In the last year, I’ve had three column encounters with Grant Wood, 1891–1942, Iowa’s best-known visual artist. In writing about MacKinlay Kantor, Park Rinard, and Arthur Mooney, I learned about meaningful relationships these one-time Iowans had with Wood. Stumbling upon these connections prompted a deeper dive, the genesis of this ramble.
Like most Iowans, I was already somewhat familiar with Grant Wood. Paula and I attended a 1983 exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, “Grant Wood, The Regionalist Vision,” and in 2018, “Grant Wood, American Gothic and Other Fables” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. We have five books about Wood, confessing here I’ve not read them all, something I’m now addressing. I probably know more about Wood’s paintings than about his brief life, overwhelmingly spent in Iowa.
The first major Wood biography was published eighty years ago, in 1944, two years after his death. Much of what follows is drawn from “Artist in Iowa, A Life of Grant Wood” by Darrell Garwood, who became interested in the artist in the early 1930s, while a University of Iowa student, where Wood was then teaching. According to one review, Garwood has written “one of the most fascinating and readable books in all American art chronicling… as carefully and artfully constructed as one of Wood’s portraits or landscapes.”
The benefit of Garwood’s portrait is the impressions, stories, reminiscences of Wood’s contemporaries. The disadvantage of a book written so close to the protagonist’s life is lack of perspective that time can provide. Additional Wood biographies appeared decades later, after many of his colleagues had passed.
Garwood’s book concludes with a simple quote from Wood patron David Turner, then owner of 17 important Wood paintings: “Art was his lifelong profession.” Garwood devotes one-third of the book to exploring Wood’s early, pre-artist life, seeking – sometimes finding – life-long traits. For example, from the Anamosa “Eureka” Newspaper (Wood’s family then lived near Anamosa), April 1901: “Master Grant Wood, ten years of age, reports he has found 55 varieties of birds in this neighborhood. His communication on this subject shows he is an observing, thoughtful, wide-awake boy.” Observant of details was a Wood hallmark, although there may be a downside to this consistency. According to Garwood, “He clung to old habits and ideas. Some people said he made a fetish of being odd.”
Wood’s arts education was uneven at best. Garwood notes, “There wasn’t any art in the (high school) curriculum,” and his higher education was “haphazard,” a Minneapolis summer course at the Handicraft Guild being a notable exception. When Wood and a Guild colleague couldn’t afford lodging, they slept on benches in Loring Park, near what is now the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. “Traffic noise on Harmon Place bothered them for a while, but they got used to it.” I wish the author included more about summers Wood spent in North Iowa, on Clear Lake, which happened much later in his life.
Wood’s artistic guideposts are sprinkled throughout the biography:
--“An art that loses contact with the public is lost. Art for art’s sake is dead. We must get back to simple relations between the artist and the public.”
--“A picture should never say, ‘Aren’t I pretty’; it should say ‘Here I am.’ If it doesn’t convey an idea, it isn’t a medium of expression.”
--(And, according to Garwood, Wood’s most quoted remark): “I suddenly realized that all the good ideas I ever had come to me while I was milking a cow.” (A symbolic statement; the author says Wood didn’t do much milking.)
In closing, two notable “blurbs” from the well-worn dustjacket. “One thing that struck me most forcibly… is the important part enlightened people in a community can play in encouraging the development of talent in the fine arts.” (Harry Boyd, Cedar Rapids Gazette). And… “A plain, sympathetic chronicle (about) one of the most interesting and significant figures of modern American art… No reader can leave it without a finer appreciation of Grant Wood.” (John T. Flanagan, Chicago Sun)
I strongly concur with both statements.
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I’m pleased to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. My talented colleagues:
Grant Wood being without shelter is a lesson. Sleeping on a park bench is not a new issue. Grant Wood is a real Iowa boy.
Your finding -- and quick scanning -- of this very early Grant Wood biography gives glimpses of Iowa's most famous artist that I've never known. Share some more!