There is no denying Grant Wood’s contribution to what is now called “American Art.” He was one of the staunchest advocates for this country developing it’s own style of Art. He did as much as anyone else from the late 1920’s on, towards making it a reality. He spoke, taught, and formed Artist’s communities. and created Art that received wide acclaim as being American. Yet, seventy-five years after his death, the image we have of Grant Wood, the man, as well as the common perception of his work, is not the whole picture.

Like Michelangelo, he carefully monitored his public image, and like Il Divino, this was no easy task given the unprecedented level of popularity “American Gothic”, um…the real one… received, literally overnight, when it debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Annual Exhibition of Painting & Sculpture in October, 1930. It  pretty much never waned the rest of his life. Along the way, he carefully monitored his public image to keep out any inkling of homosexuality, which was, apparently his preference, though he married, once. Critics, and the public, have looked long and hard at his Art for “telltale” signs of it. I find very few passages that are even “suggestive.” That doesn’t mean he wasn’t homosexual¹. That only tells me he was careful. Looking at the work, I find far more that would belie his image as the “Painter of Middle American values.”

My initial walk through of the entire “Grant Wood: American Gothic & Other Fables’” 9 galleries over 3 visits to the Whitney Museum, left me with one overriding feeling. Though his mature period lasted barely 11 years, from 1930 to his death at age 50 in 1941, I found much of this work unsettling. Over my subsequent re-visits, I searched for why.

“Overmantel Decoration,” 1930, ostensibly fills it’s commission- Art to hang over the mantel of a family’s new home. Yet, I can’t help wonder if it’s “more.” The scene depicted, an almost ideal middle class life circa the late 1890’s, would be something almost impossible for an Arist to attain. Especially one in the mid-west, far away from where Art was trading hands for serious money at the time. Grant Wood well knew this. I can’t help but wonder if that’s why the scene is almost being evesdropped on. Most people would want to show their house from directly in front of it. Yet, we “spy” it from a 45 degree angle at a time when the front facade is in shadows. It’s as if the Artist is evesdropping on a life he’ll never know choosing to follow his creative star. Of course, any life is fraught with dangers, and maybe that’s why there’s so much of it, apparently, in this work, where one would expect the kind of bliss Currier & Ives made famous.

Grant Wood was born to a farmer and his wife in Anamosa, Iowa in February, 1891. His father was a very strict, my-way-or-the-highway kind of man, who wouldn’t hesitate to discipline if things weren’t done his way. He was a man’s man, and to his son Grant, more a God than a man, as he said in his autobiography. Plump and not blessed with physical strength, Grant (who was named after that paragon of manliness, U.S. Grant), was not cut out to follow in his father’s footsteps. His sense of inadequacy and his sense of striving to put forth a “manly” persona remained with him for the rest of his short life. (He died 2 hours short of turning 51 in 1941.) His father suddenly died when Grant was 10, forcing his mother to sell the family farm, and leaving Grant with issues that stayed with him the rest of his life, and I feel, are quite visible in his work. Yes, right there alongside the “wholesome,” American values so many see in his work.

In 1920, he sailed to Europe on the first of 4 visits. In 1940, he explained, “when I told my friends in Cedar Rapids, Iowa that I was going ‘there’ to Paint, I immediately became an outcast. It wasn’t considered manly to be an Artist. Then I read H.L. Mencken’s articles, and decided I must leave the Bible Belt at once and go to Paris for freedom³.” During his 4th trip, in 1928, Grant Wood suddenly had an “epiphany” as he called it during a visit to Munich, Germany’s Alte Pinakothek, when he came upon works by the Northern Renaissance masters, particularly Hans Memling and Albrecht Durer. Virtually instantaneously, he abandoned the “Impressionistic” style he had been using (as seen above) in his non-commissioned work, for most of the 1920’s.

