AMERICAN
Grant Wood’s most famous painting travels to the Whitney Museum along with a full range of his works
Grant Wood (1891-1942) was more than American Gothic. Much came before and much came in the few years of his life that remained after its first exhibition in 1930.The first retrospective of his work in Newyork since 1983 opens March 2 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Titled Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables, the show continues through June 10.
The Whitney’s curator and curator of the exhibition, Barbara Haskell, notes,“the enduring power of Wood’s art owes as much to its mesmerizing psychological ambiguity as to its archetypal Midwestern imagery.
An eerie silence and disquiet runs throughout his work, complicating its seemingly bucolic, elegiac exterior. Notwithstanding Wood’s desire to recapture the imagined world of his childhood, the estrangement and isolation that came of trying to resolve his loyalty to that world with his instincts as a shy, sexually closeted Midwesterner seeped into his art, endowing it with an unsettling sadness and alienation. By subconsciously expressing his conflicted relationship to the homeland he professed to adore, Wood created hypnotic works of apprehension and solitude that may be a truer expression of the unresolved tensions of the American experience than he might ever have imagined, even some 75 years after his death.”
Wood grew up on a farm in Anamosa, Iowa. His father died when he was 10 and the family moved to Cedar Rapids. In high school he became acquainted with the arts and crafts movement through Gustav Stickley’s magazine The Craftsman, and with the ideas of Ernest Batchelder (1876-1957). Batchelder summed up the movement’s embrace of handcrafting over mass production when he wrote,“there is a dignity to hand labor…a dignity of the mind and