Honoring Grant Wood

The Whitney Museum is putting together an exhibit called Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables. The exhibit, which will run from March 2 through June 10, 2018, will showcase Wood’s extraordinary range of talents and his often overlooked sophistication as an artist.

Grant Wood’s Early Style

Grant Wood was born in rural Idaho and adopted a public farm boy persona, but both he and his art were more worldly than he wanted people to believe.

After studying at the Art institute of Chicago, Wood made several trips to Europe to study painting. He was influenced early on by French impressionists and post-impressionists but it was Flemish artist Jan Van Eyck that influenced his clear-lined,  luminescent style.

Woods was not just a painter. He was was a skilled craftsman, trained to work in metal and wood,  and created decorative Arts and Crafts objects that demonstrate the complexity of his talent.

The Fables in Grant Wood’s Life and Art

The time period, the 1920s, during which Grant Wood honed his skills (and his persona) was the time of the Depression, and Wood’s mythical portrayals of the American Midwest were a comfort to those who saw them.

Wood’s personal life was complicated. He was a closeted gay man who had a short-lived marriage to an older woman when he was in his forties.

From his studio in Cedar Rapids, Wood continued to paint, draw and produce some of the most touching and beautiful lithographs ever done by an American artist.

Wood’s friends knew him as a prankster and a man with a great sense of humor which is apparent in many of his paintings, like Daughters of the Revolution, where the three women portrayed in the painting resemble Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in drag.

Grant Wood Lithographs at Surovek Gallery

Please contact us for more information about January or the other fine work by Grant Wood available at Surovek Gallery.

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