Returning home, almost immediately, his mature style debuted in the portrait of the father of the Artist’s patron, David Turner. Grant Wood was obsessed with the appearance of “manliness” throughout his life. David Garwood, who wrote the first biography of Grant Wood, said his father, Maryville (pronounced “Mervil”), “looked at Grant now and then and wondered how he happened to bring such a son into the world⁴.” For the rest of his life, Grant Wood would be so mindful of the impression he made he even adopted overalls when he worked and often when he was Photographed so as to not look like the stereotypical “Artist” of the day, which was associated with “unmanliness,” since Art making wasn’t considered “real work”. In “Portrait of John B. Turner, Pioneer,” the subject looks out at us as if to say, “I have secured my place in Iowa history. Can you measure up?” “The sitter appears to know” the answer, R. Tripp Evans, says. He also sees it as a “down payment on his debt to Maryville, whose death had freed him to become an Artist. Safely contained behind the mask of ‘Daddy’ Turner, as John Turner was familiarly known, Maryville sits before the map that will lead Wood back to his past- and to a new approach⁵.”

Continually using his family and friends as models, a series of portraits of them followed, Most notably this one-

It’s a portrait of his mother, Hattie Deette Weaver Wood, who Grant Wood lived with for the rest of her life after Maryville’s death in 1900, until her own death in October, 1935, partially perhaps, to shield him from the scrutiny and gossip surrounding him being a “bachelor Artist.” In it he depicts her as he remembered her looking on the day of her husband’s death. She wears an apron over a black long sleeve top, possibly in reference to the Artist’s comment regarding his change of styles, ” I spent twenty years wander around the wold hunting ‘arty’ subjects to Paint. I came back to Cedar Rapids, my home town, and the first thing I noticed was the cross-stitched embroidery of my mother’s kitchen apron⁶.” His eyes opened to the potential subjects all around him, the change would last the rest of his life. After the fact, he tried to alter the dating of these two works to make it appear that “Woman with Plants” had come first, and before “Portrait of John B. Turner, Pioneer,” but it had not. Though he dearly loved it, Hattie insisted he sell it. Sorrowfully, he did, but intended to do another portrait to replace it. When the idea for “American Gothic” came to him, after seeing the now famous small house with the upstairs Gothic window in Eldon, Iowa, he had an idea. His sister Nan, who posed for the young lady in the Painting, said this in an interview soon after-

“As he put together his composition for the house and two people while he was at the breakfast table that morning in 1930, he said he had models in mind—a man and a woman who would be just perfect. However, he was afraid to ask the woman, fearing she would be angry at the idea of being made something less than beautiful … Grant never told me whose place I took as the model, but I’m sure it was a spinster who had hounded him⁷.”

So, finally, he arrived at this-

How can ANYone stand in front of this and not feel uneasy? I, for one, don’t like having the business end of a pitchfork pointed at my eyes.

The Artist happened to drive by the house one day and was taken by the gothic window on the second floor, which reminded him of the Cathedrals he’d recently seen in Europe. Dr. Byron McKeeby, Grant Wood’s dentist, 62, by accounts an affable man, posed as the farmer. His sister, Nan, 30 at the time, posed as the lady who has been identified as either the farmer’s wife, or his daughter (Grant Wood is quoted calling her either at least once, though, like Michelangelo, he appears not to be above saying things for his own reasons, on occasion). The uneasiness this work invokes, along with a “Mona Lisa”-like enduring mystery about it’s “meaning,” hasn’t stopped it from becoming one of the most famous works of American Art of the 20th Century. My reading of it is that it has to do with the Artist’s feelings of confronting his father about his being an Artist and not a farmer.  That it’s his devoted sister, Nan, standing besides the father figure, says to me that she wants him to show him some understanding. It also expresses the Artist’s sense of feeling like an outsider in his native state. Those feelings may have been sharpened into irony (if not outright scorn of his neighbors) by his reading of H.L. Mencken⁸.

No, Grant Wood wasn’t a farmer. The closest he got to it was tending a garden. He was, originally, a Decorative Artist. He studied and worked at making silver jewelry and coffee and tea sets, he worked in iron, as seen earlier, and he did stage design. None of these were considered “manly” and most weren’t considered actual “work” by his father and others at the time in Iowa. Right up until the 1930’s, years after he had settled on being a Painter, he was still supporting himself designing, building and furnishing homes. He spent his whole life striving to overcome what he perceived was a lack of manliness in the perception of him by others, ingrained on him by Maryville.

