Grant Wood: A Life [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

R. Tripp Evans (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 5, 2010

He claimed to be “the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.”

Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an “almost mythical figure,” recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of America’s traditional values—a simple, decent, homespun tribute to our lost agrarian age.

In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed, and misunderstood, regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed to have been anything but plain, or simple . . .

R. Tripp Evans reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed of himself. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him. He appeared to be a self-taught painter with his scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore but he was classically trained, a sophisticated artist who had studied the Old Masters and Flemish art as well as impressionism. He lived a bohemian life and painted in Paris and Munich in the 1920s, fleeing what H. L. Mencken referred to as “the booboisie” of small-town America.

We see Wood as an artist haunted and inspired by the images of childhood; by the complex relationship with his father (stern, pious, the “manliest of men”); with his sister and his beloved mother (Wood shared his studio and sleeping quarters with his mother until her death at seventy-seven; he was forty-four).

We see Wood’s homosexuality and how his studied masculinity was a ruse that shaped his work.

Here is Wood’s life and work explored more deeply and insightfully than ever before. Drawing on letters, the artist’s unfinished autobiography, his sister’s writings, and many never-before-seen documents, Evans’s book is a dimensional portrait of a deeply complicated artist who became a “National Symbol.” It is as well a portrait of the American art scene at a time when America’s Calvinistic spirit and provincialism saw Europe as decadent and artists were divided between red-blooded patriotic men and “hothouse aesthetes.”

Thomas Hart Benton said of Grant Wood: “When this new America looks back for landmarks to help gauge its forward footsteps, it will find a monument standing up in the midst of the wreckage . . . This monument will be made out of Grant Wood’s works.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The fame of the iconic, often parodied American Gothic has long masked its creator. Much about Grant Wood's patriotism and masculinity has been read into the painting's pitchfork-holding farmer and his dour companion standing in front of a Midwestern farmhouse. Evans, an art historian at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, argues that even more has been misread, overshadowing a rich and varied artistic career. Associated with the Regionalist movement in painting, Wood (1891–1942) cultivated a hearty Midwestern image that hid his homosexuality. What Wood hid from polite society, he could not help revealing in his paintings: "the object of his desire is only partially abstracted --for in the undeniably erotic curves of Stone City, we register the muscular outlines of the powerful male body." His mother and his sister, Nan, further protected him. The complicated relationship included living together until Nan married--perhaps a reaction to Wood's hard and detached father, who died when Wood was 10. Evans's in-depth, gendered readings of Wood's paintings situate him in the longer history of male artists' gendered self-portrayals (bracketed by Oscar Wilde and Jackson Pollock), providing a useful new insight into Wood's place in American art. 16 pages of color photos; b&w illus.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* It seems so straightforward. Grant Wood, born in Iowa in 1891, was the overall-clad, all-American artist from the heartland who created one of the world's best-known and most-parodied paintings, American Gothic, a portrait of a pitchfork-grasping farmer and his dour daughter. But as art historian Evans so momentously and conscientiously reveals, Wood's folksy persona was formulated to camouflage his homosexuality. Evans tells the full, grievous story of Wood's struggle to conceal his true self in a harshly homophobic world for the sake of his art and career, presenting startling insights into Wood's trauma over failing to live up to his stern father's notion of masculinity, liberating sojourns in Paris in the 1920s, and the decision to return to Cedar Rapids, where he lived with his widowed mother, attained extraordinary renown, and helped change the face of American art. Evans examines Wood's complicated relationships with his mother and his sister, Nan, the female model for American Gothic; fellow artists; various assistants; and the colorful woman he disastrously married. Most arresting is Evans' bold decoding of the eroticism and caustic social commentary hidden in plain sight in Wood's hard-edged and profoundly unnerving paintings. A fascinating and heartrending portrait of an artist forced to sacrifice his right to happiness and wholeness. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (October 5, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 030726629X
• ISBN-13: 978-0307266293
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.4 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #575,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

