Grant Wood
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OF THE ARTISTS who became famous as leaders of the mid-Western regionalist movement of the late 1920's and 1930's, the most estimable surely was Grant Wood of Iowa ( 1891- 1942). Though he spent most of his short life in his native state, Wood seems to have been less vociferously chauvinistic than his confreres in regionalism, perhaps remembering that devotion to a given locale was nothing new or final among artists and had characterized the members of the Hudson River and Barbizon Schools, to mention only two conspicuous examples from the previous century. For all his isolation Wood was a sensitive if homespun esthete, who designed interiors and stained-glass windows and constructed surrealistic objects out of odd materials. The greatest experience of his formative years as an artist was probably his trip to Munich in 1928, when he studied Flemish and German paintings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and came home to apply their immaculate, cautious example to his own work.
At its best this work is of enduring interest because Wood was able to create an American and thoroughly personal imagery from what he had learned abroad. American Gothic and Daughters of Revolution are well painted pictures. They are also acute in satirical force, a fact alternately conceded and denied by the artist, depending on the degree of hurt or hostile pressure from their living models. We are not likely soon to forget the dour, honest vigor of the figures in American Gothic (posed for by Wood's sister and his dentist), nor the acid-mouthed righteousness of his ladies from the D.A.R., nor the wry humor of Parson Weems' Fable, with the mature Washington re-enacting his apocryphal childhood. In lesser works than these, however, Wood fell back on repetitious Baroque mannerisms of design, notably in his many Iowan landscapes.
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