Over 6 visits I made a point of carving out a few minutes each time to stand alongside viewers looking at “American Gothic.” I stood to the side so I could watch their expressions. Yes, quite a few posed for selfies with it, and in those cases, I looked at their faces, too. No one smiled. It seemed to me that the mood of the work was imparting something beyond the hype the work has received for 80 years as being an icon of the American Mid-west and it’s core values. I detected uneasiness in my fellow viewers as well. The power of the work begins in the eyes. R. Tripp Evans says the farmer’s eyes don’t make eye contact with the viewer, they look just past him/her. They bored right through me.

So…? What’s up with the image I posted up top?

The same R. Tripp Evans makes a strong case that the “woman who would be just perfect” was the Artist’s mother, Hattie. But, asking her to pose alongside another stern farmer other than her late hubsand would have been too close to home for her, and too painful. She would never had agreed. So, he posed Nan in her stead. Somewhat revealingly, Nan wears the same cameo (of Persephone) that Hattie wears in “Woman with Plants,” She wears long black sleeves under her apron, like Hattie does, both with pointed fringe and collar poking out up top, and, both women wear their hair back. Also, the potted sansevieria, which Hattie grasps with both hands on her lap in “Woman with Plants,” now appears on the porch over Nan’s right shoulder. Grant Wood never reused items that had appeared in one of his works in any other work ever again. Where there’s smoke? There’s fire. There’s quite a bit of “Hattie smoke” in Nan’s portrait here.

His father having passed away, his mother not being ammenable to posing, he did the next best thing. He asked his sister, Nan, to pose, and asked his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby to pose as the farmer. In his unfinished autobiography, “Return from Bohemia,” Grant Wood describes Maryville as “Tall and gaunt,” with a “solemn, stern, angular face⁹.” The affable Dr. McKeeby was able to capture the grim look Grant Wood wanted, aided in no small part by the fact that he is wearing Maryville Wood’s eyeglasses! The only item belonging to his father that Grant Wood kept. He liked them so much, he had a duplicate pair made for himself. All these things point to the Artist’s original intention to depict his mother and father in “American Gothic.” The  Artist, himself, is represented, I believe, by the European Gothic window- quite out of place in 1930’s Iowa, like Grant Wood felt he was, fittingly, with it’s curtain down, hiding what’s inside.

So? I’ve created a very rough idea of what “American Gothic” might have looked like if he had asked Hattie to pose and she agreed.  Taking her portrait from “Woman with Plants,” my job was made easier because there are so many similarities with Nan’s appearance in “American Gothic,” and her mother’s in “Woman with Plants,” as I’ve listed. The main visual difference being the disparity of their ages.

What this exercise showed me is the difference in the effect in switching Nan for her mother would be major. Of course, we have no idea how Grant Wood would have rendered Hattie had she agreed, and enabled the Artist to follow through on his yearning to replace “Woman with Plants.” If this had happened, it is interesting to ponder if the public would have responded to it the way they have to the “American Gothic” we have. That circles the question back as to why they have.

It’s ironic that it was his mother, who’s protective presence shielded him from unwanted public scrutiny, who inadvertently led to more of it than either of them could have ever imagined. Perhaps, only the Artist would have preferred it with his intended “perfect models,” and if he had gotten them, would he have remained a strictly local favorite Artist- a while longer, or permanently, as so many others have?

While most people who see “Dinner for Threshers” will take it at face value, as a meal after working in the fields, it harbors quite another level. Set in an open house, his childhood farmhouse near Anamosa, like a stage show, what we are seeing is nothing less than the Artist’s reimagining of his father’s last meal before he suddenly “dropped dead,” as the local newspaper headline read, in 1900 at the window in the center- the vanishing point of the work, in multiple ways, as Mr. Evans points out. It’s design is an apparent homage to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” complete with untanned foreheads instead of halos, 13 workers instead of 12 disciples, and features what might be the Artist, himself, three times on the far left, outside, and again at the table looking up at the woman, who may be Hattie, who appears as the other three women, to the right, according to Mr. Evans¹¹. Since Wood said that “It includes my family…,” that leaves me wondering where Nan is. Maryville, appears in the center, taller than everyone else, with his back to the viewer, in the light shirt, in what would be the only time his son Painted him. So, what we are seeing here is nothing less than the end of one life, and the beginning of another- Grant Wood’s career as an Artist. In that sense, too, “wheat has been separated from the chaff.” Treshing day, indeed.

