Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables

Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism

Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables Details

Review “At a time when the U.S. was dealing with the Depression, drought and disillusionment, Wood was trying to recapture, as the catalog suggests, the ‘dream-power’ of his childhood—implying the tension between then and now.”—Judith H. Dobrzynski, Wall Street Journal Read more Book Description This comprehensive reevaluation of Grant Wood’s career approaches the artist’s oeuvre from a variety of perspectives and contextualizes his work for the first time within the broader framework of 20th-century art.    Read more About the Author Barbara Haskell is a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.   Read more

Reviews

I've spent a nice part of the morning with Grant Wood, eventually (as too often) giving up on the textual commentaries and going straight on to the plates. I kept wondering why Wood painted trees the way they did, making the foliage just look like bubbles, and why none of the authors seemed to address that. But one writer did stress the omnipresent curves of the landscapes as signifying fertility, so I finally decided that Wood's trees aren't trees as such, but as similarly quasi-abstract and quasi-realistic. Expands my understanding of him.I had to wonder further, though, whether any of the critics had ever actually been in the Midwest, or had paid attention to Nature if they were. They mention Iowa's "rolling" landscapes, but so far as I could see, never observe that the actual landscapes, while they do "roll," never do to the extent that Wood had them. More striking to me, as a Kansan, is that except for one that I noticed, all his "landscapes" are indeed about land only, which fills up almost all the canvases. But if you're actually in the Midwest, the sky seems to have just as much importance, if not more, because it's so huge and because it's the element that can tell you what's coming and where you are in the present. Maybe Wood didn't find it as "procreative" as he did the land. Or because his point of view is almost always above the scene -- for which I have no explanation except that he seemed to like that. (If you stand on a high point in the Midwest, the sky is still just as important and commanding as the land you're looking down at.) Maybe it's a way of both putting the viewer into the picture and keeping us out at the same time.Almost no rivers, too, now that I think about it. But Iowa is a very green, water-fed state.Also irritating was one writer's insistence on all the paintings' "silence". I suppose that's true if you're just looking at the pictures from the outside. But if you can put yourself into the depicted (however abstracted or mannerist) scenery, if in other words you know the Midwest and Nature, the art isn't "silent" at all, any more than their statuesque people are stationary,. Granted, Thomas Hart Benton's characters are usually much more twisted with implied motion, but Wood's are clearly in the midst of actions as well. I started wondering whether all these critics were folks from big cities on the coasts who've never experienced a day in the remote, tourist-free countryside. Or if they're familiar with Grandma Moses's pictures and other folk art that include such "frozen" attitudes.Anyway, the collection of works and at least some of the essays really did give me a much more helpful and comprehensive view of Grant Wood, and ways to think about what I see. It also made me wish even more that I could see the show itself -- so given all of the above, I have to say that the catalog is a success!

Share this post