", This page was last edited on 2 April 2021, at 13:35. Or does the title simply describe the revival-style architectural detail of the house? Grant Wood was born on Feb. 13, 1891, at Anamosa, Iowa. It is this ambiguity that has helped made it one of the most parodied images in art history, writes Fisun Güner. Is Grant Wood’s famous painting serious or comic? Apr 17, 2016 - Find a list of greatest artworks associated with Regionalism at Wikiart.org – the best visual art database. All grant wood artwork ships within 48 hours and includes a 30-day money-back guarantee. 4-14", "Going Back to Iowa: The World of Grant Wood", "Grant Woods Murals in the Parks Library at Iowa State University", Grant Wood's "Fall Plowing" Rural Historic Landscape District, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grant_Wood&oldid=1015612169, School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni, Articles lacking reliable references from July 2012, Articles with dead external links from July 2012, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia articles with RKDartists identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with TePapa identifiers, Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with suppressed authority control identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Wood, Grant. A few potted plants are visible on the porch, just over the woman's shoulder. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices. Similar artists When she died in 1990, her estate, along with Wood's personal effects and various works of art, became the property of the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa. ". Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930. Wood's inspiration came from Eldon, southern Iowa, where a cottage designed in the Gothic Revival style with an upper window in the shape of a medieval pointed arch provided the background and also the painting's title. The choice of subject and the decorative treatment have been interpreted in opposing manners. Eschewing the idioms of avant-garde European art, Wood depicted his native Midwest with the clarity and precision he observed in Northern Renaissance art and the organic lines and curves of Art Deco design, melding these disparate styles into a uniquely American vision. ", Taylor, Sue. "Grant Wood's Family Album. He spent his early years on a farm in rural Anamosa, Iowa. Nor is it a vague, fuzzy romantic quality known as "Beauty", remote from the realities of everyday life. He became a great proponent of regionalism in the arts,[5] lecturing throughout the country on the topic. Wood taught painting at the University of Iowa's School of Art from 1934 to 1941. The models for the couple, though, were his dentist and his younger sister Nan. Believing in the cultural superiority of Europe in the beginning of his career, Grant Wood studied the work of the French Impressionists, assimilating the style into his practice. Seven years older than Grant, she was born in Iowa in 1884. The World War II Liberty Ship SS Grant Wood was named in his honor. Wood's numerous patrons for projects such as the Iowa Corn Room hailed from the prosperous business class in Cedar Rapids and were eager to beautify the city and enhance its cultural life. The couple are in the traditional roles of men and women, the man's pitchfork symbolizing hard labor. It is the depth and intensity of an artist's experience that are the first importance in art. A few citizens emerge from their homes in his wake. The patriotically inspiring poem, lauding Revere's journey "To every Middlesex village and farm, A cry of defiance not of fear," had long inspired Wood. [18], The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Daughters of Revolution, 1932, Cincinnati Art Museum, Parson Weems' Fable, 1939, Amon Carter Museum, Sentimental Ballad, 1940, New Britain Museum, January, 1940–41, Cleveland Museum of Art, For the American politician with a similar name, see. ", "In the house itself, the gable is much lower than in the painting... you can only stand up just barely at the apex. But today, this painting, titled American Gothic, is one of the most famous American artworks of the 20th century. From 1922 to 1928, Wood made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially Impressionism and post-Impressionism. After the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, American artists turned their efforts to creating a particular strain of American art that embodied patriotic values that hearkened back to an earlier time. His most famous work, American Gothic, is an American icon. In 2009, Grant was awarded the Iowa Prize, the state's highest citizen honor.[14]. In painting small town and rural life, Wood gave the American public an idealized vision of itself at a time during the Great Depression when most … It raises more questions than it answers. Grant continued to work in this style, soon painting his most famous painting, American Gothic. Others have grouped Wood's depiction with a parallel trend of a broader colonial-era preservationist movement in the United States, emblemized most clearly by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s restoration of Williamsburg, Virginia. Although Wood gives the subject a distinctively storybook treatment, with the bird's eye view and graphic scenery, the intent is a reinterpretation of a national legend, based on the artist's conviction that America had a rich literature, worthy of preservation and appreciation. When the Art Institute of Chicago first displayed it in 1930, most people had no idea who Wood was. We learned about the life and art of Grant Wood before they were given the assignment of drawing a realistic farm landscape, showing depth. He endeared himself to Midwesterners, who saw themselves portrayed in a positive light, but Easterners tended to dismiss him because of his purported sentimental, old-fashioned style. [16] Wood's sister insisted that the painting depicts the farmer's daughter and not wife, disliking suggestions it was the farmer's wife, since that would mean that she looks older than Wood's sister preferred to think of herself. The aerial perspective recalls a common device in Currier and Ives prints, which were enjoying a resurgence