Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables
Mar 2–June 10, 2018
Early Landscapes and Narrative Paintings
7
In his early landscapes, Grant Wood recast the farmscape of his childhood into an Arcadian fantasy of undulating, swollen shapes and decorative embellishments whose multiple focal points keep the viewer’s eye in constant motion by giving all parts of the composition equal weight. His landscapes do not depict Midwestern farm life in the 1930s. Instead, they portray his idealized memories of the 1890s farm in Anamosa, Iowa, where he lived as a young boy before moving to Cedar Rapids with his family following the death of his father. His desire was not so much to portray a world that was becoming extinct as to recover a mythical childhood that existed only in his imagination.
The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, 1931
Grant Wood, The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, 1931. Oil on composition board, 29 3/4 x 40 in. (75.2 x 100 cm). Purchased jointly by the Des Moines Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Art; with funds from the Edmundson Art Foundation Inc., Mrs. Howard H. Frank, and the John R. Van Derlip Fund 1982.2. © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Photograph by Rich Sanders
Herbert Hoover (1874–1964), the thirty-first U.S. president, was born in West Branch, Iowa, in a modest three-room cottage where he lived for the first six years of his life. Although subsequent owners made the cottage nearly invisible by moving a two-story house in front of it, Hoover’s presidency turned his childhood home into a national tourist attraction.
In Wood’s painting, a tiny figure stands on the lawn pointing theatrically to the original home. Wood’s initial drawing for this work includes an insert featuring Hoover’s humble birthplace—a visual device like those used by nineteenth-century cartographers to symbolize progress. In both of Wood’s works, miniature buildings, foliage, and people resemble painted toys, creating an eerie hallucinatory effect that hints at Wood’s attempt to recapture the magic and innocence of childhood. The Iowa Republicans who had commissioned the work as a present to Hoover disliked the image and returned the painting to Wood without payment.