Grant Wood: A Life

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.