WINNER OF THE 2010 NATIONAL AWARD FOR ARTS WRITING

Tripp Evans is a Virginian by birth and Rhode Islander by adoption - hence his love for bourbon, Gothic storytelling, and stuffed quahogs. He majored in architectural history at the University of Virginia, and received his Ph.D. in art history from Yale (between degrees, he was a distracted receptionist and voracious reader). Since 1997 he has taught in the Art and Art History Department at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, specializing in American art and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Tripp's books examine how and why American artists evoke national character in their work - from U.S. explorers' fanciful representations of the pre-Columbian past (Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915) to Grant Wood's deeply personal use of national iconography (Grant Wood: A Life). Biography - whether of nations, institutions, or individuals - is his favorite genre.

In 2005, Tripp and his partner Ed Cabral moved into a former iron foundry in Providence, Rhode Island. The factory's unusual story, and its site's ties to colonial, Native American, and geological history are the subject of his next book. Three Acres of Providence will trace the life of this patch of land from continental drift - a time when Rhode Island bordered Morocco - to the post-industrial present.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Grant Wood: the public and private October 20, 2010

By Jon Hunt

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Most Americans know Grant Wood by only one painting...his famous "American Gothic", which is one of the most recognizable and parodied paintings in history. In this wonderful retrospective of the artist from Iowa, R. Tripp Evans has given the reader a warm, honest and comprehensive look at Wood's life...both public and private. It's an extraordinary offering.

Grant Wood was a rare artist in one sense...that his main output of known works occurred in one decade...the 1930s. This decade was known for its "regionalism" and featured the works of Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and John Stueart Curry...three men from the midwest who knew each other in varying levels of admiration and disapproval. A core of Evans's book centers around Wood's homosexuality which was hinted at for years but now has fully come to life in this book. Evans treats Wood with tremendous respect and proffers an understanding of the difficulties of living a closeted life during that time and how it affected his work and his relationships. The author is particularly good at weaving these people into Wood's personal life...his headstrong father, his closely attached mother and, especially after the artist's death, his legend-keeping sister.

The surprise to the reader, and to those who knew Wood at his time, was that Wood decided to get married and then endured a brief, rocky partnership. Yet, the fascination of this aspect of "Grant Wood: A Life" is his friendships with men. As best as one can assume, Wood was somewhat asexual, though his attractions (especially to younger men as a caregiver or provider) are nicely handled by the author.

Evans is a natural teacher and the inclusion of color plates of Wood's paintings make up the richest part of the book. It's like going to art class with the author as teacher. As a knowledgeable art historian, Evans takes us through many paintings in detail, explaining aspects that the lay person would easily miss. It's a terrific way to view Wood through his work.

I highly recommend "Grant Wood: A Life". It's a consummate and easily readable narrative presenting an overall view that Grant Wood loomed as an art giant of his age and though his paintings are "of an age", they are timeless.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars From Gay City News (NYC) October 28, 2010

By Doug Ireland

Format:Hardcover

Grant Wood's "American Gothic" is the most recognizable American painting.

Of all the paintings in the world, only the Mona Lisa has been more parodied. As Tripp Evans notes in his groundbreaking new biography of the artist, when it was first exhibited in Chicago in 1930, it made an instant global celebrity out of Wood: "Never in the history of American art had a single work captured such immediate and international recognition; by the end of 1930, the painting had been reproduced in newspapers around the globe... Never before, either, had a painting generated such widespread curiosity about its artist."

"American Gothic" was considered by most critics of that day as something of a national self-portrait, and it made Wood the icon of a new native American, regionalist art. The New Yorker wrote at the time, "As a symbol Wood stands for the corn-fed Middle West against the anemic East, starving aesthetically upon warmed-over entrees dished up by Spanish chefs in Paris kitchens. He stands for an independent American art against the colonialism and cosmopolitanism of New York."

