I Saw the Sign - On the Trail of Grant Wood

As someone who loves a good road trip, and in particular, as someone who gets a kick out of seeing offbeat tourist traps, I have to say that my radar is fully attuned to those brown road signs that pop up on motorways all over the world. They will announce “(Fill-in-the-blank) Historic Marker next exit” or “(Fill-in-the-blank) State Park Exit 134.” They contain no fancy font or logo (sans serif is the standard), and there are never pictures, except perhaps symbols (government-issued emoticons) of a canoe or a fish, something that indicates what the site is about.

A good road trip for me involves playing a little Let’s Make a Deal. It’s sort of like show me what’s behind curtain number three. If I choose to turn off the road to investigate what that brown sign is teasing, am I going to be pleasantly surprised, or disappointed? One never knows unless one takes that exit because the signs themselves remain completely unbiased and matter-of-fact. Unlike the larger-than-life, obnoxious billboards that you’ll find on a hill way off in the distance that promote a restaurant chain or a water park twenty miles ahead (and I do like those too), the brown road signs do no more than alert the driver that something is there, and you’re going to have to figure it out for yourself if it’s worth it or not.

I have really enjoyed my three-month stint in Iowa, and this is in spite of the fact that Iowa immediately came after a three-month stint in the more exotic Ireland; not to mention that it began in the middle of February. I suppose I can chalk it up to all the nice people I’ve met and some damn good BBQ, and perhaps also to an unusually mild winter. My one disappointment, a big let down in fact, was my lack of motivation to photograph. While the weather was warm enough, it was also wet, the skies were grey and the whole atmosphere was depressingly drab. I guess being in a new place is what kept me distracted. The act of capturing it digitally, however, was feeling a little inconvenient.

For the first couple of months I wasn’t really spending much time in Iowa outside of working. On days off I’d head out to the surrounding big cities. I ticked Minneapolis, Kansas City and St Louis off my bucket list. I even spent a weekend in Omaha, just so I could say that I’d stepped into the state of Nebraska. I used my camera wherever I went, but the photo trips were becoming rather mundane. I’d take a picture of an interesting piece of architecture, or I’d work on some long exposure stuff, but I wasn’t exactly wowed by the final product. I was missing something. I needed a good project to work on.

What I wanted to do was photograph people. I posted a couple of ads on the internet that didn’t get much traction. Not too many folks out here seem to want to work on serious portraiture. That being said, however, just by carrying my camera around the city, I was actually approached by two different people about taking their prom pictures. I politely declined, even though they were offering to pay. I’ve vowed in the past not to go that route. My excuse was that I didn’t have proper lighting equipment, but in truth, those corny professional pictures that people seem to like these days are just not in my wheelhouse. If they’d been interested in some dark and brooding experimental project, and if they didn’t have to wear rented formal wear – I might have considered it.

Resigned to my artistic nadir, I was driving back to Des Moines from St Louis on a horrible stormy night, when a little brown sign had caught my eye. Reflecting back on the moment now, I must admit that the sign was not the sole cause of my reawakening, but was rather the final ingredient to a recipe that had been simmering all day.

My journey should have taken about five hours, but it wound up being the better part of a Sunday. Torrential rains had been hammering Missouri for days prior. I was told that even for April it was a lot more water than they were used to. I passed several rivers that had been swelling up, and farm land that had been turned into swamp. Sand bags were deployed to hold back the river, but they couldn’t stop what was coming from above. Highway 61 was closed for a good spell and I was rerouted on to poorly marked detours. Along the back roads, I saw the dilapidated cabins, the one-pump gas stations and the anti-abortion billboards that one can see just about anywhere else in middle America. If I didn’t have to be at work the next day, I would have loved to have spent some time there.

