Spring Turning | Reynolda House Museum of American Art This object is currently on view. Description A high horizon line running along the exaggerated width of the composition paradoxically creates simultaneous feelings of expansion and compression in this depiction of an eastern Iowa landscape. The primary subject of Spring Turning, 1936, an oil painting on Masonite panel, is the remembered landscape of Grant Wood’s childhood in Anamosa, Iowa. There is no visual evidence of twentieth century progress in this setting—no automobiles, farm machinery, paved roads, or electric wires. Wood scholar Wanda Corn describes it as “man liv(ing) in complete harmony with nature; he is the earth’s caretaker, coaxing her into abundance, bringing coherence and beauty to her surfaces” (see Wanda Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 90).

The painting was first exhibited at the Carnegie International Exhibition in Pittsburgh in 1936 and on February 8, 1937 was featured in a full-color two-page spread in Life magazine (see Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock and the Politics of Modernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 175). The landscape shown has been segmented into fields for cultivation. The composition encompasses four fields, side by side in pairs and receding at a diagonal away from the picture plane. Their geometric demarcation is man-made, indicated by the plowed furrows that are being turned under in preparation for planting, the rusty red-orange furrows highlighted against the velvety green growth. Each field is surrounded by posthole fences. One can see the fence posts but not the strung wires, thus reinforcing the repetition of the posts as hemmed stitches on a vast quilt. The left of the rear fields has been completely plowed, while the other three are in the process of being plowed. The tiny form of a farmer works the square from the outside to its center. There is a hint of one work-team silhouetted against the sky.

The foreground field is being worked by a farmer and team of draft horses, while the mid-ground field is being worked by a farmer driving a team of oxen. In the bottom right third of the composition, a small bridge crosses a shaded stream. At the far end of the recessional diagonal created by the contour of the foreground hill is a single tree casting a shadow, as if in response to the distant pink-flowering tree back by the foot bridge. Along the left edge of the composition, tucked into the far side of a hill, a farmhouse is partly visible, along with grazing cattle in the adjoining field. Slightly above and to the right, barely visible against the sky on the farthest hill, is yet another work team, while the next hill over is topped by a very tiny weathervane against the sky. The bright blue sky is scattered with clouds, but rather than appear rounded these clouds seem to square themselves up parallel to the fields below them. The overall dominance of geometric forms in this landscape and an almost deliberate minimization of pattern and decoration may be traced to Wood’s studies under Ernest Batchelder.

Specifically, critic James Dennis says that Batchelder would have been familiar with the art teachings of Arthur Wesley Dow, whose art manual Composition was first published in 1899 and was reissued several times through the 1940s. A quote of Dow’s seems especially applicable to Spring Turning: “Take any landscape that has some good elements in it, reduce it to a few main lines, and strive to present it in the most beautiful way” (see James M. Dennis, Renegade Regionalists: The modern independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, 185). While studying in Munich in 1928 , Grant Wood grew to admire the Northern Renaissance artists Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Hans Holbein the Younger, and this admiration is evident in his most celebrated artwork, American Gothic (1930). Instead of a donor and saint with attributes, there are a farmer and farmwoman. Wood originally intended the pair to be father and spinster daughter but they have generally been perceived as a married couple.

The highly realistic depiction is heightened by the almost non-detectible brushwork and glazed surfaces. Wood’s attention to telling detail, such as the rickrack trim on the farmwoman’s apron, her cameo, and the Gothic tracery in the vernacular architecture of the farmhouse, can also be found in Spring Turning. All the details of Spring Turning were worked out in the full-scale preparatory drawing, now in the collection of the Huntington Library and Art Gallery (see Study for Spring Turning, 1936. Pencil, charcoal, and chalk on paper, 17 1/2 in x 39 ¾ in. In the collection of the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California. Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation, 83.8.53). In both the study and the painting, the cottonwood trees along the stream in the lower right-hand corner, the fence post “stitching” in the square fields created by the initial outmost furrow of each field, and the visual “stippling” of cattle on the hillside behind the farmhouse have a hypnotic effect upon the viewer.

Although Wood employs the basic tools of linear perspective in the recession of forms into deep space, he also activates the picture plane by use of careful brushwork, as in his crosshatching light and darker green in the fields and the squared-off strokes of light on dark sienna brown to show the plowed earth in the near fields that eventually smooth to ribbon in the distance. The viewer’s gaze is kept within the composition by the horizontal tilt-up of the landscape towards the picture plane, which also has the effect of directing the viewer’s gaze away from the observation of minute details to seeing the overall geometric forms of the landscape. As his fellow Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton often did, Wood created a scale model in clay prior to painting his canvas, in order to accurately depict the shadows that would be cast. The support of this painting is the smooth side of a Masonite panel, with a commercial white oil-based paint as the ground and incorporating drawing and multiple layers of transparent, pigmented glazes made from equal parts linseed oil, damar varnish, turpentine and oil paint.

The significant use of modifiers to the paint may be the cause of wrinkling and craquelure that can be found in this and other of Wood’s painted surfaces (see James Horns and Helen Mar Parkin, “Grant Wood: A Technical Study,” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed, San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks for Davenport Museum of Art, 1995, 85). Wood’s landscape paintings and lithographs capture the seasonal motifs of farming, i.e. spring planting, summer hoeing, fall plowing and fallow fields in winter. Although raised on a farm until a teenager, Grant Wood never considered becoming a farmer himself. Yet Spring Turning, like his other images of Iowa, presents an optimistic, inviting landscape in contrast to his difficult childhood on the farm with a distant and reserved father. Much has been made of the fact that this painting was done during the artist’s four-year marriage to Sara Sherman Maxson, and after the death of his mother Hattie, to whom he was immeasurably devoted. Wanda Corn and other critics read the landscape of Spring Turning as a reclining female nude, or as a large patchwork quilt draped over a female body (Corn 90).

More recent scholars including Robert Hughes, Henry Adams, and Tripp Evans assert that Grant Wood was a closeted homosexual; Evans suggests that this image is “the most erotically charged landscape Wood ever created,” and that these same fields suggest “a man’s body, rather than the reclining figure of an earth goddess” that Wanda Corn suggested (see Tripp R. Evans, Grant Wood: A Life, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, 235). Although never discussed in these specific terms during Wood’s lifetime, it seems interesting that this was created during the period when the artist Georgia O’Keeffe was angrily rejecting critical readings of her large-scale flowers as sexual imagery. Instead what the contemporary critic Henry McBride wrote of the painting in “Wood’s Satire”, The New York Sentinel, October 1936, was: “He paints a Spring Plowing (sic) in which the hills resolve, under the plowman’s touch, into vast checkerboard squares that are highly ridiculous. That is making fun of nature. Artists should not do that.

It is all very well to poke fun at the Daughters of Revolution but you can’t do that to anything so (sic) serious as spring plowing.” (Evans 239) Grant Wood may not have been a farmer, but he was an artist who grasped the agrarian mindset and practices of his fellow Iowans. In this image, the farmers plow their land using a farrow hoe behind the team. In Wood’s incomplete and unpublished autobiography (ghostwritten by Park Rinard) Return from Bohemia: A Painter’s Story. Wood recollected that as a young boy, “I liked to stand on a crest of a hill and watch father or Dave Peters plowing in a field below. They guided the plow parallel to the sides of the rectangular field and progressed concentrically inward, cutting great square patterns with light stubble centers” (Evans 237). Wood’s metaphor of man both shaping and being shaped by his landscape is one that was particularly important as this decade saw the ravaged, overworked soil of the Midwest blown away in the Dust Bowl.

As a matter of fact, this paean to the land’s fertility was painted during the same year that the composer Virgil Thomson wrote the film score for The Plow that Broke the Plains, a federal film documenting the farming practices that were believed to have caused the Dust Bowl. Thus any reading of the forms in this image as anthropomorphic reflecting the sexual desires of the artist should exist alongside a more straightforward if sentimental homage to Wood’s Arcadian vision, a visual affirmation of the basic agrarian character and values of Iowans (and by extension Americans) that could see them through any hard times. Artist Bio The fame and reputation of artist Grant Wood (1891-1942) is inextricably linked to his 1930 painting, American Gothic, easily among the most widely recognized images in American art and, along with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the most parodied. Purchased for $300 by the Art Institute of Chicago directly from its 43rd Annual Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture, American Gothic made him nationally famous.

Along with Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and John Steurt Curry (1897-1946), Wood is associated with Regionalism, which received its greatest critical acclaim during the nineteen-thirties, only to be dismissed by critics after World War II as reactionary and isolationist. The interwar period of American art referred to as American Scene Painting had two major developments, Regionalism and Social Realism. Regionalism, with which Grant Wood was associated, can be distinguished from Social Realism by the former’s emphasis on regional landscape, local history, and material culture while the latter emphasized depictions of contemporary societal issues in order to effect social change. Regionalism was more populist, nostalgic, and representational, while Social Realism was more urban, critical, and expressionistic. Participants in both movements were reacting against European influence on American art in the development of Modernism, especially non-objectivism, and felt that artists should be actively engaged in modern life. But insular attitudes in America changed after World War II with the new American pre-eminence in international affairs, and the purely American subjects of Regionalist artists like Grant Wood fell out of favor.

