 | ||||
| Grant Wood "Self-portrait" ca 1932-41 |
A new biography by R. Tripp Evans called Grant Wood: A Life, is a recent attempt to re-examine Grant Wood. Wood (1891-1942) was an American artist that belonged to a small group known as the American Regionalists who worked in the period between the two World Wars. Last Sunday’s New York Times book review by Deborah Solomon is informative and interesting as it interprets Wood’s work as a type of nostalgia art. She asserts that Wood practiced elegiac painting and, feeling not quite home among his countrymen, Wood longed for the past.
I don’t quite see it that way. As an artist, Wood had two purposes: he wanted to depict the look and feel of what he saw and he wanted to make it memorable and timeless. As an American Regionalist, Wood departed from the then-popular style of European Modernism and took as his subject rural American life. America is what Wood wanted to faithfully record and to make from it an art for the ages.
Unlike his colleagues Benton and Curry, who depicted American epic tales through large robust figure compositions, Wood tended to focus on portraits or landscapes. He adopted a Flemish style of painting he gleaned from looking at the works of Jan Van Eyck during his few visits to Europe. The uneasiness that the reviewer Deborah Solomon is picking up on, I believe, is the unintentional by product of this type of close-scrutiny painting.
In the self-portrait above, Wood paints in a manner reminiscent of the 15th century masters. He presents an intimate head and shoulders portrait in the close foreground, surrounded by a vast expanse of rolling farmland. A water-pumping windmill is prominently featured to his left.
It is important what Wood depicts around him, namely the farmlands and a windmill. This type of Aeromotor windmill was a major factor in making semi-arid land into sustainable farmland. This windmill was so ubiquitous that it is still often today called “the American Windmill”. Though it is used and manufactured in several countries, it has reached the status as a representative symbol of America.
The painting is a tribute to a type of midwest American: someone whose thoughts and feelings are intimately connected to the land, the seasons and to the viability of the family farm. The painting is a portrait and as such Wood dutifully captures the psychological complexity of the sitter, himself. However, I believe, he was aiming for something much greater; he intended to capture the important dramatic role, as food producer and thus sustainer of life, that the heartland uniquely plays in America’s psyche.
American Regionalism was an attempt at honest reporting that walked the line between nationalism and romanticism. It was devoted to the land, the people and the stories of America. It was a short-lived movement that took place away from the cities. After the end of World War II, it was eclipsed by Abstract Expressionism (the New York City based art form often vigorously promoted as the genuine American art form).
At the very least American Regionalism is an important bridge between academic art of the Nineteenth century and Abstract Expressionism. As a movement, it came about when what was American art and what was modern art were unsettled issues. By the 1950s modern critics believed the issue solved, perversely linked this movement to Italian fascism and American Regionalism fell out of favor. It’s nice to see that this movement and the artists are being reconsidered for it was the last time that such an ambitious style emerged in the States.