Grant Wood [a life]

Review by Choice Review

In his meticulously researched biography of Grant Wood, Evans (Wheaton College in Massachusetts) skillfully disentangles the myth from the man. Almost universally known for his iconic painting American Gothic (1930), Wood has been enshrined in the art historical literature as the quintessential American artist who faithfully, if ironically, portrays the folksy values of his humble Midwestern compatriots. Through a close reading of primary source material, Evans makes a compelling case that Grant Wood was a closeted homosexual, a belief privately held or openly alluded to by many who knew him, including his wife, Sara Sherman Maxon. Having established Wood's probable sexual orientation and noting the artist's own ambivalence towards sexuality, Evans is able to tease out a wealth of convincing fresh interpretations for even Wood's best-known works. The apparent affection that Evans has for his subject shines through in his prose, which makes this richly illustrated work a pleasure to read for nonspecialists. Evans's keen eye and new readings of Wood's works will challenge, surprise, and provoke students and scholars. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. K. Mason City University of New York

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

"AMERICAN GOTHIC" has been described as the most reproduced painting in this country, which is not necessarily high praise. What artist would be elated to hear that one of his paintings had been appropriated in an advertising campaign for General Mills country cornflakes, or Coors beer? For most of his life, Grant Wood endured the scorn of leading art critics, who failed to recognize his refinement. He was known for one painting only, that image of a pale, homely farming pair posed in front of their white house, looking as if their dog just died. Wood painted his creaky masterpiece in 1930, amid the ravages of the Great Depression. Unable to move forward, Americans glanced back and found consolation in images of the sturdy agrarian past. Wood rose to fame as one of the three leaders of Regionalism (Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry were the other two) and, dressed in his bibbed overalls, presented himself as an antidote to East Coast pretentiousness. "All the really good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow," he said, somewhat goofily, in his most famous statement. In his absorbing and thoughtful new biography, "Grant Wood: A Life," R. Tripp Evans, a professor of art history at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, dismisses the artist's folksy declarations and devotion to Regionalism as a mere cover, an expedient camouflage, for his tortured private life. It is certainly true that Wood had, as we say now, "issues." For most of his adulthood, he lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with his widowed mother, Hattie, a former church organist whose spiritual proclivities did not prevent her from nagging him to try to sell more paintings. She found him oblivious of normal obligations, as if stuck in a boyhood that never ended. He missed appointments, overdrew his bank account and was constantly embarking on unfruitful searches for his keys, wallet and countless other misplaced possessions. He spoke in a slow, hesitant manner, "like a schoolboy reading in a bad light," as an acquaintance noted. His affection for sugar was so extreme he sprinkled it on most everything he ate, tomatoes and lettuce included. He eventually married, but the union was brief and rather calamitous. His wife, a retired light-opera singer who was nearly a decade his senior, preferred the company of her mother-in-law to that of her taciturn husband. As she noted in an unpublished memoir, Hattie "impressed me much more deeply than did Grant." His childhood had acquainted him with isolation and loss. Born on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa, in 1891, Wood was only 10 when his Quaker father collapsed, apparently from a heart attack. Soon after, his mother sold the family farm and moved her children to the big city, Cedar Rapids. In the last paragraph of his unfinished autobiography, Wood recalled that they were on their way there when a man on horseback galloped past them to announce the news that President William McKinley had been shot. True, he made fledgling efforts at independence, at travel and an enlargement of experience. In the 1920s, he sailed several times to Europe, where he experimented with the loose brushwork of French Impressionism and painted some wonderful scenes of ancient cobblestones and stone fountains dissolving into buttery strokes of light. Yet returning to Iowa at the end of the '20s, he betrayed little hint of his contact with the fragmenting impulses of modern art. He wanted to paint portraits of his neighbors, "their clothes, their homes, the patterns on their tablecloths and curtains," as he said, and his achievement was to render the trappings of the Midwest in the crisp, razored outlines of 15th-century Flemish art. In interviews and profiles, Wood was inevitably described as a "shy bachelor," and Evans states confidently in his introduction that the artist "spent most of his life masking - not always successfully - his homosexuality." But a man who stifles his desires to the point of near extinction cannot accurately be called gay, and by the end of the book the reader has no idea whether Wood was ever intimate with a man. Affairs are hinted at, but the author is unable to document them; Wood himself claimed to be innocent of carnal satisfactions. One of his friends is quoted in the book recalling a night when Wood seems to have confessed to being chastely asexual, which is not implausible. A BIOGRAPHY of an artist, typically, uses the details of a life to illuminate the work; Evans tests the reader's patience by using the work to bolster his theories about the artist's gay fantasies. Earlier art historians like Wanda Corn, which is her real name, have associated Wood's landscapes - pristine views of small towns surrounded by rhythmically swelling hills - with female forms and a spirit of fertility. But Evans argues that she is mistaken. When he writes about the farmworkers or abstract hill forms in Wood's landscapes, he talks about "muscular, male buttocks" or "the muscular outlines of a powerful male body" or the "erotic evocation of upturned buttocks." A little of this goes a long way, and eventually the author's approach comes to seem as simplistic as that exercise that invites the readers of children's books to espy hidden images in the illustrations, except that the goal here is to spot not Waldo but every previously unheralded intimation of a male backside in Wood's art. Evans might have said more about the people in Wood's life, especially Marvin Cone, his close friend from high school and an interesting painter in his own right. And one would like to know about David Turner, who owned a funeral home in Cedar Rapids and became the artist's main patron. It was Turner who purchased Wood's early Impressionist canvases - he displayed them in the rooms of his mortuary. In 1924, Turner offered Wood use of a carriage house on his property. The artist and his mother lived there rent-free for more than a decade, comfortably ensconced on the upstairs floor, above a garage reserved for hearses. Knowing all this, one is tempted to say that "American Gothic" took its inspiration from the rituals of the funeral industry. The painting (which is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago) can be viewed as an old-fashioned mourning portrait. Tellingly, the curtains hanging in the windows of the house, both upstairs and down, are pulled closed in the middle of the day, a mourning custom in Victorian America. The woman wears a black dress beneath her apron, and glances away as if holding back tears. One imagines she is grieving for the man beside her, who gazes through his wire-rimmed glasses with a somberness that is vaguely accusing. The three prongs of his pitchfork can be read as an uppercase "W" hovering spiritlike in front of him - "W" for old Mr. Wood, the artist's father, resuscitated here for the ages. In explicating "American Gothic," Wood was typically terse. He conceived the painting, he said, on a visit to Eldon, Iowa, where he chanced upon an intriguing cottage. Its upstairs window simulated a pointy medieval arch and marked the building as an exemplar of a style of architecture known as American Gothic. He asked his dentist, Byron McKeeby, to pose for the figure of the farmer in the painting. Wood's sister, Nan, posed as the daughter, in a separate modeling session staged nowhere near the Eldon house. Wood was only 50 when he died of pancreatic cancer in 1942. His posthumous reputation was its own forlorn drama; critics and art historians who should have known better wrote him off as a propagandist for conservative values. He was accused of fostering a shrill nationalism that was actually compared to the unalloyed evil of the Third Reich. After the war, the art historian H.W. Janson asserted that "the Regionalist credo could be matched more or less verbatim from the writings of Nazi experts on art." In 1962, when Janson published his now classic textbook on the history of Western art, he made no mention of Wood. Wood had to wait for the arrival of post-modernism and its assault on the official story of art before he could be rehabilitated. Now he is back, and it says something about the folly and failures of art history that it took the special claims of gender studies to bring Wood's life into view in our time. Evans wants to convince us that Wood longed for what he could not have - but a longing for men was not what made him distinctive or memorable. He longed for the company of the dead and tunneled back through time in his enchanting and elegiac paintings. He deserves to be remembered as one of the essential eccentrics of American art. Wood said, rather goofily, 'All the really good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.' Deborah Solomon, who writes the "Questions For" column in The Times Magazine, is the author of "Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell" and a forthcoming biography of Norman Rockwell.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 31, 2010]