Although only 51 when he died, Wood had already experienced negative reactions to his work by the art establishment. Regionalism and Social Realism would give way to Abstract Expressionism, which grew out of European art movements such as Surrealism and German Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism emphasized the primacy of the artist’s individual imagination and/or subconscious as well as the formal qualities of art production—the process and product itself—as appropriate subject matter for art. The general critical disregard for Regionalism prevailed through the 1980s, at which point American art historians began a reassessment of Grant Wood’s work. Grant DeVolson Wood was born February 13, 1891, in Anamosa, Iowa, to Francis Maryville and Hattie Weaver Wood. He had two older brothers with whom he was not close, and a younger sister, Nan. After the early and unexpected death of his father in 1901, the Woods moved twenty-five miles away from the family farm to nearby Cedar Rapids. Grant lived most of his life in eastern Iowa, and with his mother, Hattie.

His sister Nan, with whom he was very close, lived with Grant and their mother until her marriage and posed for her brother on numerous occasions, most notably in American Gothic. Grant Wood married Sara Mason Maxon in the spring of 1935 and moved to Iowa City. Hattie Wood died that fall. His marriage ended in divorce in 1939. Grant Wood died in 1942 from pancreatic cancer. Wood was not quite self-taught, but his artistic training was sporadic. He drew as a child and self-identified himself as an artist in high school but it was not until after he graduated in 1910 that he enrolled in art classes at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft and Normal Art, studying under Ernest Batchelder, a strong proponent of the Arts & Crafts movement. He studied the next summer with Batchelder. After a year as a teacher, Wood lived in Chicago from 1913 to 1916, enrolling in night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and attempting to sell jewelry and other metalwork in the Arts & Crafts style.

He returned to Cedar Rapids in 1917 and served in the army from 1918-1919, designing camouflage for artillery in Fort Dodge Iowa and Washington D.C. In the early 1920s, Wood traveled to Paris, where he took classes at the Académie Julian. Back in Cedar Rapids, Wood found work as an art teacher and designed a unique studio and living space in an old carriage house. This studio showcased Grant Wood’s wit and ingenuity in its unique furnishings and decorative features such as a front door fashioned from a coffin lid with a clock face to indicate the artist’s whereabouts and expected return. By 1925, Wood had left his teaching job to focus on his art and was doing free-lance work as an artist and home decorator. At this time, Wood began to wear his signature denim overalls, which emphasized his Midwestern and specifically Iowa roots. His third and final visit to Paris was during the summer of 1926, at the end of which he had a one-man exhibition of forty-seven paintings, mostly done in an Impressionist style, at the Galerie Carmine. The exhibition did not receive critical attention or result in sales.

Upon his return to Iowa, Wood’s fortunes improved with a major commission in 1927 to create a stained glass window for the Cedar Rapids Veterans Memorial Building. In 1928, he traveled to Munich, where for three months he supervised production of the window, and studied art by Gothic and Northern Renaissance masters at the Alte Pinakothek. He was profoundly affected by their highly detailed realism and use of symbolic objects, and this affected a dramatic change in his work, most notably American Gothic of 1930. Other famous works in his signature style are Woman with Plants (1929), Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931), Daughters of Revolution and Arbor Day (1932), and Parson Weems’ Fable (1939). Along with realism and an eye for details, Wood inserted a gentle satire of his subjects, including himself. In addition to his paintings, Wood produced a number of lithographs for Associated American Artists. Most notable are those illustrating his fellow mid-westerner Sinclair Lewis’ novel, Main Street (1937), published for Limited Editions Club.

Wood established the Stone City Art Colony and Art School for two summers in 1932 and 1933. He was then appointed Director of Public Works of Art Projects in Iowa and Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, despite his lack of a college degree. In 1933, he met John Steuart Curry for the first time and, in 1934, Thomas Hart Benton and the art critic Thomas Craven, who would champion the Regionalist movement. He became permanent faculty at the University of Iowa and began promoting Regionalism across the country; notably he was featured in Time magazine’s 24 December 1934 issue. Wood was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1935 and received several honorary degrees from the University of Wisconsin at Madison; Lawrence College, Wisconsin; Northwestern University, Illinois; and Wesleyan University in Connecticut. By 1940, however, Wood’s standing at the university was shaken due to criticism by another faculty member on professional and personal grounds. After being forced to take a year’s leave of absence, he was reinstated and appointed full Professor of Fine Arts in the fall of 1941.

That year, he developed pancreatic or liver cancer and died only hours before his 51st birthday in February 1942. Published References & Bibliography Published References: Cather, Willa. “The Troll Garden.” 1984. "Wright Morris’s Nebraska." Great Plains Quarterly. (Winter 1987): 18. Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed. Davenport IA: Davenport Museum of Art, 1995. Carroll, Colleen. Earth, Air, Fire, Water: How Artists See the Elements. New York: Abbeville Press, 1995. Duggleby, John. Grant Wood: Artist in Overalls. Seattle: Marquand Books, 1995. Gombrich, Ernest. The Story of Art. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995. Senzoku, Nobuyuki. New History of World Art. 26 Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1995. Kinsey, Joni Louise. Plain Pictures: Images of the American Prairie. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. Dennis, James M.

Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Living in Our World: The Americas. Raleigh, NC: Humanities Extension/Publications Program North Carolina State University, 1998. Beckett, Wendy. Sister Wendy’s American Masterpieces. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2000: 120-121. Hubbard, Guy. "Teaching Art with Art: Making an Entrance,"Arts and Activities 129 no. 2 (March 2001): 42-43. Dross, Erika. Twentieth-Century American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Allen, Dick. The Day Before: New Poems. Sarabande Books, 2003. Georgia O’Keeffe visions of the sublime / edited by Joseph S. Czestochowski. Memphis: Torch Press and International Arts, 2004. Boyer, Paul. The Enduring Vision: a history of the American people.

Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Knutson, Anne Classen. Andrew Wyeth : memory & magic / Anne Classen Knutson ; introduction by John Wilmerding ; essays by Christopher Crosman, Kathleen A. Foster, Michael R. Taylor. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2005. ISBN: 0847827712 Neff, Emily Ballew. The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN: 0300114486 Beckett, Wendy. Sister Wendy on Prayer. London: Continuum Books, 2007. Evans, Tripp R. Grant Wood: a life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. ISBN: 9780307266293 Barrett, Terry. Making art: form & meaning. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011.

ISBN: 9780072521788 Kairyudo, Shuppan. Unknown textbook. April 2012. Speer, George V. Things of the Spirit: Art and Healing in the American Body Politic, 1929-1941. Peter Lang Publishing, 2012 Bibliography: Corn, Wanda M. Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision. New Haven: Yale University Press for The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1983. Czestochowski, Joseph S. John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood: A Portrait of Rural America. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981. Czestochowski, Joseph S. Marvin D. Cone and Grant Wood: An American Tradition. Iowa: Cedar Rapids Art Association, 1990. Dennis, James M. Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Dennis, James M. Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry.

Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. Doss, Erika. Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. Evans, R. Tripp. Grant Wood: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Heller, Nancy and Julia Williams. The Regionalists: Painters of the American Scene. New York: Watson-Guptill Publishers, 1976. Milosch, Jane C., ed. Grant Wood’s Studio: Birthplace of American Gothic. Munich: Prestel for the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, 2005. Roberts, Brady M. and James M. Dennis, James S. Horns, and Helen Mar Parkin. Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed. San Francisco: Pomegranate Artbooks for the Davenport Museum of Art, 1995. Provenance 1000+ images about Grant Wood Art on Pinterest | Spring, Grant wood and Farms History of Art: Grant Wood.

"Sheaves of Corn", 1931. See More 1000+ images about Grant Wood on Pinterest | Paul revere, Grant wood american gothic and Grant wood Grant Wood Art | ecard open image full size 322 x 400 px painting 1935 painting 1 Review: ''American Gothic'' painter Grant Wood gets to leave the closet - Books Books By JEFFREY GANTZ | January 7, 2011 Who was Grant Wood? Millions of Americans know him as the artist who painted American Gothic — and that's about it. But since his death, from pancreatic cancer, in 1942, he's become the poster boy for the right and the whipping boy of the left. "Conservative champions," R. Tripp Evans explains in his new biography, "applaud the painter as a folksy chronicler of a bygone America, or a gentle satirist of small-town foibles, whereas his detractors claim (for the very same reasons) that he promoted a cloying, phony, or even sinister form of nationalism.

Whether sympathetic or hostile to the artist's work, both camps miss the man who stands before them." Evans himself, however, is on target with a book that could as easily have been titled Grant Wood: A Gay Life. Not that Wood stood before anyone very visibly. Born in 1891 on a farm 30 miles from Cedar Rapids, he spent his entire life trying to make painting look like a normal, if not macho, occupation for a red-blooded American man. He abjured a painter's smock in favor of overalls; after years of rumors about his extended bachelorhood, he married, in 1935, Sara Sherman Maxon, an older (by seven years) woman whose object was arguably friendship rather than romance. His sexual orientation seems not to have been news to those who knew him, but it could hardly be front-page fare in a world where Time was hailing Thomas Hart Benton, John Curry, and Grant Wood as exemplars of rugged American individualism and elsewhere homophobic rhetoric ran rampant. Even now, commentary tends to treat his homosexuality as incidental to his work.

Yet Evans makes the case for melding Wood's art with his life, giving particular attention to his authoritarian father (who died when he was 10), his mother, Hattie, to whom he was devoted, his sister, Nan, with whom he had a mutually possessive relationship, and his numerous male friends. The biographer is apt to see male buttocks and penetrating trees in paintings like Stone City, Iowa and Spring Turning where others might not. But there's no doubting Wood's sly subversiveness, or his propensity for misdirection. Is American Gothic really a portrait of a rigid, plain-dealing Midwestern couple? Or could the prominent farm instrument and the in-your-face perspective suggest that this father and daughter (Nan and the artist's dentist were the models) are inviting us to participate in The Iowa Pitchfork Massacre, with optional incest? The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover is not the big house that the miniature figure points to but the tiny cottage next to it. Midnight Ride of Paul Revere would seem to show a miniature Revere riding through some Middlesex town and giving the alarm — only, isn't that Paul's house in North Square at the far right?

