Grant Wood's Studio: Birthplace Of 'American Gothic' At The Renwick Gallery

Among the Wood-as-craftsman highlights: a carved wooden "Mourner's Bench," 1921-22, designed for a school principal's outer office; the door to his studio fashioned from an old coffin lid with a glass window containing humorous messages, 1924, and a "Corn Cob Chandelier," 1925-26.

Starting in 1920, Wood made four trips to Europe, studying for a time at the Academie Julian in Paris. During these self-described "Bohemian years," Wood grew a funny-looking beard and sought to emulate French Impressionism in paintings of European and American scenes. They are accomplished, but hardly outstanding works.

He eventually concluded that only back home could he realize his potential as an artist. Sitting with fellow artists at a Parisian café drinking brandy and waiting for inspiration, he recalled, "I realized that all the really good ideas I'd ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa."

To make ends meet he took on various decorating projects and taught in Cedar Rapids schools. In the early 1920s his close friend, major patron and personal advisor, Cedar Rapids funeral home director David Turner, asked Wood to transform a turn-of-the-century mansion into a modern funeral parlor. Turner was so pleased with the results that he suggested that Wood convert the loft of the mansion's carriage house into a residence and studio.

In doing so, Wood applied Arts and Crafts ideas to the 1,000-square-foot area with built-in furniture, hideaway tables and beds, handwrought metal decorative details, chiseled, carved and painted wood objects and surfaces, and a stage that served as both workplace and theater and sleeping area at night. Hearses continued to be parked below on the ground floor.

Between 1924 and 1935, Wood "used 5 Turner Alley as a kind of laboratory for his artistic ideas, and the result was an artist's atelier that was also a powerful work of art," Milosch observes. Huge, blown-up photographs of the studio and examples of decorative and utilitarian elements Wood designed for it are on view.

Wood's early Impressionist style, as well as the colorful, light-filled feel of his home/studio, are conveyed in "Sunlit Studio," circa 1925-26. The color-filled, decorative background of one of his vivid still lifes, "Calendulas," 1928-29, suggests the elaborate décor of the studio walls.

The people of Cedar Rapids sensed that there was something special about this bespectacled, good-humored, multitalented man. Throughout his career, Wood received encouragement and support from the community, both in buying his works and commissioning him to carry out design and decoration projects. His big break came in his late thirties when he was commissioned to design the largest stained-glass window in the country for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. It featured six soldiers, one from each of America's wars, and an enormous female figure symbolizing victory.

While in Munich to oversee production of the monumental project, Wood found that the way his German colleagues planned to depict the faces of the soldiers made them "look like Sixteenth Century saints," according to Milosch, so he painted them himself. His experience of painting on flat, geometric panes of glass and his study of Northern Renaissance art - depicting people as actors with symbolic "props" and landscape backdrops - caused him to rethink his painting style. He was especially drawn to the clear realism of such artists as Dürer, Memling and van Eyck.

Pondering potential subjects back home, he said he gradually "began to realize that there was real decoration in the rickrack braid on the aprons of the farmers' wives, in calico patterns and in the lace curtains....[T]o my great joy, I discovered that in the very commonplace, in my native surroundings, were decorative adventures and that my only difficulty had been in taking them too much for granted."

Acting on this epiphany, upon his return to Cedar Rapids he adopted a more finely crafted, precise approach to portraying the people and landscape of his native state - and began to create the paintings for which he will be remembered.

Exhibit A is a compelling likeness of John B. Turner, the 84-year-old father of Wood's patron, David Turner, posed as a staunch "pioneer" in front of an early map of the Cedar Rapids area. In an affectionate portrait of his aging mother, he depicted her as a well-dressed, stalwart farmer's wife, holding a hardy snake plant in front of a rural landscape of fields and trees.

For "American Gothic," 1930, the painting that catapulted him to fame, Wood used as models his 30-year-old sister Nan, and the family's 62-year-old dentist, Byron McKeeby. He posed them in front of an 1880s Victorian-Gothic house with an impressive window and board-and-batten siding that he had spotted in Eldon, Iowa. It measures a modest 29 1/4 by 24 5/8 inches.

Confronting viewers in a close-up, straightforward way, the prim woman and dour man appear to be "hidebound rustic types fiercely protective of an older way of life," writes art historian Wanda Corn in her catalog essay. "They guard their home and their values from us, the modern intruders from the outside world."

The picture elicited sour reactions from local observers, who felt Wood was making fun of them as old-fashioned and out of touch with modern life. Declaring his affection for his fellow Iowans, Wood stoutly denied any satirical intent.

There was also confusion as to whether the figures were a couple or father and daughter; Wood eventually said they were the latter, adding that they were not farmers, but "small town folks" who might live in such a house.

"American Gothic" was soon purchased by The Art Institute of Chicago. Reproductions in newspapers and magazines made it a familiar image all over the country - and helped spawn numerous replications.

