Iowa's Painter

In a hospital room in Iowa City, death came last week to the most famed artist in the U.S. For two months he had fought a losing battle against cancer of the liver. At his bedside his old friend Thomas Benton had helped him toast the Midwest school of U.S. realism which they and John Steuart Curry had founded and brought to national fame. The trio would henceforth be a duet. Grant Wood was dead at 50.

To the U.S. public Grant Wood was a homely, honest lowan whose art, unlike most of his contemporaries', spoke directly to the man in the street. His meticulous paintings of plain U.S. landscapes and plain U.S. people were hung in the smart art salons of 57th Street; they also appeared in ads and on magazine covers (TIME, Sept. 23, 1940). After Whistler's Portrait of the Artist's Mother, Wood's austere portrait of the typical Iowa farm couple, American Gothic, had become the most popular of all U.S. paintings.

Until American Gothic made him an overnight sensation at the age of 38, Painter Wood's life was a constant fight against poverty. He was born in 1892 on a farm in Iowa's rolling Jones County. When his farmer father died, the Wood family moved to nearby Cedar Rapids, where ten-year-old Grant helped support his mother and three other children by doing chores for the neighbors. After working his way through high school, he drifted about the Middle West as a jewelry craftsman, a night watchman in a mortuary, a country schoolteacher. In 1913 he managed to enter the night classes of the Chicago Art Institute.

Year later the straits of his family called him back to Cedar Rapids where, in a 10-by-16-ft. shack built with his own hands, they weathered a winter of near starvation. For seven years, following a spell as a soldier in World War I, he taught art in Iowa public schools, saving his pennies for a trip to Paris, where all U.S. artists thought they had to go.

Grant Wood got to Paris, but Paris just confused him. He studied dutifully at the famed Julian Academy, dressed with Bohemian flamboyance, grew a crop of pink whiskers, painted scores of ordinary, dreamy, old-world impressionist landscapes. But his heart was not in it. He finally decided: "All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow." He went back to his native Iowa, to paint the country and the people he knew. But it was not in Iowa, but back in Europe again, that he discovered the style that finally made him famous.

In 1928 the American Legion commissioned him to design a stained-glass window for the Cedar Rapids Memorial Coliseum. He went to Munich. There, in the work of 15th-and 16th-Century Flemish and German primitives in the Munich museums, he found at last the infinitely scrupulous, polished and detailed kind of painting he had always wanted to do. He returned to Cedar Rapids with a new way of looking at things, started to paint Iowa with the meticulous care of a Memling in modern dress. Two years later American Gothic, exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute, created a furor, and Painter Wood's reputation was made.

lowans at first felt insulted by American Gothic, ended by being proud of it. Younger Midwest artists greeted Wood as an emancipator. Wood himself was able to move from his humble residence at the back of a Cedar Rapids funeral parlor to a fine old red-brick house in Iowa City.

In 1935 he was made professor of art at Iowa State University. Working slowly and painstakingly (he averaged only three or four paintings a year), Grant Wood followed up his first success with a whole series of similarly lucid, polished and quaintly literal canvases. Studying the grim, stalwart Iowa farmers and their neatly fenced fields, Grant Wood got what he called the "decorative quality of American newness" into his canvases. He thumbed over mail-order catalogues to get every detail of his farm machinery just right. He exchanged the blurred-landscape technique of the Impressionists for an almost photographic preoccupation with homely detail: the designs of wire fences, overall seams, the rickrack braid on Iowa farm dresses. Some of his pictures (Daughters of Revolution, Dinner for Threshers, Arbor Day) became almost as famous as his American Gothic.

Grant Wood's final years of success were not all happy ones. An unhappy marriage in 1935 ended in divorce four years later. A faculty row at the University of Iowa two years ago spewed up some ridiculous assertions that Grant Wood copied his paintings from photographs. Hypersensitive Painter Wood scarcely bothered to refute the rumors.

In his old, roomy Iowa City house, where his principal hobby was gardening, he lived in dignified semiretirement, entertained a continual stream of distinguished visitors, shook a gentle fist at Bohemia and the big cities, and preached the gospel of U.S. regionalism and the Iowa soil. More than any other U.S. painter, he had expressed the unashamed simplicity and dignified realism that lay behind the complacent, materialistic exterior of rural Midwestern life. Other painters might see and paint again the plain, practical beauty of the Iowa landscape. But Grant Wood had discovered it.

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