And doesn't the church he's passing look like Old North? (It looks, stranger still, even more like Old South.) Revere never rode through the North End. Is Wood pulling our historical leg? You could wish that Evans had devoted more attention to the dream/nightmare aspect of Wood's paintings, or explored the way Wood makes America look like some higher being's Lego set. But this is an observant (right down to the way Evans follows the sansevieria and the begonia of Woman with Plants into the background of American Gothic) and objective (when telling us that Wood felt "a deep attachment to his mother's aprons," he adds, "the strings of which, it must be said, were never cut") study. It's too bad Grant Wood didn't get this kind of fair play when he was alive. Grant Wood Paintings | Oil Paintings Gallery Oil Paintings by Grant Wood, America 1891 to 1942 Filter list according to painting color palette: Grant Wood was an American painter who was born in Iowa in 1891 and died in 1942. He is famous for his scenes depicting rural American culture in the midwest.

His most famous painting is said to be "American Gothic" feature an old woman and man standing in front of a house holding a pitch fork. In 1913 he moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute there, while there he worked as a silversmith. He traveled to Europe to study impressionist and post-impressionist work, but later found that the most influential artist to his style would be the 15th century Dutch painter, Jan vanEyck. In 1932 Wood founded the Stone City Art Colony which helped artists suffering from the devastating Great Depression that hit America at that time. In 1934 Wood became a fine art professor at the University of Iowa. During that time he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died the day before his 51st birthday. Can't find the painting you are looking for? click here The Appraisal Grant Wood, Regionalist, Whitney Museum of American Art Grant Wood, Regionalist, Whitney Museum of American Art (1983) While John Constable's landscapes look up and out to the sky and God, Grant Wood's gaze is down and in upon the earth as on the body of a recumbent lover.

Like a Gaston Lachaise sculpture, Wood sees the land of his native Iowa as a bosomy, rippling-fleshed, full-bellied woman, a sensually sprawling Earth Mother at the zenith of her richness and plenitude. In "Spring Turning," for example, infinitesimal farmers plow massive earthen buttocks. Wood's best works at the Whitney Museum through September 4, in addition to "American Gothic," are landscapes like "Stone City," "Spring Turning," "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," "January" and the dazzlingly dramatic and powerful preamble to an automobile accident, "Death on the Ridge Road," where he moves beyond commercial illustration and academicism to tap his elemental psychic need. His tapestried "land of counterpane" landscape style, deliberately childlike with nearly toy people, houses, trees and hills, attempts to recapture his childhood idyll and, like Early Renaissance painting, seeks to achieve a sense of the miraculous where "every mountain and valley shall be exalted." Nature for Wood is not just routinely alive, but imbued with a transcendent, pantheistic electricity of animation and ability to communicate.

The artist's nearly rotund fullness of form -- similarly expressed in so many painters of the 1930's as disparate in style as Pablo Picasso and Stanley Spencer, Fernand Leger and fellow Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton -- while reflecting his own physical proportions, seems to speak of a nearly universal swelling up. It may represent a hoped-for elemental fullness and significance of life in the face of personal disappointment and an increasingly disastrous 20th Century (or an inflation of ego replacing the power of an absent God?) like so many over-inflated balloons that will be punctured by the machine-gun bullets of World War II and, in Wood's and Benton's cases, by the narrow-minded attacks of modernist intellectuals. To his credit, Wood realized the dehumanizing uselessness of swallowing European artistic mannerisms whole. He didn't want to be another of the thousands of assembly-line Picassos, Matisses, Mondrians and Dalis, gagging on unassimilable aesthetics ground out by the educational and cultural establishments.

Grant Wood's life, work, goals and the art world's essentially negative response to all three during his lifetime and after, pose that most pregnant question which will eventually have to be answered if art is ever to become significant again: "Casting aside all prejudices, what artistic and human values and attitudes are absolutely necessary to the resuscitation of contemporary art?" Perhaps this exhibition and its many implications will restart the process of serious thought and examination. American Gothic CD » Arts Iowa American Gothic CD BUY NOW: iTunes CD Baby To purchase a physical CD call 319.366.8206. American Gothic (2013) for orchestra was commissioned and received its world premiere by Orchestra Iowa under the direction of Timothy Hankewich, Music Director, at the Paramount Theatre, Cedar Rapids, Iowa on May 4, 2013. The composition is scored for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano/celeste and strings.