In “Parson Weem’s Fable,” 1939, the fictitious fable about George Washington it depicts is not the only “fable” being told. Here, also, as late as 2 years before his death, Grant Wood is having it out with his father. By not wanting to become a farmer, he is ostensibly killing the cherry tree, i.e. his farm, which was sold after his sudden death in 1900. He refuses to return the axe, that is go back on his choice of an Artistic career. Grant Wood acknowledged that Washington’s attitude is his own[Ibid P.409]. The house in the back is his and his wife, Sara’s house, and the house where his mother would die. The red curtain the Parson opens is his mother’s curtain used in their prior Turner Alley sleeping quarters for a decade. Those would would classify Grant Wood’s work as Magic Realism, including Emily Braun in the show’s catalog (P.67), need to look no further, as what I believe they mean is seen in full effect here. No less than Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of the mature George Washington¹², the one seen on the dollar bill, is morphed on to young George’s body, because, as he said, no portraits of the young Washington exist. Intriguingly, in the back of the scene a black woman and man tend to another cherry tree. Are they a couple? Mother and son? They do serve to remind us that both George Washington and Washington’s father owned slaves. They are the only African Americans to appear in Grant Wood’s work (as far as I know).

“Fall Plowing,” 1931, is an example of what others call “Magic Realism” (a term that Edward Hopper gets lumped into and I will never understand why), with it’s classic, surreal, Grant Wood  background. What strikes me is the unattended plow. While others (R. Trip Evans, “Grant Wood,” P. 204) see a sexual metaphor, there is no other way for me to “read” this work than to think it’s a very poignant homage to his father, Maryville and his sudden passing. He may well have left some farm implement right where he was working and using it. The plowed and planted fields rolling off into the distance speak of work accomplished, while the unplowed land in the immediate foreground speak of work to come and now left undone. I can picture the Artist coming across such a scene after his father died, so for me, this strikes closest to home among all of Grant Wood’s landscapes. It’s interesting how the only sign of other human life is way off in the distance, heightening the sense of isolation. In the most recent biography of Grant Woods, by R. Tripp Evans, which is full over very interesting biographical detail, the author goes to great length to sexualize this work, as he does too many times, in my opinion. Frankly, I just don’t get that at all standing in front of “Fall Plowing.” I also note that in the same year, he painted Portraits of his sister, Nan (“Portrait of Nan”), and his great-aunt, Matilda Peet, (“Victorian Survival”).,

Here there is, also, the overriding distance that is seen in most of Grant Wood’s mature landscapes. The scenes are seen from far away, leaving the viewer isolated, as in “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” 1931, for one example. The feeling is not all that different from that in the work of Edward Hopper at about the same time.

The loneliness seen throughout Grant Wood’s work may be rooted in the isolation he and his family lived during his first decade, isolated on a farm near Anamosa, a village of less than 2,000, “as if we had been on an island in the ocean,” he said. “If the unique circumstances of Wood’s childhood- it’s profoundly rural setting, his father’s strict expectations, and his own emotional makeup- established early self-doubts concerning his masculinity, then the cultural context of his youth only compounded the problem…the most compelling element of his mature work- his selective reorganization of past experience-was present in his art from an early age, and appears to have served a deeply cathartic function¹³.”

Death is, obviously, an undertone that accompanies many of Grant Wood’s works, and a theme in his life. Even beyond his father’s death, Grant Wood, appears to almost be obsessed with it. He took walks in graveyards, he worked for at least two funeral homes, including his first job as a night watchman. He took various roles at David Turner’s Funeral Home, including designing casket biers, and after being given a studio directly behind it, he used a coffin lid as it’s front door. In this work, “Death on the Ridge Road,” 1935, he Paints it. Inspired, Nan says, by a close call a friend had but survived, here, the long sedan has no way out. At this time, Grant Wood was facing the eminent demise of his “we three” family unit he had been nurtured by for the past 25 years. Nan moved to Albuquerque and his mother, Hattie, was starting to go. She would die in October. Startlingly, on March 2nd Grant Wood, 44, finally married. Of course, some surmised, at the time and since, that his marriage was a “cover,” necessitated by Hattie’s demise. I have no idea. It ended in divorce some 3 and a half years later.