Mid-way through the trip, I was caught up in a conversation in a diner way out in the middle of nowhere. I was the only patron and the owner talked my ear off. He was one of those conspiracy types who believed there was a plot afoot to control our brains and eventually it came out that he believed the Jews were behind it. I could have cared less that he was totally offensive. He didn’t know that he was being such, and I found that fascinating. He articulated his thoughts very well, my first clue that he’d spent a lot of time studying this stuff. He went on and on about the Illuminati and how Obama was a conniving crook. He recounted that some locals wanted to put on a play about the local fictional hero, Tom Sawyer, presenting the character as an adult who admits to his old friend Huck that he is a pedophile. To the diner owner, this was proof that liberal society was trying to make the rape of children a socially acceptable practice. I guess so that I would look good in case anyone happened to be listening, I would disagree at appropriate moments, but I fumbled any attempt at a retort. The guy could talk circles around me with all of his alternative facts, and quite frankly, I didn’t want to appear as though I supported pedophilia.

That diner owner would have made for an awesome portrait and I’ll admit I was tempted to run out to the car and grab the tripod. I sat and listened to his babble for almost two hours, kind of scoping out the place, wondering if he’d be better positioned behind the counter, or seated at a table where the natural light was coming in. He wasn’t too old a man, but he was a little weathered. He’d lived a bit of life it seemed. He did his bout with drugs when he was younger he dabbled in a few businesses, tried life in a few cities, and finally decided to open up the BBQ place in the small town he’d grown up in. He smiled a lot. For someone who didn’t trust the world, he was quite friendly. I think if he would have agreed to pose for me, I would have insisted on a serious stare. I’m quite sure with his demeanor, he would have made for a fantastic study of the average rural American man.

It was nightfall by the time I crossed the state line into Iowa. Despite the horrible driving conditions, the opportunity to meander through the underbelly of northern Missouri had put me in a good mood. My knuckles were white from the occasional blinding downpour, but the Sunday night music selection in rural farm country included fiddling. All was right with the world as I came upon the brown sign that would snap me out of my creative funk.

American Gothic House

Next Exit

To be clear, even though that was a ‘holy shit’ moment for me, I don’t expect it would have raised an eyebrow for many others – although if you’re from Iowa I’d expect you to know where that sign was leading to. I couldn’t stop that night, but when I got to my hotel, I went directly into Google research-mode and began planning my visit back to the town of Eldon.

That week at work I started taking an informal poll of my colleagues, all of them corn-fed Iowans. “Do you know who Grant Wood is?” I would ask. Only one person knew who I was talking about. Only one person, out of several, didn’t have to think about it. The others finally clued in when I would prompt them with something like ‘picture of an old couple … with a pitchfork?’

“Oh yeah,” they would reply. “That painter guy.”

I knew who he was, but it wasn’t on my radar that Grant Wood, that painter guy, who created one of the America’s most iconic paintings, American Gothic, was from Iowa. Had I have known, my trip to Eldon would have taken place a lot sooner. My previous knowledge of Grant Wood was limited to two of his works. Outside of just being aware of it as something that has been parodied many times over the years, I saw American Gothic several times at the Art Institute in Chicago. In fact, if you go to the Art Institute, you generally make a point of seeing three paintings – Sunday in the Park, Nighthawks, and that one.

I saw a lesser known piece, Daughters of the Revolution, at the Cincinnati Art Museum a few years back. Cincinnati holds that work in high esteem. It’s to them, what the Mona Lisa would be to the Louvre. At first glance, the picture may just seem like a study of three elderly Southern ladies, looking all judgmental in the viewer’s direction. Look closer and you notice one even holding her tea cup with fingers that resemble an old chicken claw. It’s a piece of work that is at once amusing with figures that appear as much cartoon-ish as they do lifelike, yet it’s unsettling at the same time. The very title of the piece implies that this trio is from a rather elitist club, and their blank stares imply that they are looking you up and down with complete disapproval. Nobody would argue that it’s an accessible piece in that anyone is bound to have a reaction to it, but whisper in the viewers ear that the subjects are the Founding Fathers in drag and watch their head spin.

Grant Wood spent most of his life in and around Cedar Rapids. He was born in Anamosa in 1891, and lived on a farm until the age of ten, when his father had died suddenly. Until this time, Grant’s gift for painting was mostly suppressed by his strict father who felt that any interest in the fine arts was unmanly.

