Period Piece

Grant Wood is an earthy, peaceable Iowan who manages to stir up many an artistic rumpus. His American Gothic (1930), portrait of a bleak, bald Iowa farmer and his tight-lipped daughter, at once became chief icon of the past decade's resurgent move to "paint American." His Daughters of Revolution (1932), three prim, grim, self-important matrons, scandalized the D. A. R. Lately Artist Wood has spent more time teaching and making lithographs than he has at his easel.

Last week Artist Wood's first big canvas in three years, Parson Weems' Fable, went on display at the Associated American Artists' Galleries in Manhattan. Like the usual Wood, its spongy trees are set in a smoothly stylized landscape. But it is also a deft period piece. Mason Locke Weems was an itinerant parson and book agent, pioneer in fictionized biography. Unauthenticated is his pious anecdote of young George Washington and the cherry tree. Artist Wood has the worthy parson drawing back a cherry-red, cherry-edged curtain to show a tiny, Stuart-faced Washington, complete with powdered wig and all the attributes of father of his country.

Placidly ignoring the storms such paintings raise, Artist Wood lives in Iowa City in an old red-brick house remodeled by himself. He likes jokes with the same dry irony as his pictures. Once he told his fellow-Iowan Henry Wallace that he had just perfected a type of clover seed that would increase the nation's clover crop by one-third. Agog, Wallace pressed Wood for details, found it was "a seed that grows nothing but four-leaf clovers."

Slow-painting, finical Grant Wood spent months boning up on costumes, background for Parson Weems' Fable, then did a full-scale preliminary drawing of it. Last November he started work on the final canvas, for six weeks worked 16 hours a day to finish it. Priced at around $10,000 (American Gothic sold for $300 in 1930), it is first of a projected Wood series on U. S. legends.

The next famed, oft-questioned tale he will tackle: Captain John Smith's rescue by Pocahontas.*

*Captain Smith did not mention it in the 1608 account of his Virginia exploits, added it in 1624 after Pocahontas had been lionized in London as Powhatan's attractive daughter.

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