Grant Wood Biography

Grant DeVolson Wood (1891-1942) was an American artist and representative of Regionalism, best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest. He is particularly well known for American Gothic (1930), which has become an iconic example of early 20th-century American art.

Grant Wood's boyhood home, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is listed as one of the most endangered historic sites in Iowa.

Wood was born in rural Iowa, 4 mi (6.43 km) east of Anamosa, on 13 February 1891, the son of Hattie DeEtte Wood (née Weaver) and Francis Maryville Wood. Hattie moved the family to Cedar Rapids after Francis died in 1901. Soon thereafter, Wood began as an apprentice in a local metal shop. After graduating from Washington High School, he enrolled in The Handicraft Guild, an art school run entirely by women in Minneapolis in 1910.

In 1913, Wood enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied from 1913 to 1916. Wood also performed some work as a silversmith.

Near the end of World War I, Wood joined the army, working as an artist designing camouflage scenes as well as other art.

From 1919 to 1925, Wood taught art to junior high school students in the Cedar Rapids public school system. This employment provided financial stability, and its seasonal nature allowed him summer trips to Europe to study art. Wood also took a leave of absence for the 1923-1924 school year so he could spend an entire year studying in Europe. During his stint as a teacher, Wood experimented with woodworking and metalworking. For example, he built a bench for students who broke the rules to sit on while waiting punishment from the school principal, which Wood titled Mourner's Bench, a humorous reference to the mourner's bench used in Methodist churches.

From 1924 to 1935, Wood lived with his mother in the hayloft of a carriage house in Cedar Rapids, which he had converted into his personal studio at "5 Turner Alley" (the studio had no address until Wood made one up).

Between 1922 and 1928, Wood made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially Impressionism and post-Impressionism. However, it was the work of the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck that influenced him to take on the clarity of this technique and incorporate it in his new works. Additionally, Wood's 1928 trip to Munich was to oversee the making of the stained glass windows he had designed for a Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids.

In 1932, Wood helped found the Stone City Art Colony near his hometown to help artists get through the Great Depression. He became a great proponent of regionalism in the arts, lecturing throughout the country on the topic. As Wood's classically American image was solidified, his bohemian days in Paris were expunged from his public persona.

In 1934, Wood was offered a position working and teaching in Iowa City as Director of a New Deal Public Works of Art Project (PWAP). While headquartered in Iowa City and associated with the University of Iowa, he assisted other artists and art students in producing a set of murals for Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Once his PWAP concluded in 1934, the University of Iowa offered Wood a three-year-term as an Associate Professor of Fine Art. He taught painting at the university's School of Art until 1941. During that time, Wood supervised mural painting projects, mentored students including Elizabeth Catlett, produced a variety of his own works, and became a key part of the university's cultural community.

Wood was an active painter from an extremely young age until his death, and although best known for his paintings, Wood worked in a large number of media, including lithography, ink, charcoal, ceramics, metal, wood and found objects.

Throughout his life, Wood hired out his talents to many Iowa-based businesses as a steady source of income. This included painting advertisements, sketching rooms of a mortuary house for promotional flyers and, in one case, designing the corn-themed décor (including chandelier) for the dining room of a hotel.

Wood is associated with the American movement of Regionalism, which was primarily situated in the Midwest, and advanced figurative painting of rural American themes in an aggressive rejection of European abstraction.

Wood's best known work is his 1930 painting American Gothic, which is also one of the most famous paintings in American art, and one of the few images to reach the status of widely recognised cultural icon, comparable to Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch's The Scream.

American Gothic was first exhibited in 1930 at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it is still located. It was awarded a $300 prize and made news stories nationwide, bringing Wood immediate recognition. Since then, it has been borrowed and satirised endlessly for advertisements and cartoons.

Wood was married to Sara Sherman Maxon from 1935 to 1938. Friends considered the marriage a mistake for him.

Wood was a closeted homosexual. There was an unsuccessful attempt by a colleague, Lester Longman, to get him fired both on explicit moral grounds and for his advocacy of regionalism. Critic Janet Maslin states that his friends knew him to be "homosexual and a bit facetious in his masquerade as an overall-clad farm boy." University administration at Iowa dismissed the allegations, and Wood would have returned as a professor if not for his growing health problems.

On 12 February 1942, Wood died at Iowa City university hospital of pancreatic cancer, one day before his 51st birthday.