Grant Wood

Grant DeVolson Wood was born on February 13, 1891, on a farm four miles east of Anamosa, Iowa, the second of four children of Francis Maryville Wood and Hattie Weaver Wood ^[1]. His father, a Quaker farmer, died suddenly in 1901, when Grant was ten. Hattie sold the farm and moved the family to Cedar Rapids, the city that would anchor nearly all of Wood's life and career ^[2].

The move from open farmland to a modest city lot marked him deeply. Decades later, the memories of that childhood, plowed fields, corn shocks, hired men, and one-room schooling, supplied the raw material for his mature paintings. As a boy in Cedar Rapids he drew constantly, and at fourteen he won a national prize for a crayon drawing of oak leaves sponsored by a crayon manufacturer ^[1].

After graduating from Washington High School in 1910, Wood left almost immediately for Minneapolis, where he studied design and metalwork at the Handicraft Guild under Ernest Batchelder, an influential figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement ^[3]. The training mattered: before he was ever a famous painter, Wood was a craftsman, comfortable making jewelry, furniture, light fixtures, and stained glass. He later took night classes at the University of Iowa and, from 1913, studied intermittently at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago while working as a silversmith ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Grant Wood before 1930 would have found a hardworking but obscure regional figure. He served stateside in the Army during the First World War, painting camouflage on artillery, then returned to Cedar Rapids in 1919 to teach art in the public schools ^[2]. Between 1920 and 1928 he made four trips to Europe, spending extended periods in Paris, where he painted in a loose Impressionist manner and briefly studied at the Académie Julian ^[1].

The decisive trip came in 1928, when Wood traveled to Munich to supervise the fabrication of a large stained glass window he had designed for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids ^[4]. In German museums he studied fifteenth and sixteenth century Flemish and German masters, painters such as Hans Memling, whose crisp detail, smooth surfaces, and quiet formality struck him as a better model than French modernism. He came home convinced that this meticulous old-master technique could be applied to the faces, barns, and rolling hills of Iowa ^[3].

The first major result was Woman with Plants (1929), a portrait of his mother holding a sansevieria, rendered with the tight finish of a Flemish panel. The following year he found the subject that changed his life. Struck by a small white farmhouse in Eldon, Iowa, built in the Carpenter Gothic style, Wood imagined the kind of severe rural people who might live in it. He posed his sister Nan and his dentist, Byron McKeeby, as models, and painted American Gothic ^[4]. Entered in the Art Institute of Chicago's annual exhibition in 1930, the painting won a bronze medal and a 300 dollar prize, was purchased by the museum, and was reproduced in newspapers across the country. Almost overnight, the forty-year-old Iowan became a national figure ^[1].

American Gothic remains the core of Grant Wood's achievements, but the decade that followed produced a remarkable run of work. Stone City, Iowa (1930) turned a quarry town into a rounded, almost toy-like dreamscape of hills and trees. The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) treated a patriotic legend with affectionate theatricality, showing Revere's horse galloping past moonlit houses that resemble a model village ^[4]. Daughters of Revolution (1932), in which three tight-lipped women pose before a print of Washington Crossing the Delaware, delivered Wood's sharpest satire and provoked lasting controversy ^[2].

Alongside Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and John Steuart Curry of Kansas, Wood became a public face of Regionalism, the movement that dominated discussion of American art in the 1930s. A Time magazine cover story in December 1934 presented the three men as leaders of a homegrown school that rejected European abstraction in favor of American subject matter ^[5]. Wood articulated the position in a 1935 essay, Revolt Against the City, which argued that artists should root their work in the regions they knew firsthand rather than chase fashions set in New York or Paris ^[3].

His influence extended well beyond his own canvases. During the summers of 1932 and 1933 he ran the Stone City Art Colony near Anamosa, an experiment in cooperative art education held partly in ice wagons converted into living quarters ^[2]. In 1934 he was named director of Iowa's Public Works of Art Project, overseeing mural production by young artists, and that same year he joined the faculty of the University of Iowa as an associate professor of fine arts ^[1]. In his later years he also produced a celebrated series of lithographs, making his imagery affordable to ordinary buyers, and illustrated a 1937 edition of Sinclair Lewis's novel Main Street ^[4].

Wood's private life was quiet, and much of it revolved around family. He lived with his mother, Hattie, for most of his adult life, including the years he spent in a converted hayloft studio at 5 Turner Alley in Cedar Rapids, a space he rebuilt himself with characteristic ingenuity ^[2]. His sister Nan, immortalized as the woman in American Gothic, remained a lifelong confidante and later a fierce guardian of his reputation.

In 1935 Wood married Sara Sherman Maxon, a singer several years his senior. The marriage was strained almost from the start and ended in divorce in 1939 ^[1]. Friends described Wood as soft-spoken, shy in public, and fond of overalls, an image he cultivated even as he moved among university colleagues and national reporters. Biographers, most notably R. Tripp Evans in a 2010 study, have examined evidence that Wood was a closeted gay man navigating a time and place where openness was impossible, a reading that has reshaped interpretation of his guarded persona and some of his imagery ^[6].

His years at the University of Iowa brought both stability and conflict. Wood's craft-based, workshop style of teaching, and his fame, irritated some academic colleagues, and by 1940 a dispute within the art department had grown bitter enough to reach university administrators. Wood took a leave of absence in 1941 while the university worked out an arrangement to keep him ^[3].

The late 1930s tested Wood's standing. Regionalism, celebrated at mid-decade, came under attack from critics who considered it provincial or, worse, uncomfortably close to nationalist art abroad. Wood kept painting: Parson Weems' Fable (1939), which shows the cherry tree legend being theatrically unveiled like a stage curtain, ranks among his wittiest late works, and landscapes such as Spring Turning (1936) and January (1940) refined his smooth, patterned vision of the Iowa countryside ^[4].

In late 1941, shortly after the United States entered the Second World War, Wood was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died at University Hospital in Iowa City on February 12, 1942, hours before he would have turned fifty-one ^[1]. He was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Anamosa, the town of his birth. At his death he was reportedly planning new work and had spoken of starting over with a fresh style, an ambition the illness cut short ^[2].

Few American paintings have entered popular culture as completely as American Gothic. The stern farmer with his pitchfork and the woman beside him have been parodied in advertising, television, magazine covers, and political cartoons for more than ninety years, a level of recognition shared by only a handful of images anywhere ^[5]. The painting still hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, while the Eldon farmhouse that inspired it is preserved as a state historic site with a visitor center ^[4].

Wood's broader reputation has traveled a winding road. Abstract Expressionism's postwar triumph pushed Regionalism out of critical favor, and for decades Wood was often dismissed as a painter of one famous picture. Scholarship since the 1980s has reversed much of that judgment. Major exhibitions, including a 2018 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, have presented him as a sophisticated, self-aware artist whose polished surfaces conceal irony, anxiety, and careful design ^[7]. Wanda Corn's 1983 study and Evans's later biography deepened understanding of both the work and the man ^[6].

Among the most useful Grant Wood facts for understanding his legacy is this: he built a national art movement without leaving home. The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art holds the largest collection of his work, his Turner Alley studio is preserved, and the Grant Wood Art Colony at the University of Iowa continues his teaching mission ^[2]. Any honest Grant Wood biography ends where he began, in eastern Iowa, the landscape he turned into some of the most familiar images in American art.