Grant Wood: A Life

Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism

Grant Wood: A Life Details

From Publishers Weekly The fame of the iconic, often parodied American Gothic has long masked its creator. Much about Grant Wood's patriotism and masculinity has been read into the painting's pitchfork-holding farmer and his dour companion standing in front of a Midwestern farmhouse. Evans, an art historian at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, argues that even more has been misread, overshadowing a rich and varied artistic career. Associated with the Regionalist movement in painting, Wood (1891–1942) cultivated a hearty Midwestern image that hid his homosexuality. What Wood hid from polite society, he could not help revealing in his paintings: "the object of his desire is only partially abstracted --for in the undeniably erotic curves of Stone City, we register the muscular outlines of the powerful male body." His mother and his sister, Nan, further protected him. The complicated relationship included living together until Nan married--perhaps a reaction to Wood's hard and detached father, who died when Wood was 10. Evans's in-depth, gendered readings of Wood's paintings situate him in the longer history of male artists' gendered self-portrayals (bracketed by Oscar Wilde and Jackson Pollock), providing a useful new insight into Wood's place in American art. 16 pages of color photos; b&w illus. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more From Booklist *Starred Review* It seems so straightforward. Grant Wood, born in Iowa in 1891, was the overall-clad, all-American artist from the heartland who created one of the world's best-known and most-parodied paintings, American Gothic, a portrait of a pitchfork-grasping farmer and his dour daughter. But as art historian Evans so momentously and conscientiously reveals, Wood's folksy persona was formulated to camouflage his homosexuality. Evans tells the full, grievous story of Wood's struggle to conceal his true self in a harshly homophobic world for the sake of his art and career, presenting startling insights into Wood's trauma over failing to live up to his stern father's notion of masculinity, liberating sojourns in Paris in the 1920s, and the decision to return to Cedar Rapids, where he lived with his widowed mother, attained extraordinary renown, and helped change the face of American art. Evans examines Wood's complicated relationships with his mother and his sister, Nan, the female model for American Gothic; fellow artists; various assistants; and the colorful woman he disastrously married. Most arresting is Evans' bold decoding of the eroticism and caustic social commentary hidden in plain sight in Wood's hard-edged and profoundly unnerving paintings. A fascinating and heartrending portrait of an artist forced to sacrifice his right to happiness and wholeness. --Donna Seaman Read more Review Winner of The Marfield Prize: The National Award for Arts Writing"[Written] with verve, nuance and the excitement of discovery. . . a fascinating, audacious and empathic portrait."—Donna Seaman, Kansas City Star  “Evans provides Wood and his work with layers upon layers of depth, creating a portrait of a fully realized, three-dimensional man whose work and life is fascinating and distinctly American.” —Dustin Michael Harris, Chicago Sun-Times“Absorbing and thoughtful… Evans dismisses the artist’s folksy declarations and devotion to Regionalism as a mere cover, an expedient camouflage, for his tortured private life.”   —Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Book Review“Sumptuous, eminently readable…”  —Sam Coale, The Providence Journal “Evans’s in-depth, gendered readings of Wood’s paintings situate him in the longer history of male artists’ gendered self-portrayals (bracketed by Oscar Wilde and Jackson Pollock), providing a useful new insight into Wood’s place in American art.” —Publishers Weekly"This audacious, ingenious and powerful book blows the lid off the study of Grant Wood, the creator of America’s best-known work of art, aptly titled American Gothic. Evans frankly acknowledges Wood’s homosexuality, which earlier biographers avoided entirely, and mines layer upon layer of meaning in his fascinating paintings that earlier writers completely missed. This is certainly one of the best and most psychologically penetrating studies ever written on an American artist, but it’s more than that. It is a book that transforms our understanding of what goes on in the American heartland—and of the swirling currents and undercurrents of American life." —Henry Adams, author of Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock."A fascinating and heartrending portrait of an artist forced to sacrifice his right to happiness and wholeness."—Booklist (starred) Read more About the Author R. Tripp Evans is Professor of Art History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. He is the author of Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915 (2004). He received his doctoral degree in the history of art from Yale University and has served as a visiting lecturer at Yale, Wellesley College, and Brown University. He and his partner, Ed Cabral, live in Providence, Rhode Island. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.  Sometime in the late 1930s, Grant Wood confided to his sister that he had a double. Mistaken for the artist by Wood's lifelong friends and even his Aunt Jeanette, this shadowy figure had appeared as far away as Omaha and as uncomfortably close as the painter's home in Iowa City. The story of Wood's doppelgänger appears only briefly in his sister Nan's memoirs — the reference is casual, the mystery left unsolved — yet it raises related questions about the impression Wood made on those who knew him best, and reveals, to use Nan's words, one of the many "strange by-products" of her brother's fame. Typically more amused than alarmed by his own celebrity, Wood confessed that in this instance "the matter makes me feel a little queer." The fact that a stranger could have fooled the artist's family and friends so easily may be explained, in part, by their occasional inability to recognize Wood himself. As the painter related in his unfinished autobiography, his father sometimes failed to register Wood's presence even when the two stood in the same room. Similarly, following the artist's return from a summer in Paris in 1920, his neighbors in Cedar Rapids claimed not to recognize the man they'd known for decades. Even Wood's mother, who lived with him until her death at 77, could not identify her son when presented with a recent photograph of him in 1929. Wood fared little better with the general public. His popular image as the Artist-in-Overalls allowed Wood to simply vanish when he appeared in his street clothes; despite ubiquitous images of the artist that had appeared in the national press, a reporter in 1938 noted that Wood "can spend two hours in Union Station in Kansas City without exciting any notice at all." Such an uncanny talent for blending into the woodwork — reflected, rather fittingly, in Wood's brief stint as a camouflage artist during the First World War — was matched by a lifelong habit of self-deprecation. In a typical interview at the height of his fame, Wood claimed: "I'm the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn't a single thing I've done, or experienced, that's been even the least bit exciting." Countless profiles of the artist in the 1930s celebrated his very ordinariness as the source of his work's appeal. For these critics, Wood's life and imagery appeared to reflect the values of a similarly unassuming, and now vanished, rural American Golden Age — a period untainted by the complexities and strident individualism of the modern world.  