Wood did have a creative gift and it was allowed to blossom when he moved with his mother and sister to Cedar Rapids. Having teachers that encouraged him, and with a whole host of emotional baggage to draw on, that many suspect included suppressed homosexual tendencies, Wood’s sketches and paintings were getting lots of notice, at least from a local level.

The artist was able to express his creative genius in many different forms and styles. He studied in Paris at a time when expressionism was all the rage and he was able to mimic the form in his own work. His murals are all over the state of Iowa, including several universities and libraries, and he even has stained glass works to his credit. And as an even further stretch, Wood was quite handy with tools. He was known to create furniture and knick-knacks using stone and wood.

Of course, most of us know of him for that one painting.

Wood was visiting an artist friend in Eldon, Iowa, in 1930, and on a little tour, a house with a gothic-style window caught his eye. He made some sketches and returned home to his studio. He had his sister, Nan, sit for him, and later he asked his dentist to pose. The three main elements of a painting had never been connected before. The two figures hadn’t even met.

What I find most interesting about story of this painting is that Wood entered it into competition at the Chicago Art Institute’s exhibition that year. Organizers had originally excluded it from the final cut, but apparently one determined judge snuck it back in. The painting would win third place and $300. I can’t help but think about the Academy Awards, and the importance bestowed upon them. How often is the Best Picture remembered after a little time has passed. How many times have you watched Million Dollar Baby or The English Patient? In 1930, a sculptor named Heinz Warneke took first place honors for a piece call The Water Carrier. A Google search tells me that Warneke’s name lives on in art galleries and other spaces all over the United States, but there is no denying that his accomplishments do not equal the phenomenon of American Gothic.

Fame came fast and furious for Wood, after the exposure he received from his third place win. Magazines and newspapers nationally and internationally began to take notice, and an audience for the painting quickly developed. Art critics were bending over backwards with praise to a point that it became so renowned, that some art critics began to regard it as over-exposed tripe. Over the years, it has been studied, interpreted, and parodied so much so that it’s become one of the most famous images in the world, not to mention a defining piece of American art in the twentieth century.

American Gothic even became a catalyst for the division that existed in America at that time. The New York elite embraced the work, claiming it to be a parody of simple, conservative country living. “A Farmer and His Wife” was how they first labelled it, and commentators seemed to take delight in picking apart the apparent prudish demeanor of the grotesque figures. The farming class naturally took offence, and the fact that it came from one of their own must have seemed like a betrayal. Wood began to receive death threats and local press called out his folksy charm, questioning whether his insistence on wearing overalls was just part of the act. Robert Hughes, an art critic from the day, went so far as to pull the gay card. He wrote that American Gothic is ‘the expression of a gay sensibility so cautious that it can hardly bring itself to mock its subjects openly.’ 2

The most venomous critiques, however, were hurled at the woman in the painting. Incorrectly referred to as the wife, someone wrote to a Des Moines newspaper that she had a ‘face that would sour milk’. In an interview later in life, Nan recalled taking it all in stride.

“… Grant and I laughed about all the things that people said about the painting. The farmers all around Iowa got mad at him – real mad –for painting them that way. Many of them wrote pretty mean letters to the editor of the Des Moines Register – and I mean really mean letters –critical of Grant. One man wrote in and said that if young men believed that farm women actually looked like the woman in ‘American Gothic,’ then all the young men in Iowa would avoid farming and take up bootlegging.”1

When he revealed that the model for the woman was in fact his sister, opinions softened considerably, but it threw Nan into the spotlight in a way that she was not prepared. It hardened her though. She would go on to be Grant’s toughest defender, for the rest of his life, and for the 45 additional years that she lived thereafter. Right up until her death in 1992, she attended Grant Wood retrospectives and anniversaries, and was always willing to don a wig and a sack dress to take photos in front of the painting that made her famous.

Wood only lived for another decade, dying of cancer at the very young age of 51. He was heavy smoker, he drank somewhat, and his coffee, which he also consumed frequently, was loaded with sugar. While his death came as a surprise, it’s apparent from his lifestyle, that an early demise was not out of the realm of possibilities.

