The
upcoming Grant Wood retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art
will reassess the career of an artist whose most famous work, American Gothic—one
of the most indelible emblems of Americana and perhaps the best-known
work of twentieth-century American art—will be making a rare voyage from
the Art Institute of Chicago for the occasion. Organized by Whitney
curator Barbara Haskell, with senior curatorial assistant Sarah
Humphreville, this exhibition is Wood’s first museum retrospective in
New York since 1983 and only the third survey of his work outside the
Midwest since 1935. It will be on view in the Whitney’s fifth-floor Neil
Bluhm Family Galleries from March 2 through June 10, 2018.
Grant Wood (1891–1942) achieved instant celebrity following the debut of
 
Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930. Oil on composition board, 30 3⁄4 x 25 3⁄4
in. (78 x 65.3 cm). Art Institute of Chicago; Friends of American Art Collection
1930.934. © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood
Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph courtesy Art Institute of
Chicago/Art Resource, NY
American Gothic
at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930. Until then, he had been a
relatively unknown painter of French-inspired Impressionist landscapes
in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His relatively short mature career, from 1930 to
1942, spanned a tormented period for the country, as the United States
grappled with the aftermath of an economic meltdown and engaged in
bitter debates over its core national identity.
What emerged as a
powerful strain in popular culture during the period was a pronounced
reverence for the values of community, hard work, and self-reliance that
were seen as fundamental to the national character, embodied most fully
in America’s small towns and on its farms. Wood’s romanticized
depictions of a seemingly more innocent and uncomplicated time elevated
him into a popular, almost mythic figure, celebrated for his art and
promotion of Regionalism, the representational style associated with the
Midwest that dominated American art during the Depression.
As
Barbara Haskell has noted,
“The enduring power of Wood’s art owes as
much to its mesmerizing psychological ambiguity as to its archetypal
Midwestern imagery. An eerie silence and disquiet runs throughout his
work, complicating its seemingly bucolic, elegiac exterior.
Notwithstanding Wood’s desire to recapture the imagined world of his
childhood, the estrangement and isolation that came of trying to resolve
his loyalty to that world with his instincts as a shy, sexually
closeted Midwesterner seeped into his art, endowing it with an
unsettling sadness and alienation. By subconsciously expressing his
conflicted relationship to the homeland he professed to adore, Wood
created hypnotic works of apprehension and solitude that may be a truer
expression of the unresolved tensions of the American experience than he
might ever have imagined, even some seventy-five years after his
death.”
Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables
brings together the full range of Wood’s art, from his early Arts and
Crafts decorative objects and Impressionist oils through his mature
paintings, murals, works on paper, and book illustrations. The
exhibition reveals a complex, sophisticated artist whose image as a
farmer-painter was as mythical as the fables he depicted in his art.
“This
exhibition is an interrogation—not a reification—of stereotypes,
values, and reputations,” writes Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice
Pratt Brown Director, in his foreword to the exhibition catalogue.
Rather than celebrating a nostalgic American past that never was, the
exhibition is “a quest to understand how a remarkable artist created
mythic images, images that are not as unequivocal or as unambiguous as
some might think or, yet, as some might wish…What one discovers, looking
deeply into Wood’s paintings, is that, for all their apparent clarity
and precision of style, in the best of them what is depicted is not at
all straightforward. The images put forth are often conflicting and
ambiguous. They reveal a collision of amplified meanings, sublimated
feelings, and layered evidence.”
Wood
began his career as an Arts and Crafts decorative artist. Even after he
shifted to fine arts, he retained the movement’s ideology and pictorial
vocabulary. To it, he owed his later use of flat, decorative patterns
and sinuous, intertwined organic forms as well as his belief that art
was a democratic enterprise that must be accessible to the average
person, not just the elite.
Wood’s training in the decorative arts began
early. He studied at the Handicraft Guild in Minneapolis for two
summers after graduating from high school before moving to Chicago to
join the Kalo Arts and Crafts Community house. In 1914, he opened the
Volund Crafts Shop with a fellow craftsman and began to exhibit his
jewelry and metalwork in the Art Institute of Chicago’s prestigious
decorative arts exhibitions.
Despite this recognition, commercial
success eluded him and he closed the shop and returned to Cedar Rapids
in 1916 to begin his painting career. The decision did not mean the end
of his work in decorative arts, however, as is evident from the 1925 Corn Cob Chandelier
included in the exhibition and the 1928 stained-glass window he
designed for Cedar Rapids’ Veterans Memorial Building, replicated at
half-scale in the exhibition.
