This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  One of the major American Regionalist painters along with Thomas Hart
Benton and John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood was born in Anamosa, Iowa,
and spent his childhood in Cedar Rapids. Unlike Curry and Benton,
he never moved East but remained in the Middle West where he found
inspiration for his paintings of prosperous farms and people reflecting
idealized American values. However, his work was set apart from
many regionalists in that provoked both laughter and social
indignation. A good example Daughters of Revolution,
1932, depicting the aloof smugness of women who regarded
themselves as emblematic of the country's founding values
This painting was a
retaliation by Wood against DAR members who had criticized him for
completing
their window in Germany instead of America. Much of his satire
was good natured and humorous.
For two summers, Wood attended the
Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft and Normal Art as a student
of Ernest Batchelder, and he had brief times of study at Iowa State
University and the Art Institute of Chicago from 1913 to 1916.
After World War I, he taught high school art in Cedar Rapids.
Asserting
that he "had to go to France to appreciate Iowa," he had several trips
abroad, and in 1923 enrolled in the Academie Julian in Paris, but he
determined to make his life in Iowa because "all the really good ideas
I'd ever had came to me while I was milking a cow." In 1932, he
was co-founder of the Stone City Art Colony and Art School and he
became director of the Public Works Art Project in Iowa. He was
also an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa.
His
work can be divided into two periods, the first being views of Cedar
Rapids, other landscapes including scenes of Europe, and a few
portraits. However, in 1928, his work changed when he travelled
to Munich to oversee the making of a stained-glass window for the Cedar
Rapids Veterans Memorial Building commissioned by the Daughters of the
American Revolution. Seeing the severe, austere new style of
painting in Germany combined with work from the late Gothic period, he
developed a unique new style of his own that treated mid-western
subjects with gothic overtones, satire, and caricature.
In 1930, he produced his first major landscape painting, Stone City,
that had exaggerated perspective and unique naive treatment. From
that time, his paintings had a simple innocence and fantasy that
transported the viewer into another world, often that of a child.
He also did many murals and a few lithographs, completing nineteen
between 1937 and 1942, the year he died of cancer at age 50 in Iowa
City.
Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art
Michael David Zellman, 300 Years of American Art
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Grant Wood is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Modernism
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