Wood’s sexuality continues to be debated to this day. While it seems that he did have gay tendencies, to the point that there are even clues in his work such as naked boys and landscapes in the shape of firm buttocks, there is nobody that has ever admitted to being with him, and in the most frank conversations on the topic, his friends at best offer that he might have had a low libido or was perhaps asexual. Wood had made enemies, and gossip had swirled over the years that there were complaints made by students at Iowa State University, where he taught. Most of these complaints were discarded, but they didn’t exactly die. Time magazine was even chasing this story, right up until Wood’s death. His friends denied any knowledge of Wood having an interest in men, and Nan, the fierce protector of his legacy, scoffed at the idea.

Suffice it to say, that brown sign had opened the flood gates, in a sense that it provided me with a prism with which to experience the great state of Iowa. For my last month, I became obsessed with Grant Wood. I sought out his paintings. I learned that some of the very good ones weren’t on display in their respective galleries. As it turns out, the Royal Academy in London is currently hosting a show on America in 1930, and American Gothic is the headliner, along with several very good pieces from various Iowa and Nebraska galleries. I will have to write about my Bartolome Murillo problem someday, but for now, suffice it to say that this sort of thing is typically just my luck.

I did see some Grant Wood pieces and even better, I made it to Eldon, and even managed to tour the studio in Cedar Rapids where he created his most iconic work. Luckily for me, May is not a busy tourist month, and luckier for me still, Iowa is not a busy tourist destination, so my visits were even more special in that I had the docents all to myself for pretty much for as long as I wanted. This was a very good thing, because I had questions.

I was very curious to understand where Grant Wood stood as a person. There were many aspects of his personality, his work and his life that conflicted. In some respects, he seemed liberally-inclined. As a young man, he’d spent time in Paris and Germany learning his craft. While not much is known of his time there, it’s suggested that he was introduced to attitudes and lifestyles that would have gone beyond the imagination of the average, god-fearing Iowan. The 1920s were hedonistic times in European cities like Paris and Berlin, where politics were colliding, and where some of the most incredible art was being produced. A favorite painter of mine, and German contemporary to Grant, happens to be Otto Dix, from Stuttgart, and I see some similarity in the portraits that Wood produced. For both artists, the art work was never meant to be pretty, and often tended toward the grotesque, with portraits that featured elongated necks or bulging eyes. In fact, some of Wood’s models were known to complain about how old or ugly he made them seem.

But while his work was progressive, controversial and complex, Wood, the man, not only seemed to prefer the rural lifestyle, but he also celebrated it. He was a spokesman for the regionalist movement in art, proclaiming that an artist should paint what they know and what they are familiar with. He once remarked that he got all his “best ideas for painting while milking a cow.”

Wood is known as much for his landscapes as he is for painting people. His hilly farm scenes were, for awhile, dismissed by critics. Time magazine was particularly brutal in one article that scoffed at what they called the ‘hard-candy like effect that is his specialty’. Perfect shapes, such as globes and cylinders, filled out his brightly colored scenes. His work was dismissed for a few decades, which some accounts suggest was a result of a spat between Wood and those critics who decided on such things. By the 1960s, however, new eyes began to evaluate his collection, and they began to filter out the pop-culture elements of American Gothic.

I’ll admit that my interest in Grant Wood, the landscape artist, was non-existent until one weekend when I took a drive in the country. It must have been the last weekend in April. Spring was springing and I was interested in exploring the Loess Hills scenic byway in the western part of the state. It’s an incredibly stunning drive and an absolute must-do for anyone who happens to venture out that way. The experience was all the more impactful in that up until that time, all I was seeing was dead trees and mud, complemented by grey skies and frequent rain. That weekend happened to be full of sunshine and the buds were coming out. Everything was bursting with green – just like a Grant Wood landscape. Seriously – the hard candy images do exist in Iowa. They are real! The rolling hills and the tree tops are cylindrical and round, just like in the paintings.

