Wood, Grant

(1892-1942)

   Grant Wood, regarded as “one of the most American of America’s artists,” learned his trade at the Minneapolis School of Design and in night classes at the University of Iowa and Art Institute of Chicago. He taught in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but after military service during World War I, he was one of the many artists and writers who spent time in Paris, France. In 1927, he received a commission for a stained glass window commemorating war veterans in Cedar City, Utah. His design, using German glass, caused some controversy, a fact that influenced his satirical painting Daughters of Revolution (1932). A number of Wood’s paintings shared this ironic view, most famously his austere depiction of a farmer and his wife in American Gothic (1930). Other work showing the influence of American folk art and the sense of irony included the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) and Parson Weems’ Fable (1939).

   In the 1930s, Wood became a leading figure in the regionalist school of artists, celebrating the richness of the land and offering a vision of hope during the Great Depression in work ranging from Fall Plowing (1931) and Birthplace of Herbert Hoover (1931) to Iowa Cornfield (1941). During the 1930s, Wood was head of the Iowa Works Progress Administration Art Project and taught at Iowa University. In 1935, he was elected to the National Academy of Design, and much of his work in the mid-1930s was printmaking and illustration.