Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables | Art & Artists

Between 1925 and 1935, Wood lived rent-free in the hayloft of the Cedar Rapids carriage house behind the mortuary owned by his friend and patron David Turner. He transformed the space into a studio and living quarters for himself and his mother, dubbing it 5 Turner Alley. In a punning reference to the lily of the valley plant, Wood titled this sculpture and the three others like it in the exhibition after his street. He created these flowerlike forms from an assortment of found materials, including bottle caps, shoehorns, gears, and clothespins, and placed them in earthenware flowerpots, which he gave to friends. Precursors of mid-twentieth century assemblages, Wood’s lilies reveal his inventiveness and whimsical humor.

Wood received three significant commissions between 1925 and 1927 to decorate the dining rooms of hotels in Cedar Rapids, Sioux City, and Council Bluffs, Iowa. For each one, he created what became known as an Iowa Corn Room, so called because its decorations revolved around the theme of Iowa corn, subject matter that would come to dominate his art. 

Working with the artist Edgar Britton in response to a 1925 commission from hotelier Eugene Eppley to decorate the dining room of his Montrose Hotel in Cedar Rapids, Wood created a number of corncob chandeliers, including this one, as well as a 360-degree panoramic mural depicting a harvested corn field and a frieze reproducing the lyrics of the “Iowa Corn Song.”

Painted in the same year as American Gothic, Overmantel Decoration was part of the decorative scheme for the neocolonial home Wood designed for Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Stamats, a local Cedar Rapids publisher and his wife. Placing large painted panels, usually of landscapes, over the fireplace was common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In depicting the Stamats family strolling in old-fashioned dress in front of their brand-new home, Wood drew on sources as varied as Currier and Ives lithographs, his mother’s willowware china platter, and family photo albums to create a fanciful scene of pre-industrial America that speaks to his romance with the world of his childhood of the 1890s.