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Review by Booklist Review

*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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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 in [his landscapes]-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. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A portrait of painter Grant Wood (18911942) as a melancholy, closeted man.In the 1930s, Wood became the standard-bearer of Regionalism, an art movement that rejected European abstraction in favor of homespun imagery. Then as now, Wood's workespecially the iconic 1930 painting American Gothicis often claimed to represent old-fashioned American values. But as Evans (Art History/Wheaton Coll.) demonstrates, a swirl of complex messages made its way onto Wood's canvases. Born in rural Iowa, Wood was raised by a demanding father, whose ethos of manliness complicated his son's early interest in painting. But the young Wood persevered, eventually settling in Cedar Rapids to work in a studio above a funeral home. The setting was appropriately somber for an isolated artisthis mother and sister were his closest confidanteswho felt forced to suppress not just his homosexuality but anything resembling bohemianism. Evans devotes much of the book to close studies of the symbolism cloaked within Wood's paintings. His landscapes were coded appreciations of the male body; a female portrait like Victorian Survival takes swipes at conservative values; a home-and-hearth scene like Dinner for Threshers is Wood's epic reckoning with the ghost of his father. The author's decryption efforts come at the expense of traditional biographical detail, at times frustratingly sothere's relatively little on the place of Wood's work in the larger context of American art, and the commentary on Regionalism is mainly run through the filter of the homophobia of fellow regionalist star Thomas Hart Benton. But Evans also shows how Wood's obscuring maneuvers extended to his own behaviore.g., he donned overalls as a working-class affectation and married an older woman for appearances' sake. Wood became more daring in his late career. His 1937 male nude, Sultry Night, was so provocative that the U.S. Postal Service banned prints of it from being mailed. A frustrated Wood sawed off the nude portion of the painting and burned it, an action that serves as a symbol of the torment Evans amply documents.An overly analytical biography, but one that goes a long way toward upending assumptions about Wood's work.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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 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 dis connection 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. Excerpted from Grant Wood: A Life by R. Tripp Evans All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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