in popularity in the 1930s. Grant Wood, an American painter, was a leader in the art movement known as Regionalism, which also included the artist Thomas Hart Benton. Nostalgic and romantic. Envy of New York or not, Wood and his colleagues were not wilting in a cultural backwater but enjoyed a thriving arts community with ample support. [Internet]. Wood was an active painter from an extremely young age until his death, and although he is best known for his paintings, he worked in a large number of media, including lithography, ink, charcoal, ceramics, metal, wood and found objects. In subsequent decades, his work has been praised and derided by critics and public alike, but his paintings, and in particular American Gothic, remain some of the most iconic, and appropriated, paintings created by an American artist, thus providing Wood with a permanent place in American popular culture. It's title declares itself American, but what, exactly, is emblematically American about it? [12] He is buried at Riverside Cemetery, Anamosa, Iowa. By Daniel A. While there were rumors about Wood's homosexuality during his lifetime and after his death, Wood never publicly acknowledged this aspect of his identity, and in fact seemed to live in fear of being exposed. Grant Wood was an American painter who is best known for his work depicting the Midwest. Gross / Despite his relatively short mature career and his dismissal by important critics and scholars in the 1940s, Grant Wood endures as one of America's most popular artists, who painted quintessentially American scenes. At the opening of a similar project at the Martin's Hotel in 1926, Wood spoke to the press of the burgeoning "feeling for the culture and art in this section of the country, which is rapidly making it a place which New York artists look to with longing." [16] Wood decided to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house. Grant Wood (1891–1942) was born on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa. More contemporary scholarship has begun to reexamine Wood's painting in light of his sexuality, excavating, in curator David Ward's words, the "tension and difficulties faced by gay men who stayed behind in Middle America. I sincerely hope that this painting will help reawaken interest in the cherry tree tale and other bits of American folklore that are too good to lose. This timing separated his perspective from other realists: Wood focused on the rosy, mythical memories of boyhood, and a life of simple pleasures in tune with the seasons, rather than the more adult drudgery and economic precariousness that often go hand-in-hand with farming. The 1930s saw a retraction from growing cosmopolitanism into what Barbara Haskell describes as "a powerful strain in popular culture" with "a pronounced reverence for the values of community, hard work, and self-reliance that were seen as fundamental to the national character and embodied most fully in American's small towns and farms." View Grant Wood’s 1,438 artworks on artnet. [16] With the onset of the Great Depression, it came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit. Both the rigid frontal arrangement and the minute details echo the works of the Flemish early Renaissance Masters – namely Van Eyck, Memling, and Dürer. Stylistically, this work shows both the forward and backward-looking tendencies in Wood's mature style. Grant Wood’s painting, the American Gothic, has a Carpenter Gothic Style house with a stoic man with a pitchfork and women staring off to the side painted outside their house. Grant Wood Notable Artworks. Choose your favorite grant wood designs and purchase them as wall art, home decor, phone cases, tote bags, and more! As Emily Braun states, "Even those who concur that satire may have been the operative mode for the artist debate whether his debunking was gentle or biting." Shop for grant wood art from the world's greatest living artists. In addition, his 1928 trip to Munich was to oversee the making of the stained glass windows[4] he had designed for a Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. Perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, the painting's ambiguity, Wood's enigmatic couple became iconic. The debates of national identity that dominated the time of Wood's mature career play an important role in the interpretation of his work. The precision of the paint was a newer development for the artist, but the imposition of modern design on the landscape reflects his professional roots. Calendulas by Grant Wood, 1928-29, via Cedar Rapids Museum of Art Before Grant Wood created sweeping landscapes in the Regionalist style he started out as an Impressionist painter. In 1932, Wood helped found the Stone City Art Colony near his hometown to help artists get through the Great Depression. [13], When Wood died, his estate went to his sister, Nan Wood Graham, the woman portrayed in American Gothic. Though Wood had no interest in working in a Cubist or truly abstract style, he wanted his work to have a modern look. Washington Post / [1][16] Wood rejected this reading of it. His father, a farmer, died in 1901, and the family moved to Cedar Rapids. Wood's best known work is his 1930 painting American Gothic,[17] which is also one of the most famous paintings in American art,[16] and one of the few images to reach the status of widely recognised cultural icon, comparable to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch's The Scream. It depicts, presumably, a farming couple, either married or a father and daughter, standing in front of their frame house with a large gothic window. A theatrical spotlight illuminates the center of the painting, showing the town from an aerial perspective, placing the tops of chimneys in the foreground. [16], Wood was hired in 1940, along with eight other prominent American artists, to document and interpret dramatic scenes and characters during the production of the film The Long Voyage Home, a cinematic adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's plays. The Iowa Corn Room commission came to Wood during his first years dedicated solely to his artistic career. "Grant Wood Artist Overview and Analysis". 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