Even after the success of American Gothic, he continued designing objects for popular use. His Spring Plowing
fabric design, armchair and ottoman, Steuben glass vase, eight book
covers and illustrations for two books—all made after 1930—are also
included in the exhibition.
At
the start of his career, Wood believed in the cultural superiority of
Europe, as did many other Americans. Consequently, he went abroad four
times between 1920 and 1928 for a total of twenty-three months,
primarily studying the work of the French Impressionists, whose loose
brushwork he used in the first two decades of his career to paint what
he later called “Europy-looking” subjects. His assimilation of the style
served him well; by the early 1920s, he was the city’s leading artist,
selling his paintings to its residents and executing commissions in a
variety of styles according to the given project’s needs. Three of
Wood’s commissioned paintings, along with examples of his Impressionist
works, are included in the exhibition.
By
the late 1920s, Wood had come to believe that American art needed to
break free from Europe and that the emergence of a rich American culture
depended on artists expressing the specific character of their own
regions. For him, it was Iowa, whose rolling hills he used as the
background for his earliest mature portraits. In Europe, he had admired
Northern Renaissance painting by artists such as Hans Memling and
Albrecht Dürer. His realization that the hard edge precision and
meticulous detail in their art could convey a distinctly American
quality, especially suggestive of the Midwest, became the foundation of
his mature style.
Wood
brought to his portraits and landscapes his belief that democratic art
necessitated universal and timeless story telling. He achieved this in
his portraits by painting types rather than individuals and by including
images that suggested something about the life and character of the
depicted subject. He left these images intentionally ambiguous, making
the stories they suggest so enigmatic that they defy ready explanation;
they are puzzles to be deciphered by viewers based on their individual
attitudes and predilections.
Wood
believed that people are psychologically formed in the first twelve
years of life and that everything they experience later is tied up with
those childhood years. He often spoke of the experiences of his early
years on his family’s farm as “clearer than any I have known since.” Not
surprisingly, his landscapes do not depict Midwestern farm life in the
1930s, but instead, portray his idealized memories of the 1890s farm he
lived on as a young boy before moving to Cedar Rapids with his family
following the death of his father.
His desire was not so much to
celebrate a world that was becoming extinct as to recapture the idyllic,
re-imagined dream world of his own childhood. In his hands, the
Midwestern farm became an Arcadian fantasy of undulating, swollen shapes
and decorative embellishments whose tumescent abundance was
sufficiently polymorphous to be read as both masculine and feminine. Yet
Wood unconsciously challenged this evocation of sensuality and
fecundity by employing rigid geometries, shellac-like surfaces and
sharp, unnatural light that yielded landscapes that appear curiously
still, a dollhouse world of estrangement and solitude.
Wood’s
hard edge style and nostalgic subject matter made him one of America’s
most revered artists during the 1930s, with a host of artists around the
country imitating his art, especially his murals. Seen as paradigmatic
images of prosperity and shared purpose, these works served as models
for the scores of murals commissioned by President Franklin Roosevelt’s
New Deal art programs during the Depression. With their subdued colors
and monumental, frozen figures, Wood’s murals evoke the early
Renaissance art of Fra Angelico and Giotto that he had admired in
Europe. Examples of all of Wood’s murals, both realized and unrealized,
will be in the exhibition, including a projected film of his two
large-scale PWAP murals at Iowa State University at Ames.
The
rise of fascist powers in Europe in the late thirties turned Wood’s
attention to the fate of democracy. Worried that America might be
vulnerable to outside aggression, he set out to inspire the public to
defend the country in case of attack by rekindling national pride. To do
so, he planned to depict a series of American folktales, highlighting
their fictional aspect to avoid the chauvinism associated with fascism.
The first was Parson Weems’s tale of George Washington as a child
confessing to having chopped down his father’s cherry tree. The growing
crisis in Europe shifted Wood’s focus. Faced with Nazi victories over
the Allies in the first years of World War II, he accelerated his
efforts to awaken the country to what it stood to lose by depicting what
he called the “simple, everyday things that make life significant to
the average person.” He completed only two works in the series—Spring in the Country and Spring in Town—before his death of pancreatic cancer on February 2, 1942, two hours before he would have turned fifty-one.
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