As the Nazis blitzkrieged across Europe, Grant Wood embarked on a series of works designed to show Americans what they stood to lose. “Spring in Town,” 1941, is one of the two he lived to finish before he died of pancreatic cancer on February 12, 1942. In the midst of the townspeople busy with their daily chores, I can’t help but notice the gent planting in the foreground. For me, this symbolizes much of Grant Wood’s Art. His work speaks for  him, and they do so on a number of levels, not all of them obvious. As this increasingly comes to light, the reassessment of Grant Wood is continuing. Just what is he really sowing in that ground, and in these Paintings? He had quite mixed feelings for Iowa, it’s citizens and their lifestyle, and some of his most famous works, including “American Gothic” were born out of his desire to poke fun at them in response to the way he felt he was treated as an Artist then and there. But more than that, seeing this many of his works together, it becomes obvious that Grant Wood was painting his childhood of the 1890’s, and not the mid-west of the 1930’s. He was painting what he lost, not what was disappearing as he grew older, and he was working out that most significant relationship of his life, that failed relationship with his father.

With 117 works on view by my count,  the show is larger than the Stuart Davis show. It does feel light on his early work (I saw one Painting from the decade of the 1910s, three dated 1920-25), which misses a chance to trace his development from nearer his beginnings. I doubt the overall impression would be much different. “Grant Wood: American Gothic & Other Fables” provides New York with a rare chance to see so many of the Artist’s works in one show (the last time, if I recall correctly, was also at the Whitney in 1983), given the overwhelming number of them permanently reside in Iowa, and most importantly, a rare chance to assess his work in light of all that has come after it, and to see what it has to offer to us today.

When you begin to piece it all together, Grant Wood comes across as more of a “contemporary” American, who’s complex, had issues with his family and neighbors, and was a member of a sexual minority. He looked forward to, and did all he could to help establish, an American style of Art, while at the same time, his own Art seems fixed in time- the 1890s. In that sense he was “old-fashioned,” too. Having dealt with rejection from his childhood, by the time he achieved his breakthrough, Grant Wood was an expert at managing what he revealed to others. He edited his work relentlessly to make sure it presented the image he intended, and he destroyed what he thought didn’t. Therefore, it should be no surprise that looking for “proof” of his homosexuality (in things like the gent in “Spring in Town,” above, working without a shirt on, or in “Fall Plowing”) is a waste of time, in my opinion. He didn’t want it to be found because the results would have been disastrous, personally and professionally, and he knew his work better than anyone else ever will. Looking, instead, at his work for messages and intentions that lie beneath the surface may be a bit more fruitful, but, again, it seems to me that so much of what he did was known only to himself. We can find elements of it through a study of his biography, his interviews, the memoirs of his sister, Nan, and the unfinished autobiography he left. But, it seems to me, that the still un-tilled, “deeper” levels in Grant Wood’s work, (reminiscent of the planting going on in “Spring in Town”), which I believe are there, are purposely buried so deeply under it’s topsoil that only he knew where they are.

*- Soundtrack for this Post is “I Shall Be Released” by Bob Dylan, lyrics here, as performed with The Band and a cast of thousands in “The Last Waltz.”

References-

“Grant Wood: American Gothic & Other Fables,” by Barbara Haskell, Glenn Adamson, et al, Whitney Museum, 2018- Ms. Haskell and her team have done an excellent job with this 272 page catalog. The quality of the reproductions are excellent (180 color, 30 B&W), and include works not seen in the show, and different views of some that are, though some suffer loss of detail due to being across two pages. The essays are interesting, informative and even unusual, especially an entire essay about Grant Wood’s Homosexuality by Richard Meyer. Also included is a thorough Chronicle by Ms. Haskell, which includes a number of texts and additional Photos. Throughout rarely seen Photos add much to the book, which is now, the standard in Grant Wood monographs, admittedly a small field.

“My Brother, Grant Wood,” by Nan Wood Graham. I haven’t found an actual copy of this book, which is still in print, but the fact that she burned her brother’s letters after he passed would seem to indicate a protective slant. That being said, from the excerpts I’ve read of it, and interviews with her published elsewhere, I have no doubt it’s an essential resource.

“Grant Wood,” by R. Tripp Evans. Though marred by, what I consider to be, oversexualized interpretations of the Artist’s work, it is extremely well researched and adds countless key insights and details to his biography and background on his work.

My thanks to Danielle Bias and Veronica Brown of the Whitney Museum.
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