Exhibition model for Memorial Window

Narrator: This is a half-scale exhibition copy of a stained glass window that Wood made for the Cedar Rapids Veterans building.

Barbara Haskell: It was a window to memorialize America's war dead.

Narrator: Barbara Haskell.

Barbara Haskell:  He painted a giant figure of a woman representing peace, surrounded by foliage. Very stylized. In the lower quadrant of the painting are six figures of soldiers that participated in the six wars to date that America had been engaged in.

Narrator: Working on the window prompted Wood to abandon his Impressionist painting style.

Barbara Haskell: Working on the window forced him to work in a style, which he ultimately felt was more in keeping with this personality. Very flattened abstracted forms, decorative stylization, the clarity of the shapes, those were all things that he had practiced as a child and eliminated when he adopted Impressionism.

Narrator: Wood designed the window in 1927. A year later, he went to Munich, Germany, to oversee its production. German craftsmen painted most of it, but Wood thought their designs for the soldiers looked too medieval and stylized. In the end, he painted these himself.