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Posted February 13, 2007
Grant Wood may be Iowa’s best-known native son, a painter born in Anamosa who spent a lifetime depicting rural scenes that still appeal to people around the world.

Wood was born on February 13, 1891, in Anamosa. He moved to Cedar Rapids after his father died in 1901 and spent part of his formative years working as an apprentice in a metal shop to help support his family. It was there that he met Marvin Cone, who also went on to become an important regional artist. Together, the pair designed sets for high school plays and ran the literary magazine.
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Grant Wood, world-famous artist
He graduated from Washington High School in Cedar Rapids in 1910 and enrolled in art school in Minneapolis, but stayed only a year before returning to Iowa to teach in order to help out his mother financially. He received further training in art in 1913 at the Art Institute of Chicago, was drafted into the U.S. Army as a camouflage painter, and then returned to Cedar Rapids to teach junior high.

School politics and the fact that the art curriculum didn’t receive the respect he thought it deserved was maddening to Wood. He resigned his post abruptly in 1925 when the school district cut the number of hours the school district required students to spend in art class.

About the same time, Wood and his old pal Marvin Cone began taking trips to Europe where they would paint and view the works of the masters.

Wood’s 1928 trip abroad was to Munich, where he supervised the
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execution of a large stained glass window he had designed for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. While in Munich, he responded with great enthusiasm to the paintings of the northern Renaissance masters, particularly the works of Hans Memling. He was attracted to the glowing colors, smooth surfaces, carefully defined outlines and decorative repetition of shapes and patterns which characterize the works of these artists. Such elements can be found in his mature works such as “Woman with Plant(s)” and “Young Corn.”
But at same time he began to question the influence that European art sensibilities had on work being done in the United States and began speaking up about what he termed “artistic colonialism.”

As a young artist, Wood could have chosen any place in the world to hone his craft, but he chose Iowa because its people and scenery. “I realized that all the really good ideas I’ve ever had came to me while milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa,” Wood once told an interviewed. His notions were emboldened when he returned from one of his trips abroad and saw “like a revelation, my neighbors in Cedar Rapids, their clothes, their homes, the pattern of their tablecloth, the tools they used… I suddenly saw all this commonplace stuff as art, wonderful material.”

Wood found a home in a carriage house behind the Turner Mortuary and began to carve out a career for himself. More than 400 Cedar Rapids residents purchased paintings from him in the early days of his career. He painted a mural at the funeral home, made a series of paintings of workers at a local manufacturing plant, and drew pictures of scenes from the city’s past. He painted murals at hotels in Sioux City, Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, and Council Bluffs. After he died, Cone told an interviewer: “The best testimony as to how his home folks like him is the widespread ownership of his work in this community, not only in homes, but in offices and in industry.”

Wood began to receive national attention in 1929 when his painting “Woman With Plant”, which featured his mother’s image, was displayed at the Annual Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture in Chicago. In 1930, his most famous painting, “American Gothic”, received wide attention, although not all positive.

In August of that year, Wood was visiting the town of Eldon in the southern part of Iowa when he came upon a house that would eventually make him famous. This five-room structure was built in the 1880s in a style known as Carpenter Gothic. Wood was very impressed with its compactness and strong design, particularly the Gothic Window placed in the gable.

Wood imagined a farmer and his daughter standing in front of the house. He immediately did a small sketch of his idea on brown paper and had someone take a photograph of the house so that he could work out his idea when he returned home.

Back in his studio, Wood used old Victorian photographs and 19th century portrait paintings to plan the scene he was to paint. His sister, Nan, and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, served as models and were dressed in the period clothes they are seen wearing. Even though they are seen standing together in the painting, each was painted during separate sittings.

The man was given a pitchfork to hold because Wood wanted him to be associated with haying in the 19th century rather than the more common farming practice of gardening in the 20th century. The pitchfork is said to symbolize symbolize masculinity, the devil and farming; and served as a compositional device to echo the ovalness of the people's faces and the repeated lines of the Gothic Window. Wood worked on the painting for two months and finished it in time to enter it into a juried exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Although the jurors were at first divided over whether to accept the painting, it eventually got into the show and even received a bronze medal and a $300 prize. At the time it aroused great controversy and was called by one art critic "an insulting caricature of plain country people." But, the American Gothic gradually gained acceptance and has since become one of the most popular and widely recognized paintings in America.

Those comments illuminate Grant’s motivation for exploring regionalism: He saw a need to “revolt against the domination exercised over arts and letters and over much of our thinking and living Eastern capitals of finance and politics.”

Wood tried to promote his interest in regionalism with the establishment of Stone City Colony and Art School in June of 1932, an effort to create an artists’ community similar to one in Taos, New Mexico. During the two years Wood taught at the school, along with Cone, he completed some of his most memorable works, including “Daughters of the Revolution”, and “The Fruits of Iowa” mural at the Montrose Hotel in Cedar Rapids.

During the next ten years, Wood continued to find new outlets for his artwork, designing lithographs, book jackets, and murals. He served as the state director of the Public Works of Art Project and was appointed professor of fine arts at the University of Iowa.

Wood spent his last summer in Clear Lake in an old railroad depot on the north shore. His professional career was at its nadir and his mother had died a year before, about the same time that we was going through a traumatic divorce. During his stay, he completed two major works, “Spring in Town” and “Spring in the Country.”

Wood died of liver cancer on February 12, 1942.

Self Portrait, by Grant Wood