Wood, who was born in the small town of Anamosa, Iowa, in 1898 and spent nearly all his life painting in the Hawkeye State, depicting its countryside and inhabitants, was said to stand for the flinty, manly virtues of heartland America. The New York Times proclaimed that Wood, who styled himself a "farmer-painter," had earned his "toga virilis" for, as Evans summarizes it, "ending Americans' perilous fascination with impressionism."

Wood himself encouraged this anti-intellectual, quintessentially American, and rigorously heterosexual version of his persona and the origins of his art. He famously declared in a newspaper interview, "All the really good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow," adding, "You don't get panicky about some `-ism' or other while you have Bossy by the business end. Your thoughts are realistic and direct."

The public image Wood constructed of himself even extended to the way he dressed. As one prominent critic eulogized him on his death in 1942, "In past years artists adopted smocks for their own... the working attire of French peasants. Grant Wood wore the work clothes of his own country when he painted, overalls such as a farmer or mechanic would choose."

But all of this was an elaborate charade. As Evans, an openly gay art history professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, reveals in this meticulously researched biography, Wood had made a careful study of impressionism during four extended trips to Europe and had been a student for two years at the prestigious Académie Julian in Paris, where he steeped himself in the impressionist and post-impressionist masters.

Although he spent his earliest years on the family farm, he spent most of his boyhood time hidden away in a dark basement, his refuge where he could draw and paint, sequestered from the disapproval of his distant and authoritarian father, who considered such artistic proclivities "sissified."

His father died when he was quite young, and he then moved to the bustling metropolis of Cedar Rapids with his mother and sister, with whom he lived there for most of the rest of his life until, as part of his camouflage, he contracted a loveless, unconsummated, unhappy, and brief marriage.

Far from being inspired by milking cows -- an activity he only engaged in occasionally in his young boyhood -- Wood told his wife that he felt "disgusted and dirty" by the act. She would recount, "He told me how embarrassed he was at the time because he was sure that no matter how much he bathed, he must carry with him the smell of the manure which permeated his clothes from working around livestock."

And as a young man Wood wouldn't have been caught dead in overalls -- he was, in fact, something of a dandy, as photographs in this copiously illustrated volume from Wood's "bohemian," European period clearly show. His earliest vocations activities were not in farming but as a jewelry designer, interior decorator, and in theatrical production. One friend described the shy Wood's voice as sounding "like the fragrance of violets made audible."

Wood's previous biographers have turned a blind eye to the demonstrable fact that he was a deeply closeted homosexual. Evans documents the always-chubby Wood's infatuations (many of them apparently unrequited and sublimated into parental role-playing) with an unending series of slim, dark-haired young men who were his students, protégés, and secretaries. As the bartender in a famous Cedar Rapids watering hole Wood favored put it, "Wood was only gay when he was drunk."

Evans has even unearthed numerous oblique but unmistakable references to Wood's sexual orientation in the Iowa newspapers of the 1920s. As he writes, "Given the later insistence upon Wood's sturdy masculinity and embodiment of Midwestern morality, it is surprising to note the frequency and candor of these early references to his homosexuality."

To take just one example, Wood's friend MacKinlay Kantor (who won later fame as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter) wrote in his gossip column for the Des Moines Tribune-Capital, emphasizing Wood's bachelorhood: "Pink of face and plump of figure, he was most nearly in character one night when he appeared at a costume party dressed as an angel -- wings, pink flannel nightie, pink toes, and even a halo, supported by a stick thrusting up his back."

Not only did Kantor link Wood's costume to common stereotypes of the "fairy," but after comparing Wood to Snow White, who lay imprisoned in a glass coffin awaiting her prince's kiss, Kantor wrote: "The front door of his apartment is made of glass, but it's a coffin lid. OOOOOOoooooh!" Kantor then exhorted the "boys" among his readers to "look [Wood] over." The meaning of all this is quite evident, unless one doesn't want to see.