American Gothic for orchestra is a contemporary musical reflection on the creative world of Iowa artist, Grant Wood (1891-1942). Composed in memory of my father, Willis Daugherty (1929-2011), the music also reflects on the years I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. With exceptional public schools, opulent movie palaces and a marvelous symphony orchestra, art museum, public library and community theater, Cedar Rapids is a splendid Midwestern center for the arts. Music was an important activity in the Daugherty family. My father was the manager of the Seiferts downtown department store by day and a drummer with local dance bands by night. My mother, Evelyn Daugherty (1927-1974), was physical education teacher at Franklin Junior High School, who often appeared in community theater productions such as Gypsy. My grandmother, Josephine Daugherty (1907-1991), played piano for silent films in Vinton, Iowa back in the 1930s. They all encouraged the five Daugherty boys to pursue music. Today, my four younger brothers are all professional musicians: Pat (b.

1956), Tim (b. 1958), Matt (b. 1959) and Tom (b.1961). I first became aware of Grant Wood when I was a ten-year-old boy enrolled in art classes at the old Cedar Rapids Public Library (now the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art). Prominently displayed in the room where we learned to draw and paint was Grant Wood’s original painting of his mother, entitled Woman with Plant (1928). I realized that Grant Wood was everywhere in Cedar Rapids: his paintings and lithographs at the Museum of Art; his farm mural at the old Montrose Hotel; his carved wooden Mourner’s Bench in the principal’s office at McKinley Junior High School; his stained glass Memorial Window at the Veteran’s Memorial Building. I often rode my bicycle past the artist’s studio at 5 Turner Alley, where Grant Wood created his most famous painting, American Gothic (1930). My father was a fan of Grant Wood’s regionalist art. He was a tour guide at the Grant Wood Studio and he displayed reproductions of American Gothic along with Stone City (1930) at his home.

Much like a character in the background of Grant Wood’s paintings from the 1930s, my father milked the cows and fed the horses every morning on the farm before walking several miles down a desolate gravel road to a one-room country grade school. In 2012, I returned to Cedar Rapids to revisit the small towns of Eastern Iowa. I drove along the back roads and farms where my father grew up, and where Grant Wood found inspiration for the people and places captured in his art. All the while, I was collecting musical ideas and mental images to create an emotional framework for my composition. I. On a Roll The first movement features a rollicking melody with colorful orchestration, suggesting the vivid colors and dynamic curves of Grant Wood’s paintings of rural Iowa. Just as Grant Wood simplified elements of the Iowa landscape into a precisely placed compositional design, I have created an abstract musical pattern. Like the modernist geometric patterns imposed on rolling hills in Young Corn (1931) and in Spring Turning (1936), the music rolls along in a continuous ascending and descending melody that moves from one instrument to the other, from the tuba to the string pizzicato.

The percussion crackles like the sound of the corn growing in row after row on a hot summer day. II. Winter Dreams The second movement evokes the bleak winters experienced by my father growing up in rural Iowa during the 1930s and scenes, depicted in Grant Wood’s black and white lithographs of the same time period, such as January and February. A haunting melody, played by alto flute and strings in harmonics, evokes a cold winter wind whistling “down in the valley”. The cellos respond with a melancholy countermelody accompanied by sleigh bells. The title of this movement hearkens back to a poem entitled “Grant Wood” by Jay Sigmund (1885-1937) where he exclaims, “ … time found a new son / Dreaming on the plain.” An Iowa poet and close friend of Grant Wood, Sigmund persuaded the artist to turn his attention from Europe back to Iowa for his subject matter and artistic inspiration. III. Pitchfork The title of the third movement refers to the pitchfork gripped by the dour farmer who stands alongside his spinster daughter in Grant Wood’s painting, American Gothic.

Many have speculated on the hidden meanings of this American masterpiece. Is it a tribute? A comic portrait? An allegory? A social satire? A political critique? A private joke? For me, this iconic painting reveals the ambiguities of American culture and Grant Wood’s dry wit. After all, he was a founding member of the infamous Grant Wood Garlic Club in Cedar Rapids, and a practical joker, like my father. For this movement, I have composed playful, toe-tapping music. A quirky melody in the woodwinds is punctuated by spiky chords in the brass section and bluegrass riffs in the string section. Like the gothic window in the background of Grant Wood’s painting, this movement is a window into my contemporary musical vision of American Gothic. – Michael Daugherty Grant Wood (1891-1942) - American Regionalist American Regionalist * Sullivan Goss seeks to acquire works by this Artist Grant Wood�s Regionalist paintings of bountiful farmlands and busy farmworkers starkly contrast the period of the Great Depression and wartimes in which they were created. Free from images of poverty and fear, they capture the unique, inspirational spirit of the Midwest of decades earlier.