In 1936, the Daily Iowan went so far as to print a scientific recording of Wood's brainwaves; as uniform and predictable as a sine curve, the painter's "large, regular, and smooth" brainwaves - whose pattern, indeed, bore a striking resemblance to the rolling hills of his landscapes - were favorably compared with the "irregular and more complicated" brainwaves of a psychology professor at the University of Iowa.  Wood's physiological makeup, it seems, represented as much of an historical throwback as his work did. Critics in our own time have often perpetuated this two-dimensional image of the artist, yet even the most cursory investigation of Wood's life calls into question its supposedly uncomplicated character. Not only do we encounter a self-proclaimed "farmer-painter" who never farmed, but a young man whose earliest vocations lay in the fields of jewelry design, interior decoration, and theatrical production. Faced with Wood's public reputation as a naïve, parochial artist, moreover, we must account for his early training in a prestigious French atélier, his ambitious one-man début in a Paris gallery, and his careful study of Old Master paintings. Finally, we must reconcile this apparent paragon of such "heartland" values as civic virtue and traditional Christian morality, with a man who often bristled at small town life, belonged to no church, and spent most of his life masking — not always successfully — his homosexuality. Wanda Corn claims that "it has been Grant Wood's fate to be widely known but narrowly understood," yet I would argue that he is every bit as narrowly known as he is understood. Conservative champions applaud the painter as a folksy chronicler of a by-gone America, or a gentle satirist of small-town foibles, whereas his detractors claim (for the very same reasons) that he promoted a cloying, phony, or even sinister form of nationalism. Whether sympathetic or hostile to the artist's work, both camps miss the man who stands before them — and certainly, they fail to account for the arresting elements that haunt his imagery. Wood's subtly distorted figures and tumescent landscapes, his esoteric and sometimes intentionally incorrect historical quotations, as well as his unsettling juxtapositions of scale, place, and time all belie his work's presumed legibility and communal spirit. Indeed, if we stop to consider some of the paintings for which he is best known — works like American Gothic (1930), Victorian Survival (1931), or Parson Weems' Fable (1939) — it is clear that his most successful images are also among his most unnerving and impenetrable. First-time viewers of these paintings often find it difficult to reconcile their immediate emotional response with the scenes before their eyes, and with good reason. Tickling our subconscious in unexpected ways, these images appear to provide a rather startling view of the artist's, as well. American Gothic perfectly illustrates this phenomenon. Although the painting is often interpreted as an unmediated reflection of rural American values, most viewers feel neither warm nostalgia nor smug contempt when they first encounter the picture. Rather, they experience an indefinable dread. For a whole host of reasons, American Gothic is a profoundly creepy image — "or it can be," as Steven Biel suggested in his 2005 study of the painting, "if you look at it carefully." The work's extraordinary fame, of course, has made it difficult for anyone to properly see it. Its composition has become an almost instantly recognizable sight gag — after the Mona Lisa, it may be the most parodied painting in the history of art — yet it is the rare viewer who can name its maker, determine its subject, or even identify the intended relationship between its figures (most audiences assume that the pair represents a married couple, but the artist himself insisted they were a father and daughter — a factor that, in and of itself, considerably complicates the work). Not only do American Gothic's innumerable recastings obscure the artist along with his intentions, but they also banish the original work's palpable sense of confrontation. It is easier by far — a great relief, in fact — to see the likes of Paris Hilton, Paul Newman, or the latest lampooned politician holding the farmer's menacing pitchfork. To understand the discomfort that American Gothic inspires, we must strip away its parodies and reproductions and consider, instead, the unique circumstances of its creation and creator. "Every masterpiece came into the world with a measure of ugliness," Gertrude Stein once wrote; "[Raphael's] Sistine Madonna is all over the world, on grocer's calendars and on Christmas cards; everyone thinks it's an easy picture. It's our business as critics to stand in front of it and recover its ugliness." The "ugliness" Stein perceives in the Sistine Madonna, and that we may find in abundance in Wood's imagery, has less to do with notions of beauty or design than it does with the works' potential to move viewers in unexpected ways. By recovering this dimension of Wood's art we not only better understand the man himself, but we also rescue his remarkable works from the charge (or the accolade) that they are in some way "easy" pictures. Rather than presenting Wood and his work as paradigms of Depression-era America, as so many have done, this study seeks to illuminate the profound and fertile disconnection between the artist and his period. More particularly, I am interested in the ambivalence Wood felt toward his native environment, and in the ways his allegiance to Regionalism — the movement with which he is most often associated — served important private and immediate ends, rather than political or cultural ones. As if by pentimento, I hope to reveal the indelible traces of desire, memory, and dread that lie just beneath the surfaces of his work — elements that have little, if anything, to do with national character. Even more so than any of his critics, it is Wood himself who has hampered our full understanding of his art and its motivations. Throughout his life he attempted to present himself and his work as the reflection of "authentic" American manhood — conceived as heterosexual, hardworking, wholesome, and patriotic — precisely because he believed he had fallen short of this model himself. Not only did Wood fail to achieve his father's rather daunting model of masculinity, but his short-lived "bohemian" period in the 1920s also inspired chronic suspicions concerning his character, associations, and private life. The defensive, all-American image Wood adopted in response to this scrutiny has provided as much relief to his promoters as it has fodder for his critics, yet it has also led to their rather meager harvest from his work. If we are to make better sense of his imagery, then it is our business to recapture the compelling "ugliness" in his work — to borrow Stein's phrase — and to restore it, as well, to the man himself. Read more

