Grant Wood

Grant Wood grew up on a farm four miles east of Anamosa, Iowa, the second of four children in a family that lost its father when the boy was ten. His mother moved them to Cedar Rapids, where he apprenticed at a metalworking shop and enrolled in a Minneapolis handicraft school before three years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For over a decade he taught junior-high art in Cedar Rapids to fund summer trips to Europe, where he painted in a loose Impressionist manner that drew little notice. Only after studying Jan van Eyck's exacting detail in Munich in 1928 did the tight, deliberate style that would define him begin to take shape.

Wood found a Carpenter Gothic cottage in Eldon, Iowa, in 1930 and painted 'the kind of people I fancied should live in that house' — his sister Nan and his dentist, Byron McKeeby, rigid before its arched window. American Gothic won a 300-dollar prize at the Art Institute of Chicago and made him instantly famous, and instantly misread: critics read grim satire of rural puritanism, and outraged Iowans agreed, seeing themselves mocked. Wood insisted he meant the opposite, an image of enduring pioneer character. Through the 1930s he became the leading voice of American Regionalism alongside John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, directed Iowa's New Deal Public Works of Art Project, painted Daughters of Revolution and Dinner for Threshers, and taught at the University of Iowa until 1941.

Wood built a public identity as the overalls-wearing farm boy who never left Iowa, and it was largely a performance. Friends and colleagues understood him privately to be gay, in an era and a state where saying so was unthinkable for a man dependent on conservative Midwestern patrons and a state university salary. In 1935 he married singer Sara Sherman Maxon, a match friends considered a mistake from the start; it lasted three years. A University of Iowa colleague, Lester Longman, spent years afterward maneuvering to have him fired, citing both his private life and his Regionalist teaching as unfit for a research university, and Wood spent much of his last decade fighting the university as hard as he painted.

Wood learned he had pancreatic cancer in late 1941 and died in an Iowa City hospital on February 12, 1942, one day before his 51st birthday. American Gothic outgrew him almost immediately, becoming one of the most parodied images in American visual culture, reprinted so often that most people who recognize it could not name its painter. Cedar Rapids and Anamosa built civic identities partly around him; his childhood country school appears on Iowa's 2004 state quarter. The Regionalism he championed fell out of critical favor after his death, dismissed for a generation as provincial next to Abstract Expressionism, before museums returned it to serious study decades later.

Grant Wood's life against the full span of the corpus.

• American Gothic artwork
  Won a $300 prize at the Art Institute of Chicago; became one of the most reproduced images in American art 1930
• Stone City, Iowa artwork
  Painted the summer he co-founded the Stone City Art Colony 1930
• Daughters of Revolution artwork
  A satire of preservationist politics that drew public protest from the group it depicted 1932
• Dinner for Threshers artwork 1934
• Parson Weems' Fable artwork
  Reworked the cherry-tree myth of George Washington 1939
• Public Works of Art Project, Iowa region other
  Directed the New Deal program that employed Iowa artists during the Depression 1934

• February 13, 1891 aged 0 Born on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa
• 1901 aged ~10 Father dies; family moves to Cedar Rapids
• 1913 aged ~22 Enrolls at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• 1928 aged ~37 Studies Jan van Eyck's work in Munich, reshaping his style
• 1930 aged ~39 Paints American Gothic after finding a Carpenter Gothic cottage in Eldon, Iowa
• 1932 aged ~41 Co-founds the Stone City Art Colony
• 1934 aged ~43 Joins the University of Iowa faculty and directs the state's Public Works of Art Project
• 1935 aged ~44 Marries Sara Sherman Maxon; the marriage ends in 1938
• February 12, 1942 aged 50 Dies of pancreatic cancer in Iowa City, one day before his 51st birthday

• Herbert Hoover 1874–1964
  Engineer and relief administrator whose presidency was consumed by the onset of the Great Depression. fellow Iowan
• Sinclair Lewis 1885–1951
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose satirical novels critiqued American capitalism. parallel critique of small-town America
• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. New Deal patron
• Edward Hopper 1882–1967
  Realist painter whose depictions of urban isolation, like Nighthawks, became iconic American images. contemporary in American realism