Grant Wood was an American painter. He was born in Anamosa, Iowa, and spent his childhood in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His parents were Quaker farmers. He spent his life in the Midwest in the United States and painted scenes and portraits from that region. His works are thought to represent idealized American traditional values, such as hard work, family and individuality. He is one of several painters of the “American Scene”, or “Regionalist” group which also includes Thomas Hart Benton and Andrew Wyeth.
He studied art in Minneapolis and Chicago, and taught at the high school level for a short time. After serving in World War I, he was exposed to Northern Renaissance painting and Impressionism during the period when he lived in Europe (in Paris, France; Sorrento, Italy and Munich, Germany), beginning in Paris in 1923.
Grant Wood’s most famous painting is “American Gothic”, which was painted in 1930. It is a portrait of a Midwest farming couple, and in it, Grant Wood is imitating the arrangement of a Northern Renaissance portrait, with the subjects in a rigid frontal view and with elaborate details added. The style represents the Gothic Revival style of painting. The models for the painting are actually his dentist and his sister, Nan, and the cottage is an actual cottage he saw in Eldon, Iowa, although he added the Gothic-style upper window. The couple and the composition of this painting have been much parodied, and the painting is now part of American popular culture. The painting is an example of the realistic Regionalism movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which opposed the European abstract art movement of the same time period.
Web Sites
Catalog
Search the library's catalog for Wood, Grant or Modernism.
Databases
Enter Wood, Grant; Regionalism or Modernism in these databases: