Grant Wood

A leading modernist painter and influential American Regionalist, Grant Wood was born on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa in 1891. After the death of his father in 1901, he moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa with his mother and sister. In Cedar Rapids, he eventually became a young metalsmith apprentice and first developed his artistic talent by experimenting with various media, particularly crafts such as jewelry and furniture making. After graduating from high school in 1910, he enrolled in the School of Design, Handicraft, and Normal Art in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which was administered entirely by women. He completed two subsequent summers at the school and later entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood lived, studied, and worked in Chicago between 1913 and 1916.

 

Active as an artist and designer with the U.S. Military during World War I, Wood later returned to Cedar Rapids to teach in local public schools. In the early 1920s, he was granted a year-long sabbatical in order to study in Europe at the prestigious Parisian art school Académie Julian. Between 1922 and 1928, Woods traveled throughout Europe, drawing inspiration from Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in addition to earlier European movements such as the Flemish school of painting led by fifteenth-century painter Jan van Eyck. As a result, Wood’s early works reflect the sensibility of light and brushwork developed by Impressionist painters but applied to Midwestern landscapes and scenes. In 1926, he held a solo exhibition I Paris but to little fanfare and returned to the U.S.

 

By the late 1920s, Wood had abandoned his Impressionist painting style, choosing to work in a more realistic manner with flat paint and meticulous detail. This signaled his adaptation of a modern approach to Flemish-inspired realism with Midwestern subject matter, particularly in staged portraits of his friends and family. As he developed his distinct painting style, Wood expanded his oeuvre to include scenes recounting significant moments of American history and folk traditions in addition to the rolling hills and agricultural fields of his native Iowa. With paintings like American Gothic (1930), Wood garnered national renown and became a leading figure of Regionalism, alongside Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, both of whom he convinced to return to the Midwest after stints in New York. In 1935, he was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, a position he maintained until his death from pancreatic cancer in 1942. Wood was 51 years old when he died.