Wood, Grant, , Iowa 1892 1942 Male Painter painter, christened Grant De Volsen Wood was born on his father's farm near Anamosa, Iowa.
His father, a descendant of Quaker settlers of Pennsylvania, was from Winchester, Va. ; his mother's parents had come to Iowa from New York state.
By aiding in the support of his mother and sister during these early years, he seems also to have developed the sense of local roots which would assert itself in his painting and personal life after a period of broadening and travel.
Education
In Cedar Rapids, Grant Wood combined formal education in the public schools with a variety of odd jobs.
Washington High School, from which he graduated in 1910, offered no courses in art, but he did well in manual training, took a mail-order course in design, and was active in art projects for both the school and the Cedar Rapids Art Association.
He studied design and metalwork for two summers under Ernest Batchelder at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft and for a few months one winter attended life classes at the evening school of the University of Iowa.
After an unsuccessful attempt to establish himself as a silversmith in Chicago, during which time he took evening courses at the Art Institute, Wood in 1917 was inducted into the army and assigned to camouflage work in Washington.
Career
His equanimity in personal relationships helped bring him acceptance and patronage.
At the end of the war he took up a life of teaching art in the public schools in Cedar Rapids, interspersed with frequent travel to Europe.
In 1923 he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he quickly adapted to the expatriate bohemian life-style by assuming a beard and beret and reading H. L. Mencken.
His paintings took on the delicate coloration of a derivative Impressionism and, while conforming to a type, also reflected a personal delight in the visual charms of the Old World.
He traveled for fourteen months in Europe, living for extended periods in Paris, Munich, and Sorrento.
In 1928 he returned to Munich to oversee personally the manufacture of a stained glass window commissioned by the war memorial committee of Cedar Rapids.
Once more he had the opportunity to absorb from the primitives their style of straightforward, unemotional portraiture and their technique of applying multiple overlays of glazing to obtain an effect of solid color without loss of brilliance.
Both the style and the technique of the primitives were evident in his portrait of "John B. Turner--Pioneer" (1929), in whose Cedar Rapids mortuary Wood was to hold his first exhibition.
This was the first of several portraits in which the artist captured the stern and intense character of his native Iowa.
This work, considered in intellectual circles as a piece of debunking in the vein of Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, won the Harris prize at the Chicago Art Institute that year and was purchased for the museum's permanent collection; three years later it was a highlight of the museum's Century of Progress exhibit.
In spite of the popularity of "American Gothic, " Wood allowed himself only one other painting which even suggested the darker side of his humor.
This was the portrait of three sere and astringent matrons posed, teacups in hand, before the famous painting by Emanuel Leutze [q. v. ], "Washington Crossing the Delaware. "
Wood had been personally abused by representatives of the Cedar Rapids Daughters of the American Revolution for having the work on the war memorial window done in a nation only recently engaged in war against this country.
"Daughters of Revolution" (1932), which slyly used the style of the German primitives and took as background a symbol of American heroism wrought by a German painter, was the only rebuttal Wood was ever to make to such misdirected patriotism.
Because of his time-consuming technique of glazing, however, it often took him months to complete a painting, and he found it necessary to supplement his income by yearly lecture tours throughout the country.
As an established figure of national prominence, Wood was appointed in 1934 an associate professor of art at the University of Iowa.
Among his best-known works are the "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" (1931), "Birthplace of Herbert Hoover" (1931), "Dinner for Threshers" (1934), "Death on Ridge Road" (1934), and "Parson Weems' Fable" (1939).
Together they spoke for the indigenous values and subject matter of the Midwest as embodying the peculiarly American character and spirit, and rejected the following of European trends which they saw as characteristic of art circles in American cities.
He was buried in Riverside Cemetery, Anamosa, Iowa.
[The only biography of Grant Wood is Darrell Garwood, Artist in Iowa (1944).
Cyc.
Am.
Biog. , XXXV, 522-23.
An essay on the man and his work by Park Rinard and Arnold Pyle prefaces the Catalogue of a Loan Exhibition of Drawings and Paintings by Grant Wood (Lakeside Press Galleries, Chicago, 1935).
Full color reproductions of his best-known paintings may be found in Life, Jan. 18, 1943.
Critical essays of interest are Thomas Craven in Scribner's Mag. , June 1937; Matthew Baigell, "Grant Wood Revisited, " Art Jour. , Winter 1966; and H. W. Janson, "The Internat.
Aspects of Regionalism, " College Art Jour. , May 1943.
Religion
Maryville ("Murvill") Wood, a serious man of Presbyterian convictions, enjoined his household from reading Grimm's Fairy Tales and directed them toward the more secure reality of Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales and Dickens's Child's History of England.
Personality
He was generous with both his time and money to aspiring artists, often entertained at home, and for two summers operated the Stone City Art Colony, a small tent city near Cedar Rapids which brought together artists of many schools.
He took a keen interest in the work of promising students, but was impatient with academic practices and openly contemptuous of contemporary methods of teaching art.
Connections
"Woman with Plants" (1929), a painting of his mother, reveals in detailed and meticulous fashion both her personal qualities and the regional type, suggesting beneath the careworn, expressionless face the internal dynamics of faith and hard work.
In 1930, prompted by a chance glimpse of a Gothic-arched window incongruously situated in the gable of a white-clapboard farmhouse, he posed his sister and the local druggist in rural dress for his most famous painting, "American Gothic. "
The marriage was childless and ended in divorce in 1939.
married:
-RRB-
On Mar. 2, 1935, Wood married Mrs. Sara (Sherman) Maxon, a widowed music teacher in Cedar Rapids.
children:
Hattie
He was the second son and second of four children of Francis Maryville Wood and Hattie De Ette (Weaver) Wood.