While I still couldn’t find people to photograph, I now found a new challenge for my camera. I wanted to try and capture the agricultural landscapes, a la Grant Wood. If you look at his work, you would see that it’s not as simple as pointing and shooting. The composition is most often not at eye level. His angles are from above, below, around, etc. The shapes may seem scattered, but there is a pattern to them, an order that makes it appear as though the image is popping out.

I practiced quite a bit, appropriately enough, on the Grant Wood Scenic Byway, a stretch of country road that runs for the Mississippi River, westward to Cedar Rapids. Again, spring time was teeming with color, but I’m told that I’m missing something, not having the corn stalks in full bloom.

I don’t think I was overly successful in creating a pictorial version of a Grant Wood landscape, but I had fun trying, and the exercise certainly forced me to think creatively about perspective. Not just basic composition, but I got to thinking about Grant Wood’s Iowa, and how it might have changed to become the Iowa that I now knew. What would his paintings display if he were to be working today? Instead of posting Grant Wood paintings throughout this blog, I kept with my usual theme of posting my photos - and in this case, my Grant Wood inspired photographs. I figured anyone interested in the topic could look up Grant Wood themselves, and I wouldn't break any copyright rules.

Farm life has become a corporate affair. That’s something that we’ve known for a long time, and it’s quite evident when you drive anywhere in Iowa. Massive pieces of machinery, that looked built to perform very specific tasks, were laid out in fields, waiting for the opportunity to do the one thing they were built to do. Grain elevators are the skyscrapers of little towns like Prairie City and Madrid (pronounced MAH-drid). The stern farmer in American Gothic doesn’t exist anymore, except perhaps as a cog in the larger wheel run by the big man.

Many of the people that I worked with came from a farming background, if they weren’t recent transplants from the east coast. Des Moines, and just about all of the cities and towns in Iowa, are seeing some brisk growth in their populations. A lower cost of living and encouragement of tech and financial institutions to farm some of their work has led to a massive boom. What were once corn fields are now vacant lots, that I’m told that in a few years time, will become commercial spaces.

College life has also had an influence. There is a very conservative voice in this state but it’s relegated mostly to the country. The cities are keeping liberal values alive and well. Iowa is known as the first state to have their voice heard in the presidential primaries every four years, and that seems fair to me. Indeed, their choices always tend to be off-the-wall, but this is not a state like Mississippi or Vermont, where mode of thinking is swayed to either the right or the left. Iowa has a very well rounded diversity, that ranges from conservative Christian to sandal-wearing hippy. Grant Wood would have been that hippy back in his day. His Stone City art colony must have attracted an interesting cast of characters.

Cities like Des Moines and Cedar Rapids have come alive in the past few years. I’m told that as recently as the 1990s, urban life was a pretty sorry site. It was rare that anyone would go downtown, and you certainly didn’t hang out there. Shopping malls in the suburbs were the preferred draw. There wasn’t much action in the cities that I could see today, but they were clean, seemingly safe, and quite modern. They even had a few small entertainment districts which were hopping once the warm weather came. Iowa’s towns are caught up in car culture though. Free parking downtown after 6pm and all weekend was what made it ok for folks to travel in for drinks or a show.

Iowa has also embraced the casino culture. Most cities have at least one of them, and border towns like Council Bluffs (pronounced Council-tucky by the locals) have turned themselves into a little Las Vegas. You can even still smoke in these places, which was a challenge for someone who just quit a few months prior.

With a very small, but growing ethnic population, the culinary palette is also progressing. The BBQ places like Jethro’s, and of course all the American chain restaurants, continue to thrive, but I was told I had to try out Des Moine’s Pho restaurant, (which was alright), and that I could not miss Fong’s Pizza. Imagine all the Chinese food you know and love, such as General Tso chicken and crab Rangoon, thrown on top of pizza dough. I wasn’t a fan of the end product, but the greasy spoon feel to the restaurant gave it a unique character that I kind of dug.