Most parodies over the years have manipulated details of the original, usually faces, often clothing, sometimes the pitchfork or house. Among those depicted: Presidents and First Ladies; Mickey and Minnie Mouse; hippies and yuppies; ads for corn flakes and consumer electronics; women's libbers and Barbie and Ken; editorial cartoons and more recently Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie.

Today, most see "American Gothic" as depicting a tough, disciplined, morally rigorous Midwestern pair. We associate them with the essence of the American character - pioneer spirit, progress, resiliency, self-discipline and honesty - qualities that constitute US national identity.

Wood's rough oil sketch from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum emphasizes the vernacular design of the small white house in "American Gothic." It still stands in Eldon, maintained by The State Historical Society of Iowa, with signs indicating its significance and where to pose to emulate the famed painting.

Wood's self-portraits, whether wearing bib overalls or a green shirt, invariably show him in front of Iowa landscapes. In his somber "Return to Bohemia," 1935, he portrayed himself working at his easel in front of a red barn and surrounded by a group of folks presumably welcoming the native son back home.

In his mature work of the 1930s, building on the success of "American Gothic," Wood drew on the material culture of his region's pioneering and Victorian past to develop a Regionalist/Midwestern school of painting. "Much of his success," writes Corn, "was in calling upon old things that resonated not just regionally but with any American who felt a kinship in the antiquities he drew upon and the rural past that he recalled."

In "Appraisal," 1931, Wood contrasted rural versus urban types, depicting a handsome farm woman standing in front of her simple house and barn, seeking to sell a chicken to a pudgy, overdressed city matron. The stern, black-clad older woman, sitting gaunt, tight-lipped and erect in "Victorian Survival," 1931, epitomizes the past, while a candlestick telephone to her right signals a modern intrusion into rural life.

One of Wood's most memorable paintings, "Daughters of Revolution," 1932, satirized the elitist snobbery and supernationalism of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Their local chapter had criticized the artist, a World War I veteran, for completing his Veterans Memorial Building stained glass in Germany, America's recent enemy.

Wood's depiction of three thin-lipped, expressionless, stereotypical old crones standing in front of Emanuel Leutze's patriotic icon, "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (ironically, painted in Germany), effectively spoofed an organization he despised.

The finest landscape in the exhibition, the precise, patterned, panoramic "Stone City," 1930, immortalizes the town where Wood established a short-lived summer art colony and school in the early 1930s. Once a thriving community where limestone was quarried, by the time Wood painted it, that business had collapsed and the workers had moved away. The artist took considerable liberties in composing a bird's-eye view of rolling hills, globular trees, crops, horses, cows, farm buildings, windmills, billboards, a winding road and a river bridge.

Other refined, wide-angle farmscapes, like "Young Corn," 1931, "Spring Plowing," 1932, and "Spring in the Country," 1941, offer optimistic views of rolling lands of plenty. Townspeople are occupied with productive tasks in the more confined space of "Spring in Town," 1942.

Wood's sense of history and humor animate his version of "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," 1931, in which the hero astride a kind of hobbyhorse gallops through a setting that looks suspiciously like Iowa. In "Parson Weems' Fable," 1939 (represented by a finished drawing), he made sure that viewers knew the identity of the naughty but honest youthful axe-wielder by placing George Washington's head from the dollar bill on his tiny body.

After the mid-1930s Wood's major painting production fell off as he devoted himself to running New Deal art projects in Iowa, fought internal battles as a member of the faculty at the University of Iowa and dealt with a troubled marriage. Much of his late work involved book illustrations and lithographs.

He died of pancreatic cancer in 1942, on the eve of his 51st birthday. Along with such other Regionalists as Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, Wood's reputation suffered over the next several decades - denigrated as provincial and old-fashioned. These artists, and particularly Wood, have enjoyed a comeback in the last three decades. Nowadays, "American Gothic" is admired as a national icon, and with the help of outstanding exhibitions such as this one, the magnitude of Grant Wood's other achievements - both as painter and craftsman-designer - will receive lasting appreciation and admiration.

The 143-page, fully illustrated exhibition catalog is unusually informative and attractive. Cogent essays by art historians Corn, Dennis, Milosch and Joni L. Kinsey illuminate all facets of Wood's career. Debra Foxley Leach, an independent curator and longtime Wood champion, organized the compact, useful chronology. Published by Prestel, it sells for $45 (hardcover) and $40 (softcover).

Two other recent books about Wood and his celebrated painting are worth examining. Harvard teacher Steven Biel's "American Gothic": A Life of America's Most Famous Painting (W.W. Norton, $21.95, hardcover) traces the evolution of the painting's reputation and its many replications. Former Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving's "American Gothic": The Biography of Grant Wood's American Masterpiece (Chamberlain Bros./Penguin, $13.95, softcover) dissects the painting in minute detail from a "connoisseur's" point of view.

The Renwick Gallery is on Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street N.W. For information, 202-633-1000 or www.americanart.si.edu.