The fact that things like this had appeared in print drove Wood even further into his closet in the late 1920s, leading him to adopt the overalls and "farmer-painter" pose to bolster its locked door. It was also at this time that he turned away from his early painting style, indisputably marked by his study of impressionists, to the gothic realism that, as Evans demonstrates, bore the imprint of the Dutch and German masters he had absorbed while studying in Germany.

Evans is brilliant in documenting how gender assignments were made to various artistic styles, and how impressionism was considered a "feminine" art form. Moreover, the new school of regionalist, "authentic" American art of "US scene" painting, of which Wood became a symbol in the 1930s after the stunning success of "American Gothic" -- and which was launched as a media fetish with a 1934 Time magazine cover story written on orders of its conservative nationalist publisher Henry Luce -- was impregnated with an explicitly xenophobic, anti-modernist, and extremely homophobic ideology.

Thus, Wood's famous comrade-in-arms in this movement, the painter Thomas Hart Benton, wrote a 1935 essay entitled "Farewell to New York," which Evans rightly describes as a "homophobic diatribe." In it, Benton roared that the city had "lost its masculinity" since the start of the Depression, because it had been polluted by "the concentrated flow of aesthetic-minded homosexuals into the various fields of artistic practice... far be it from me to raise any hands in moral horror over the ways and tastes of individuals. If young gentlemen, or old ones either, wish to wear women's underwear and cultivate extraordinary manners it is all right with me. But it is not all right with the art which they affect and cultivate. It is not all right when, by ingratiation or subtle connivance, precious fairies get into positions of power and judge, buy, and exhibit American pictures on a base of nervous whim and under the sway of those overdelicate refinements of taste characteristic of their kind." To cover himself, Wood endorsed Benton's queer-bashing declaration.

The movement's most ardent advocate among art critics -- one might even call him its ideologue -- Thomas Craven, in his 1934 book "Modern Art: The Men, the Movement, the Meaning," had earlier blown the same trumpet. "The artist is losing his masculinity," Craven growled. "The tendency of the Parisian system is to disestablish sexual characteristics, to merge the two sexes in an androgynous third, containing all that is offensive in both. Once [male artists] contract la vérole Montparnasse -- the pox of the Quarter -- they become jaded and perverse...They found magazines in which their insecurity is attested by the continual insulting of America, hymns to homosexuality and miscegenation... It is this sort of life that captures American youth and emasculates American art."

Not only was homosexuality illegal and known homosexuals jailed or condemned to horrific "treatments" by psychiatric ghouls in mental hospitals, but the very art movement that had made Wood a central figure was unrelenting in its condemnation of same-sex orientation. Wood's exposure would have threatened not only his reputation but his income as well.

It was in this context that in 1935 he contracted a marriage with a former actress, Sarah Moxon, to the great surprise of his friends and family. But he soon alienated Sara by falling in love with her handsome, 20-something son from a previous marriage, installing this rather louche and exploitative if decorative young chap in their home, and lavishing money and attention on him, even considering adopting him at one point. Read more ›

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing work of insight into an artist October 25, 2010

By Michael Muller

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

As a big fan of Grant's work and an artist myself I have always been interested in and searched for what inspires artists and how that influences their work. When I mention Grant to people they often look blank until you say "The painting of the man and woman with a pitchfork" and then all becomes clear. Evan's with his new book about Grant opens up a whole world of Grant and not only what influenced this man to produce an amazing piece of history in his painting "American Gothic" but a side of Grant we have never been able to know about as a man. In the past searching for information about Grant Wood I was never able to find anything that really felt more than superficial and at a distance about Grant Wood the man. This is the book that finally fills in all the gaps with not only heart but a true love for Grant Wood. If you have ever wondered what makes an artist and artist and how his life influences what he or she produces then this book will amaze you. Even if you have ever thought you were not a big fan of artists and art I think this book will move you just to understand the story of a man and his internal struggle to be himself and how he expressed that in his art.