Grant Wood

July 19, 2010
The fame of the iconic, often parodied American Gothic has long masked its creator. Much about Grant Wood's patriotism and masculinity has been read into the painting's pitchfork-holding farmer and his dour companion standing in front of a Midwestern farmhouse. Evans, an art historian at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, argues that even more has been misread, overshadowing a rich and varied artistic career. Associated with the Regionalist movement in painting, Wood (1891–1942) cultivated a hearty Midwestern image that hid his homosexuality. What Wood hid from polite society, he could not help revealing in his paintings: "the object of his desire is only partially abstracted in —for in the undeniably erotic curves of Stone City, we register the muscular outlines of the powerful male body." His mother and his sister, Nan, further protected him. The complicated relationship included living together until Nan married—perhaps a reaction to Wood's hard and detached father, who died when Wood was 10. Evans's in-depth, gendered readings of Wood's paintings situate him in the longer history of male artists' gendered self-portrayals (bracketed by Oscar Wilde and Jackson Pollock), providing a useful new insight into Wood's place in American art. 16 pages of color photos; b&w illus.

June 1, 2010

A portrait of painter Grant Wood (1891–1942) as a melancholy, closeted man.

In the 1930s, Wood became the standard-bearer of Regionalism, an art movement that rejected European abstraction in favor of homespun imagery. Then as now, Wood's work—especially the iconic 1930 painting American Gothic—is often claimed to represent old-fashioned American values. But as Evans (Art History/Wheaton Coll.) demonstrates, a swirl of complex messages made its way onto Wood's canvases. Born in rural Iowa, Wood was raised by a demanding father, whose ethos of manliness complicated his son's early interest in painting. But the young Wood persevered, eventually settling in Cedar Rapids to work in a studio above a funeral home. The setting was appropriately somber for an isolated artist—his mother and sister were his closest confidantes—who felt forced to suppress not just his homosexuality but anything resembling bohemianism. Evans devotes much of the book to close studies of the symbolism cloaked within Wood's paintings. His landscapes were coded appreciations of the male body; a female portrait like Victorian Survival takes swipes at conservative values; a home-and-hearth scene like Dinner for Threshers is Wood's epic reckoning with the ghost of his father. The author's decryption efforts come at the expense of traditional biographical detail, at times frustratingly so—there's relatively little on the place of Wood's work in the larger context of American art, and the commentary on Regionalism is mainly run through the filter of the homophobia of fellow regionalist star Thomas Hart Benton. But Evans also shows how Wood's obscuring maneuvers extended to his own behavior—e.g., he donned overalls as a working-class affectation and married an older woman for appearances' sake. Wood became more daring in his late career. His 1937 male nude, Sultry Night, was so provocative that the U.S. Postal Service banned prints of it from being mailed. A frustrated Wood sawed off the nude portion of the painting and burned it, an action that serves as a symbol of the torment Evans amply documents.

An overly analytical biography, but one that goes a long way toward upending assumptions about Wood's work.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from June 1, 2010
It seems so straightforward. Grant Wood, born in Iowa in 1891, was the overall-clad, all-American artist from the heartland who created one of the worlds best-known and most-parodied paintings, American Gothic, a portrait of a pitchfork-grasping farmer and his dour daughter. But as art historian Evans so momentously and conscientiously reveals, Woods folksy persona was formulated to camouflage his homosexuality. Evans tells the full, grievous story of Woods struggle to conceal his true self in a harshly homophobic world for the sake of his art and career, presenting startling insights into Woods trauma over failing to live up to his stern fathers notion of masculinity, liberating sojourns in Paris in the 1920s, and the decision to return to Cedar Rapids, where he lived with his widowed mother, attained extraordinary renown, and helped change the face of American art. Evans examines Woods complicated relationships with his mother and his sister, Nan, the female model for American Gothic; fellow artists; various assistants; and the colorful woman he disastrously married. Most arresting is Evans bold decoding of the eroticism and caustic social commentary hidden in plain sight in Woods hard-edged and profoundly unnerving paintings. A fascinating and heartrending portrait of an artist forced to sacrifice his right to happiness and wholeness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)