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American Gothic Art
Painting
[
800 x 600 . 1024
x 768 . 1280
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[
800 x 600 . 1024
x 768 . 1280
x 1024 ]
1024 x 768
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1024 x 768
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Grant Wood
Life and Times Wood was born in Anamosa, Iowa. From a very
young age he showed a keen interest in creative pursuits – drawing and
painting being favorites. When he was just 10 years old, his father
died, and his mother took the family to Cedar Rapids. After graduating from high school, Wood studied at Minneapolis art
school for a year, then returned to take up a position as a
schoolteacher in a small one-class school. Three years later, in 1913,
he joined the Art Institute of Chicago for a two year course. Again he
went back to his hometown, this time to work as a teacher in the Junior
High school.
In the period from 1920 to 1928, Wood made four trips to Europe,
studying, copying, and reinventing many styles of painting, especially
the impressionist French painters such as Manet and Monet. On his final visit to Paris,
Wood had the courage to organize his own exhibition – to mixed reviews.
Wood later denied that his travels abroad had influenced his own
painting – to quote the artist himself, ‘all the really good ideas I’d
ever had came to me while I was milking a cow’.
Back at home, Wood turned the loft of an old house into his
workspace, taking it upon himself to give his new studio a name - 5
Turner Alley. He worked on a great variety of projects, mostly
paintings, but also designs in ceramics, metal and wood. The studio is
now owned by the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, who run regular tours
(which are very invocative of the spirit and character of the artist).
In 1932, Wood was a founding member of the Stone City Art Colony, a
collective of artists, which met for two summers. Wood helped many of
the collective’s members through the depression, by securing them work
with the Federal Works of Art Program creating a series of Depression
Era murals.
Wood had a worthy reputation for inspiring and helping young
artists, and in 1934 the University of Iowa persuaded him to join them
to teach art. So after more than twenty years of living in Cedar
Rapids, Wood moved from his beloved hometown to Iowa city.
In 1942, one day before his 51st birthday, Wood died in hospital.
The popularity of his art seemed to die with him. A retrospective show
of his works in Chicago in late 1942 brought out many back-stabbing
knives from the critical press.
Grant Wood was born on February
13, 1891 on his parents' farm four miles east of Anamosa, Iowa, where
he spent the first ten years of his life. After his father's death in
1901, he moved to Cedar Rapids with his mother, sister Nan and brother
Frank. Even though life on the farm came to an end, the sights, smells
and sounds of his country childhood would be preserved forever in the
faces and landscapes of his famous paintings.
Grant Wood was an
exceptional artist from a very young age. When he was 14, he won third
prize in a national contest for a crayon drawing of oak leaves and said
that winning that prize was his inspiration to become an artist. His
formal art education included two summers with Ernest Batchelder
at the School of Design and Handicraft in Minneapolis and three years
of occasional night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In October
1920, Grant Wood set out on a trip to Europe, telling his sister "the
art critics and dealers want no part of American art. They think this
country is too new for any culture and too crude and undeveloped to
produce any artists. You have to be a Frenchman, take a French name,
and paint like a Frenchman to gain recognition." It wasn't long before
Grant would prove them wrong.
In 1923 Wood took a leave of
absence from teaching high school art to visit Europe for a second
time, where he studied at the Academie Julien in Paris. While in
Europe, he experimented with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. His
exposure to modern European art played a significant role in the
development of his mature style.
In 1927 Wood received a
prestigious local commission from the city of Cedar Rapids to design a
stained glass window for the Veterans Memorial Building. The Memorial
Window stood 24x20-feet. At the base of the window were six life-size
figures of soldiers of every American war, beginning with the
Revolutionary War and ending with W.W. I. Above the soldiers was a
woman representing the Republic. The window took two years to complete,
including time spent supervising the fabrication of the glass in
Munich, where the guild tradition of medieval craftsmanship continued.
While in Munich, Wood admired 15th century Northern Gothic painting at
the Alte Pinakothek Museum. This style had enjoyed a resurgence of
popularity in Germany during the 1920s as part of a broader return to
realism, objectivity referred to as "die Neue Sachlichkeit." Wood
sought inspiration from the precise clarity of paintings by Jan van
Eyck, Hans Memling, Albrecht Durer, and Hans Holbein. He demonstrated a
tendency to render rounded forms in a simplified, schematic fashion
with the clear definition of Northern Gothic painting and modern German
art.
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