Casey’s is a large chain of gas stations that are quite popular with the locals. I was told to try their breakfast pizza, which I never found the time for, but I did manage to get a slice of regular pizza on a couple of occasions, and the raspberry-cream cheese turnover was quite delicious. Imagine a gas station having a solid reputation as a place for tasty food and low prices. As they seemed to be just about everywhere, even spreading out into neighboring states, and having an old country storefront concept that seemed to harken to a simpler time, I wondered if this gas station chain had been around during Wood’s day. I looked it up and it wasn’t. The first gas station was opened in 1959 and the business plan was to penetrate rural areas off the highway. Today, Casey’s is a local institution, and bring it up with any local and they’re bound to have an opinion.

During my stay, there had been some argument within the state government over abortion laws. Republicans have the upper-hand these days, and they’ve been able pass legislature that will make terminating a pregnancy much more difficult. I listened to a lot of radio in the car and there were countless religious radio programs on that dial. During one in particular, they were interviewing a couple of rape victims who were espousing the moral duty they felt they had to keep babies that were conceived afterward. I would imagine that religion would have a been a big deal in Cedar Rapids in 1930. It was certainly a big deal to a lot of people when I was there.

I wonder how Grant Wood would feel about this new generation’s take on his work. Would he be happy to see that he was getting world wide acclaim? How would he feel about at society that doesn’t judge him on his sexuality, but rather considers it as another lens into understanding his paintings? I suppose we’d all like to believe that he would be thrilled by this, but I’m not so sure that would be the case. The docent at his art studio in Cedar Rapids told me that he was “known for being quiet when around new people, and it took a long time for him to warm up, if he ever did at all”. He did have a wide circle of friends, and within that klatch he was known to be personable and a very sociable. His home was always open to impromptu parties and gatherings. He associated himself with all types, including city elite and assorted social misfits. There seemed to be a wall around his darker side, and it only reared itself in his art. He had his secrets, and if he was a closet homosexual, then he probably kept his secrets by simply keeping his friends in line. I’m going to presume that his friends knew which lines not to cross.

I recall reading something interesting about an actor named William Haines. Haines was a silent film star who happened to be defiantly open about his sexuality. It wasn’t generally reported in the tabloids of the day, but that was in part because the studio had more control over the press back then and they weren’t about to make something like that public – at least not until they stopped caring about him. Haines refused the demands put upon him that he leave his long-time partner and find some Hollywood starlet to marry. He left the acting business and spent the rest of his years in a very successful furniture making operation. Google William Haines furniture if you’re curious to see just how successful he was.

The purpose of bringing Haines up is that he was a contemporary of Wood, who lived into the 1970s and was able to see the birth of the gay rights movement. In a Haines documentary, writer, William Mann observed, “Like so many of his generation he couldn’t quite integrate that into his experience. … It was not something he ever felt was necessary”. 3

I would hazard a guess that Grant Wood would have had the same feeling. Perhaps it could be his small town humility at work, or the fact that he was coming from a day and age where such things were widely accepted as abnormal. Regardless, I suspect that any confrontation regarding his personal life would be fiercely rebuffed. Even his own sister wouldn’t come to terms with such ideas in later life when she would have seen a massive change in attitudes.

For me, I think forming an opinion is irrelevant. For me, the lesson for the day should come from and stay with the little brown sign. Here’s an example of what following one can lead to. A beautiful piece of the Iowa fabric was opened up for me. It fed into my love of art and I was able to discover a bit of history about certain individuals and about an entire group of people. In the end, my perception of Iowa is so much more informed. The canvas is larger, with many of the minute details flushed out. And perhaps, by taking curtain number three, I unwittingly picked at some scabs that perhaps some folks may not have appreciated. But I walk away, having left most of it in tact, ready for the next adventure – for the next road sign that peaks my interest!

Bibliography

1. Blog: Pushing On – Dec 11, 2011, American Mona Lisa: A Profile of Nan Wood

http://lde421.blogspot.com/2011/12/american-mona-lisa-profile-of-nan-wood.html

2. R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life, 2010

3 Out of the Closet, Off the Screen:The Life of William Haines(2001 documentary)

Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr11bt6FOOQ&t=145s

Other

Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Wood

Selected Grant Wood Art

American Gothic – Chicago Art Institute

Daughters of the Revolution - Cincinnati Museum of Art

Woman with Plants – Cedar Rapids Museum of Art