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Written by Will Fellows
Dec 16, 2010
Grant Wood: a Life
You may not know Grant Wood, but you’re undoubtedly familiar with the artist’s most famous work, “American Gothic,” a somber painting that depicts a dowdy woman and a man holding a pitchfork, standing in front of a small white house. The work has been widely reproduced and has inspired many parodies.
But just as there’s a lot more to “American Gothic” than meets the eye, the real Grant Wood is more complicated than his reputation as a homespun “artist in overalls” would suggest.
“Grant Wood: A Life,” a new biography by art historian R. Tripp Evans, looks at the closeted gay man beneath that cultivated image. I spoke with him recently about the celebrated artist and his work.
Will Fellows: What led you to devote years to researching and writing about Grant Wood?
Tripp Evans: My book is an attempt to reintroduce Wood and his remarkable work to a culture that has largely forgotten who he is. I find his story endlessly fascinating. Here’s this ambitious, small-town guy who ached for success, and when he finally achieves it, it’s not in Paris or New York but in exactly the place he’d been trying for years to escape.
Wood loved Iowa in the same way he loved his family: It was genuine and ran deep, but it was also very complicated. Wood was a deeply closeted man with a byzantine family setup: A tyrannical father who died when Wood was 10. A mother and sister with whom he lived for much of his adult life. A wife – a woman many years his senior, who bore quite a resemblance to his mother – who suddenly enters the picture as his mother lay dying.
WF: Grant Wood was born in 1891 and died in 1942. What kinds of life-compromising forces did gay men of his era face?
TE: Within weeks of the spectacular debut of “American Gothic” at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930, Wood was approached by his first homosexual blackmailer. Like many gay men, he lived in terror of losing his livelihood through the exposure of his sexuality. He spent the last 18 months of his life fighting off a threatened exposé by Time magazine, coupled with a gay witch-hunt led by his colleagues at the University of Iowa.
Censorship, including self-censorship, constrained Wood’s life and work in painful ways. When his lithograph of a nude farmhand, “Sultry Night” (1937), was banned by the U.S. postal service as pornographic, Wood’s reaction was to destroy his full-scale oil of the same work.
Like many gay men of his time, Wood eventually yielded to the pressure to marry, with disastrous results. And he was unable to develop a healthy, satisfying relationship with any of the men he fell in love with. All of these issues, and the self-loathing and depression that attended them, constrained his life.
WF: How were Grant Wood’s artistic development and achievement shaped by the culture in which he lived?
TE: Wood’s generation grew up with deeply negative stereotypes about male artists. Wood often explained that “it wasn’t considered manly to be a painter.” The sexual suspicion that surrounded art-making and the dim view that his father took of artists meant that Wood always harbored a sense of shame about his calling. So, when critics praised Wood for switching from the “feminine” style of Impressionism to the hard-edged realism of his work in the 1930s, Wood never looked back. He felt he’d finally solved the problem of being a painter and a “real” man at the same time.
Beyond stylistic change, the genius of Wood’s work in the 1930s includes the subtle and not-so-subtle private messages hidden within his paintings. Some critics have called me to task for recognizing muscular, male bodies in Wood’s landscapes. Yet the abstraction of eroticized bodies is one of the staples of art criticism, at least where straight artists are concerned. No one doubts that DeKooning or Picasso objectified the female body. Wood, who managed to avoid painting female nudes altogether and who created numerous celebrations of the male nude, found in these landscapes a way to satisfy conservative Iowans and himself in one stroke.
WF: Your book certainly demolishes the simple-minded “artist in overalls” cliché that has defined Grant Wood for decades.
TE: On his deathbed, Wood told friends and family that if he made it through his illness he planned to move to Palm Springs and reinvent himself and his art, erasing the person he had been up to that point. We can’t go back in time and give Wood his idyll in California, but we can restore his wholeness and humanity in the way that we talk about his life. He was a brilliant, important painter – and he desired men. Whatever Wood’s generation may have been taught, these two things are not mutually exclusive.
Will Fellows is author of “Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s,” “Farm Boys” and “A Passion to Preserve.”
