Maestri di Pittura    Grant Wood

Grant Wood     gallery

 Going back to Iowa,  was the formative experience in his artistic life. It was the return to his home state that prompted his painting to take a distinctive turn--towards regionalism, towards American subjects, towards the nineteenth century, towards an affectionate and yet ironic vision of his country and its history. His American audience is borne back alongside him, in time as well as in space, to an idealized world of memory; it is a place that most have not seen but one that we, as Americans, remember as our own.

Grant Wood undeniably played to his American audience. He cast himself in the part of the midwestern farmer, a character in myth-laced agrarian world he had created. Almost without exception,Wood wore overalls for photographs. Most of the pictures preserved of the Iowan artist suggest that he spent his days in his studio clad in the sort of garb his famous farmer of American Gothic wore; that farmer, actually Wood's dentist, stands with calm menace, defending the home that immediately--upon its unveiling at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930-- become an icon for middle America with all its positive and negative connotations. It seems no coincidence that Wood, defender of the regionalism movement and public denouncer of artistic colonialism, would choose visually to ally himself with his most well-known creation, and by extension, with his farmer's implied stance.

Boemia

Self-portrait

Daughters of revolution