Had Grant Wood not made the painting “American Gothic” (1930), there would not be a Grant Wood retrospective now at the Whitney Museum. This would be a pity, because the show fascinates as a plunge into certain deliriums of the United States in the nineteen-thirties, notably a culture war between cosmopolitan and nativist sensibilities. But any notion that the Iowan—who died in 1942, of pancreatic cancer, on the day before his fifty-first birthday—is an underrated artist fizzles. “American Gothic” is, by a very wide margin, his most effective picture—though not his best, for which I nominate “Dinner for Threshers” (1934), a long, low, cutaway view of a farmhouse at harvesttime that brought to disciplined perfection Wood’s strong suit, imaginative design. He was a strange man who made occasionally impressive, predominantly weird, sometimes god-awful art in thrall to a programmatic sense of mission: to exalt rural America in a manner adapted from Flemish Old Masters. “American Gothic”—starchy couple, triune pitchfork, churchy house, bubbly trees—succeeded, deserving the inevitable term “iconic” for its punch and tickling ambiguity. (It’s still hard to say what, exactly, is being iconized.) The work made Wood, at the onset of his maturity as an artist, a national celebrity, and the attendant pressures pretty well wrecked him. I came away from the show with a sense of waste and sadness.
Wood was born on a farm, in 1891. His forbiddingly taciturn Quaker father—“more a god than a father to me,” he later wrote—died when Wood was ten. His mother, with whom he would live until her death, in 1935, moved him and his three siblings to Cedar Rapids. The closest to him was his younger sister Nan, who posed as the prim wife or (as she later insisted) daughter of the lugubrious male in “American Gothic.” Wood was precocious in a wide range of crafts—silversmithing, ceramics, interior decoration, and, in one prodigious instance, stained-glass design—and an inveterate participant in local art and theatre clubs and projects.
Between 1922 and 1928, he had three sojourns in Paris, where he studied art and developed a generic Impressionist painting style oddly inflected by crisply contoured details that suggest a tug toward mosaic flatness. The early craft works in the show convey a buoyant creative personality that his paintings overly strained with mixed ambitions—to be decorative, which he was good at, and narrative, which he wasn’t. The pieces include some practically Dadaist still-life sculptures, made of machine parts, and a chandelier, designed for a Cedar Rapids hotel, with eye-fooling replicas of corncobs. (“Corny” is a multipurpose adjective for Iowa, the Saudi Arabia of exported corn.) Reproduced photographically in the show at half scale, the vast stained-glass window he made for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids quite ravishes, with an angelic figure of Peace standing above ranked American soldiers from six wars. It was while overseeing its fabrication, in Munich, in 1928, that Wood latched on to a five-centuries-old mentor, Hans Memling, the greatest portrait painter of the Northern Renaissance. Memling’s precise delineation, incorporation of landscape backgrounds, piquant detail, and glowing color in oil glazes became aspects of Wood’s style. In short order, this and his agrarian subject matter combined with a national mood of restive nostalgia to make Wood a paladin—routinely yoked with the Missourian Thomas Hart Benton and the Kansan John Steuart Curry—of anti-modernist regionalism.
Why Wood now? One political factor and one social factor seem to be in play in the Whitney’s first retrospective of the artist since 1983 (at that time, the chief impetus was a vogue, begun in the seventies, for revisionist art history). The politics may be deemed prescient, since the show was planned before the election of Donald Trump, but it feels right on time. I have in mind the worries of urban liberals about the insurgent conservative truculence in what is often dismissed—with a disdain duly noted by citizens of the respective states—as flyover country. Parallels between reactionary trends now and those of the thirties are inexact, of course, and can be untrue to the facts of both eras, at least in America. In the thirties and forties, in ways that became art-world conventional wisdom, some critics equated regionalism with the blood-and-soil mystique of Nazism and/or socialist realism. But Wood, Benton, and Curry were sturdy Roosevelt liberals. (Wood headed Iowa offices of the New Deal programs that supported artists during the Depression.) Some sophisticates, in New York and Hollywood smart sets, took these artists’ works in stride as populist chic. Collectors of Wood included Cole Porter, Alexander Woollcott, Edward G. Robinson, and King Vidor. Then, as perhaps now, there was a recuperative urge among metropolitans to make nice with the disgruntled heartland—an uphill process, as witness a recent protest movement against a terrific Benton mural, at Indiana University, that features Ku Klux Klan figures, never mind that Benton meant to denigrate them.
The social factor entails identity politics. Wood was homosexual, a fact long unpublished and, even now, commonly reported with qualifiers: “repressed,” “closeted,” “latent.” There’s no record of his acting on his orientation, but, for the last six years of his life, he lived with his personal secretary. And no special sleuthing is needed to winkle out his desires from his enraptured depictions of hunky men versus his stony ones of women, and the recurrent suggestion of male anatomy in his bizarre Iowa landscapes—spatially impossible topographies, compounding descriptive and decorative techniques without the slightest feel for nature, which can appear impatient for the arrival of a Warner Bros. cartoon character or two. (If anything about the putatively backward-looking Wood was closeted, it was Surrealism; there are whiffs in his work of the fantastic landscapes of the next artist to be as famous in America as he had been: Salvador Dali.) A recent biography of the artist by R. Tripp Evans takes gaydar to such feverish extremes that an essay by Richard Meyer in the show’s catalogue takes pains to tone it down a little. (“Sometimes an ear of corn is just an ear of corn,” Meyer remarks.) Wood was certainly conflicted, and he had good reason to fear damage to his very public career as a lecturer and oft-quoted savant. He was briefly, disastrously married to a flamboyant former opera singer, Sara Sherman Maxon, several years his senior, who alienated his circle of friends in Cedar Rapids. Lester Longman, a modernist-minded colleague in the University of Iowa art department, where Wood had taught since 1935, tried mightily to have him fired, in part on explicit moral grounds. But the university ignored the charge and retained Wood. There’s a tendency in our time of retroactive frankness to imagine that grownups of the past didn’t know things about one another when, in fact, they merely kept mum.
I recommend spending minutes with a Memling-esque self-portrait that Wood began in 1932 and completed in 1941. It seems to me tragicomic—an effort to project masculine resolve by a hypersensitive man who, in 1941, was drinking heavily, tormented by his nemesis Longman, and in failing health. He had to sense the underpinnings of his popularity crumbling as the war approached that would tie America’s fate to that of Europe once again and eclipse rustic romance with the thrum of heavy industry. A memorial show after his death, at the Art Institute of Chicago, was a flop. The regionalists lost standing to less boosterish modern painters of American subjects, such as Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Reginald Marsh, and Charles Sheeler. (Meanwhile, in New York, the gay painters Paul Cadmus and Jared French employed styles akin to that of Wood to kick their closet doors at least halfway open.) In the self-portrait, a windmill—a leitmotif in most of Wood’s landscapes—looms behind him against a yellow sky. There’s a faintly seductive sensuality in his pink fleshiness, emphasized by the plunging neckline of the shirt that he wears. His face, despite its determinedly set eyes and mouth, has a babyish look that people often remarked on. As with all his works that reward more than a glance, including “American Gothic,” a deeply buried, wild humor seems astir yet, at the same time, baffled at the point of its contact with the world. The longer I look at the picture, the more I feel that its subject is about to burst into tears. ♦