On the West Coast, Regionalist painters included Ben Messick , Paul Sample , and Dan Lutz . Table of Contents IX. WORKS FOR SALE BY THIS ARTIST I. BIOGRAPHY In 1891, Grant Wood was born to Hattie Weaver and Francis Maryville Wood on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa, a rural town with a population of about 2,000. After the unexpected death of her husband in 1901, Hattie Wood relocated with her four children to her parent�s house in Cedar Rapids. Removed from their idyllic family farm, Grant Wood and his siblings quickly accustomed to the new, urban setting that surrounded them. Wood�s grammar school teacher, Emma Gratten, is credited as the first person to support the youngster�s interest in art. At the age of fourteen, Wood submitted a drawing of oak leaves to a sweepstakes and won first prize. During his high school years, he befriended artist Marvin Cone (1891-1965), and together, they designed sets for the school�s theater department.

On the night of his graduation, he left for a summer course taught by nationally known architect and designer Ernest Batchelder (1875-1957) at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft. In 1913, Wood relocated to Chicago, where he set up a jewelry and fine metalwork shop. Occasionally, he enrolled in evening drawing classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the next several years, he took correspondence and summer school courses in the decorative arts and even served in the U.S. Army as a camouflage designer. When his mother fell ill in 1919, he returned to the family home in Cedar Rapids and took a position as a grammar school teacher in order to support her and his younger sister. After a brief summer trip to Paris in 1920, Wood returned to France three years later to study at the Academie Julian. On a sabbatical from his teaching position, he also traveled with artist friends to Sorrento, Italy. Looking back, Wood referred to these times as his �bohemian years.� When he returned to Iowa, he dawned a beard and adopted an impressionist style of painting.

In the 1920s, Wood earned fame as an artist in the local community. In 1919, Killian�s Department Store held an exhibition of his paintings alongside the works of his longtime friend and fellow artist, Marvin Cone. Following this exhibition, the competing major department store, Armstrong�s, hired Wood to decorate their store window displays. He also completed mural and portrait commissions for local family-owned businesses and factories. In 1927, he was commissioned to complete a stained-glass window for the new Veteran�s Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. Upon the urging of the planning commission, Wood was sent to Germany with Cone to oversee the production of the piece at specialist workshops. During his three month stay in Munich, Wood saw early German and Flemish paintings for the first time. His admiration for the works of the German and Flemish Old Masters is said to have been a major turning point in his career. Abandoning the Impressionist style, Wood adopted the extreme Realist style of the fifteenth and sixteenth century Flemish school. Working with a tighter brushstroke and a darker color palette, the artist completed his most memorable works upon his return from Munich.

In 1930, his painting American Gothic (1930) was accepted into the juried annual exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago and won the Norman Walt Harris Bronze Medal. Wood�s painting of a woman, man and pitchfork received almost overnight success and catapulted the artist into the public eye. To this day American Gothic stands alone as the sentinel distillation of the clear, forceful and acerbic Midwestern mentality. In the years following the exhibition of American Gothic, critics were eager to present Wood to the public as the leader of American Regionalism. He was invited to contribute paintings to numerous contemporary art exhibitions and to act as a director for several national art programs. Drawing upon memories from his early childhood spent on a farm, Wood exemplified the Regionalist style through his paintings of small-town folk and life in the Iowan countryside. In 1932, he best expressed the regionalist sensibility when he and fellow artists Edward Rowan (1898-1946) and Adrian Dornbush (1900-1970) opened a summer art colony and school in Stone City, Iowa. The art colony proved to be successful in attracting many aspiring Midwestern artists.

Lasting two summers, the colony was Wood�s most dramatic attempt yet to establish the Midwest as a significant art center. After two summers, Wood closed the art colony and accepted a position as an associate professor in the art department of the University of Iowa in hopes of giving wider breathe to his artistic vision. During his tenure, Wood gave many lectures on Regionalism and even published a tract entitled Revolt Against the City that drew comparisons between Regionalist art and literature. For many years, Wood was known for his status as one of Cedar Rapids� most eligible bachelors. However, in 1935, he decided to marry struggling actress and opera singer Sara Maxon, much to the dismay of his friends and family. Their marriage proved to be tumultuous, and the two divorced in 1939. Misled by his failed marriage, Wood was further embarrassed by the government�s discovery that he had failed to pay income taxes for the past three years. With the extra burdens brought on by his divorce and the government, Wood was buried in financial debt by the late 1930s.

Furthermore, a bitter argument developed between Wood and the University of Iowa�s art department, which had began to denounce his artistic talent and reject his Regionalist doctrines. Faculty members, who supported the new abstract trends that were then sweeping the nation, began to argue that Wood�s lectures and paintings were provincial at best and outdated. Feeling betrayed by the department that he had made famous, Wood requested a leave of absence in 1940. Two years later at the age of 51, he died from liver cancer at the University�s hospital. II. AN ANALYSIS OF THE ARTIST'S WORK A son of a Midwestern farmer, Grant Wood lived his entire life in Iowa, only briefly traveling to Europe. The unique character of small-town mid-America had a lasting impression on Wood that compelled him to make it the chosen theme of countless paintings. Over the course of his career, it seems that Wood had a stock of subject matter that revolved around American folklore and life in the countryside. A farmer plowing a field, mother and child planting new crops, grandma mending, and grandpa eating freshly popped corn all became the recognizable �stars� of Wood�s creations.