Reviews

A couple of years ago I began reading biographies of painters whose work I admired. For the most part I have enjoyed every biography I read, some, obviously, more than others. For instance, "N. C. Wyeth, A Biography" by David Michaelis, "Edward Hopper, An Intimate Biography" by Gail Levin, and "George Bellows, Painter of America" by Charles H. Morgan are all examples of what I consider a well written biography. They tell me the origins of the painter, where he lived and who he associated with, where a particular piece was painted and what else he might have been interested in during various phases of his life. This book, Grant Wood a Life by R. Tripp Evans glosses over those details in favor of a Sigmund Freud like micro dive into the hidden meaning, mostly sexual, of every brushstroke in a painting. I was ready to quit reading the book half way through the first chapter but have always tried to finish every book I begin, no matter how tedious it is to read. And this book is extremely tedious. As a painter myself, I simply do not believe that every aspect in a painting has some deep hidden meaning. As I read this book, I was reminded of the writer, Flannery O' Conner, confronting a critic who ascribed a deep hidden meaning to the fact that many of the men in one of her stories wore black hats. Miss O'Conner said that in her part of Georgia most of the men wear black hats. That is why the men in the story wore black hats. Sometimes the explanation really is that simple. I'm sure there more satisfying biographies of Grant Wood than this. Do yourself a favor and find one of those. The only reason I didn't give it 1 star is because the author was able to get it published so that should be worth something.

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