Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables
Mar 2–June 10, 2018
Prints, Illustrations, and Commercial Projects
5
Grant Wood’s experience as a decorative artist led him to view fine and applied art as being equal. In addition to designing textiles, an armchair and accompanying ottoman, and a Steuben glass vase, he illustrated two books and made cover images for eight others. The first book he illustrated was the 1935 children’s book Farm on the Hill, written by Madeline Darrough Horn. In 1936, he illustrated a deluxe publication of Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street (1920). As he often did with his paintings, he asked friends to pose for the illustrations, dressing them in costume for the occasion.
Wood’s desire to reach a broad audience with his art likewise led him to make lithographs through the Associated American Artists (AAA), which published and sold prints by major American artists in department stores and by direct mail for five dollars apiece. Making affordable art appealed to Wood, who completed eighteen lithographs for the AAA between 1937 and 1941.
Sultry Night, 1939
Grant Wood, Sultry Night, 1939. Lithograph: sheet, 11 1/2 x 15 in. (29.2 x 38.1 cm); image, 9 x 11 3/4 in. (22.9 x 29.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; bequest of William S. Lieberman, 2005. © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; courtesy Art Resource, NY
The Associated American Artists (AAA) released this lithograph in 1939, expecting to sell it through its mail-order catalogue. The United States Postal Service classifed the print, with its frontal male nude, as pornographic, and refused to allow the AAA to send it through the mail. The controversy surprised Wood, who explained that the composition was based on childhood memories of farmers bathing at the horse trough with a pail of water after a day of working in the fields.