Grant DeVolson Wood (February 13, 1891 - February 12, 1942) is an American painter famous for his paintings depicting Central American countryside, especially the Gothic America, which has become an iconic painting from the 20th century.
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Wood was born in rural Iowa, 4 miles (6 km) east of Anamosa, in 1891. His mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids, after his father died in 1901. Soon after, Wood began as an apprentice at a local metal shop. After graduating from Washington High School, Wood enrolled in The Handicraft Guild, a women's fully managed art school in Minneapolis in 1910 (now a leading artist in the city). He is said to have returned to the Guild to paint the Gothic America. A year later, Wood returned to Iowa, where he taught in a rural one-room school. In 1913, he enrolled at the Chicago Institute of Art School and did some work as a silversmith.
From 1922 to 1928, Wood made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially Impressionism and post-Impressionism. However, it was the work of the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, who influenced him to take the clarity of this technique and incorporate it into his new work.
Maps Grant Wood
Careers
From 1922 to 1935, Wood lived with his mother in the carriage attic in Cedar Rapids, which he transformed into his studio in "5 Turner Alley" (the studio did not have an address until Wood blew him up). In 1932, Wood helped find Stone Town Art Colony near his hometown to help artists pass the Great Depression. He became a great supporter of regionalism in the arts, teaching throughout the country on this topic. When his classic American image solidified, his bohemian days in Paris were removed from his public persona.
Wood married Sara Sherman Maxon from 1935-1938. Four years older than Grant, he was born in Iowa in 1887. Friends thought the marriage was a mistake for Wood.
Wood taught painting at the University of Iowa School of Art from 1934 to 1941. During that time, he oversaw the mural painting project, the mentored student, produced his own works, and became an important part of the University's cultural community. It is thought that he is a confined homosexual, and that there is an attempt to dismiss him because of his relationship with his personal secretary. Critics Janet Maslin stated that his friends knew him as "homosexual and a little joking in his masquerade as a boy of common dress farmers." The university administration dismissed the allegations and Wood would return as a professor if not for his ever-increasing health problems.
Death and inheritance
The day before her 51st birthday, Wood died in a university hospital for pancreatic cancer. She is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Anamosa, Iowa.
When Wood died, his land went to his sister, Nan Wood Graham, the woman depicted in Gothic America. When he died in 1990, his estate, along with Wood's personal effects and various works of art, belonged to the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa.
Work
Wood is an active painter from a very young age to his death, and although he is famous for his paintings, he works in a large number of media, including lithography, ink, charcoal, ceramics, metal, wood, and found objects.
Throughout his life, he has leased his talent to many Iowa-based businesses as a source of steady income. These include painting ads, mortuary sketch rooms for promotional brochures and, in one case, designing corn-themed decorations (including chandeliers) for the hotel dining room. In addition, the 1928 trip to Munich was to oversee the manufacture of stained glass windows he designed for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. The window was damaged during the 2008 flood and is currently in the process of recovery. He returns again to Cedar Rapids to teach junior high school students after serving in the army as a camouflage painter.
Regionalism
Wood is associated with the movement of American Regionalism, which is primarily located in the Midwest, and figurative painting advanced American rural themes in the aggressive rejection of European abstraction.
Wood is one of the three artists most associated with this movement. The others, John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, returned to the Midwest in the 1930s because of Wood's encouragement and assistance by placing a teaching position for them at college in Wisconsin and Missouri, respectively. Together with Benton, Curry, and other Regionalist artists, Wood's work was marketed through Associated American Artists in New York for many years. Wood is considered a protective artist of Cedar Rapids, and his childhood state school was depicted in the 2004 State Quarter Iowa.
Gothic America
Wood's best work was his 1930s American Gothic, one of the most famous paintings in American art, and one of several pictures to attain a status of a widely recognized cultural icon, comparable to Leonardo. da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch The Scream .
American Gothic was first exhibited in 1930 at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it still resides. It was given a $ 300 prize and made news across the country, bringing Wood's direct confession. Since then, it has been borrowed and insulted nonstop for advertisements and cartoons.
Art critics who have a good opinion about the painting, such as Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley, consider the painting to be intended as a sarcasm of repression and the rigid thought of rural small town life. This is seen as part of a trend towards increasingly critical portrayal of rural America, along the lines of novels such as Sherwood Anderson 1919 Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis' 1920 Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess . Wood refused this reading. With the occurrence of the Great Depression, it is seen as a dependable American pioneer spirit. Another reading is that it is a double blend of admiration and parody.
Wood's inspiration came from Eldon, southern Iowa, where a cottage designed in Gothic Revival style with a medieval arch-pointed arch window provides the background and also the title of the painting. Wood decided to paint the house together with "the kind of person I want to live in that house." The painting shows a farmer standing beside his spinning daughter, a figure modeled by artist sister Nan (1900-1990), and her dentist. Wood's sister insisted that the painting depicted a peasant princess instead of a wife, disliked the suggestion that it was the farmer's wife, since it meant that she looked older than Wood's sister would rather think of herself. Dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby (1867-1950), originally from Cedar Rapids. The woman wore a dark print apron imitating Americana of the 19th century with a cameo brooch and a tightly tied tie. These couples in the traditional roles of men and women, male fork symbolizes hard work.
Compositional severity and detailed engineering are derived from the paintings of the Northern Renaissance, which Grant had seen during his three visits to Europe; after this he became increasingly aware of his own Midwest heritage, which also informed the work. This is the key image of Regionalism.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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