He is primarily known for his paintings such as these, and in particular, the painting American Gothic featuring a Midwestern father and daughter. Since its creation in 1930, it has gained an iconic stature in American culture. In 1935, he published the essay Revolt Against the City, which defended his regionalist beliefs. Wood argued that the Great Depression was good for American art because it forced many American artist�s who could not finance a trip abroad to rely on their own tradition, rather than that of Europe. He claimed that to look toward America for artistic inspiration was neither provincial nor close-minded; instead, it creates an independent style that is both personal and narrative. By World War II, the rise in popularity of European abstraction put the figural style of Wood and the Regionalists out of fashion. Critics began to argue that he and fellow Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and John Stewart Curry (1897-1946) made art that was provincial and nationalistic. Moreover, opponents argued that Wood�s style was far too similar to that of an illustrator.

Despite negative criticism late in his career, Wood adhered to the Regionalist style that he had made popular decades earlier. His paintings of idyllic farmlands and busy farmworkers starkly contrast the period of the Great Depression and wartimes in which they were created. Through a narrative design, Wood created a world that captured the mid-west of decades earlier. Free from poverty and fear, they capture a unique spirit of America and its idyllic history of untainted farmlands and small-town communities. While the world was looking toward Europe for answers to art, Wood examined what was before his very self with a courageous eye, imaginative mind and classicizing brush. III.

CHRONOLOGY 1891 Grant Wood born on February 13 on a farm near Anamosa, IA 1910 Graduates from high school and takes a summer course at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft 1911 Retunes for a second summer to the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft 1913-16 Takes evening drawing classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and opens a jewelry and fine metalwork shop 1916 Returns to his family�s home in Cedar Rapids 1918-19 Serves in army designing camouflage for artillery 1919 Teaches in public school system. Killian�s Department Store sponsors his first exhibition. 1920 Travels to Paris for the summer 1923-24 Returns to Paris and takes classes at the Academie Julian.

Travels to Sorrento, Italy in the winter months 1926 Makes last trip to Paris and holds a solo-exhibition at the Galerie Carmine 1927 Commissioned to complete a stained glass window for the new Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids 1928 Travels to Munich for three months with artist friend Marvin Cone 1930 Wins medal at the annual exhibition of the Art Institute of Chicago for his painting American Gothic 1932 Opens Stone City Colony and Art School, which stays open for two summers 1934 Elected director of Public Works of Art Project in Iowa and named Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa (UI) 1935 Marries Sara Maxon 1939 Divorces Sara Maxon Wood 1941 Awarded honorary degrees from Northwestern University and Wesleyan University. Appointed Full Professor of Fine Arts at UI 1942 Dies of liver cancer on February 12 IV.

Exhibitions 1919 Kilian�s Department Store, Grand Rapids, IA 1926 Galerie Carmine, Paris 1928 Iowa Federation Women�s Clubs 1929-32 Iowa Art Salon 1929 Toledo Museum Annual Exhibition 1930 National Academy of Art, Chicago 1930, 1942 Art Institute of Chicago 1931-37 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Annual Exhibition 1935 Ferargil Galleries, NY 1937, 1957 Corcoran Gallery biennial 1965, 1996 Des Moines Art Center 1970 University of Iowa Museum of Art 1975 Brooks Memorial Art Gallery 1977 Davenport Municipal Art Gallery 1983 Whitney Museum of American Art 1985 Elvehjem Art Center at the University of Wisconsin 1987 Montgomery Art Center at Pomona College 1996 Joslyn Art Museum Grant Wood Spring in Town Stone City, Iowa BORN AT Anamosa, Iowa, Grant Wood spent his entire life in this small town in the American Midwest, and his paintings

 are a chronicle of the people and the scenery of the district.

In the 1920s, however, he travelled to France and the Netherlands where he studied the works of the Old Masters, especially the Gothic, Romanesque, Renaissance and Flemish School, all of which had a strong influence on his own paintings. His best-known painting, American Gothic, is aptly named, for in it Wood depicts a cottage in his home town whose Gothic window appealed to him. In the foreground stands a typical Midwestern farmer and his wife, actually Wood’s sister and his dentist, who served as his models. He was severely criticized at the time for lampooning the values of Middle America but he defended himself insisting that the painting was intended as a sincere tribute to the simple dignity of rural communities. Wood was the foremost of the Regionalists, a group of American artists who rejected the abstract in favour of the realism of ordinary people and their locale. Excerpt from Art. The World of Art, from Aboriginal to American Pop, Renaissance Masters to Postmodernism. Fall Plowing

Question: Which Iowa-born artist painted American Gothic and Spring Turning?
Answer: Grant Wood