Wood Works

Ever since the day in 1930 when his American Gothic won $300 and a bronze medal from the Chicago Art Institute, the name of Grant Wood has echoed persistently throughout the land. In five years, Artist Wood's picture of the bleak, bald Iowa farmer with the pitchfork and his daughter with the cameo and the printed apron has become almost as well known to the U. S. Public as Washington Crossing the Delaware. Yet not until last week did Manhattan's Ferargil Galleries succeed in borrowing American Gothic from the Art Institute of Chicago, Dinner for Threshers from Stephen C. Clark of New York, Birthplace of Herbert Hoover from Gardner Cowles Jr. of Des Moines, Fall Plowing from Marshall Field of New York, the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere from Mrs. C. M. Gooch of Memphis and some 37 other paintings and drawings on brown wrapping paper to give Grant Wood his first comprehensive one-man show in New York.

Ten years ago as an art student in Pans Grant Wood affected a flaming pair of pink whiskers and a beret basque. As the Rembrandt of Iowa and Director of the Stone City art colony, Artist Wood now works in blue denim overalls.

Grant Wood was born in 1892 in Anamosa, Iowa, site of Iowa's best known Reformatory. His family was rigidly Quaker. His first studio was a hiding place under the red checkered table cloth of the oval dining-room table. In 1907. when he was 15, Grant Wood made a little water color of a spray of green currants of which he is extremely proud. It was painted in what he now realizes is his natural style, hard, exact, brittle. The currants were on view last week together with a number of pictures from the pink-whisker period of Artist Wood's career--impressionist landscapes, views of Paris, Italian farmyards. Most of these early Wood canvases have found their way into the collection of David Turner of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

In the German primitive room of Munich's famed Old Pinakothek Museum, Grant Wood on one of his few trips to Europe saw a grimy, meticulous little man painstakingly copying a 15th-Century panel with layer upon layer of tempera glaze. Wood realized that that was the way he should paint the U. S. scene. Back to Cedar Rapids he went, shaved off his pink whiskers, settled down to being the Breughel of the Com Belt among the dentists, butchers, farmers and shopkeepers with whom he was brought up.

The first picture in what has become the recognized Wood manner was a portrait of his mother holding a potted sansevieria. At her throat is the identical cameo which he put on his sister and used with such effect a year later in American Gothic. Iowans liked his work. He won the art contest for a sweepstakes prize at the Iowa State Fair, continued to win it year after year.

His next venture was establishing a summer school and art colony at Stone City in an impressively colonnaded mansion, relic of the days when Stone City's abandoned limestone quarries brought the town brief prosperity. Stone City's art school quickly became known as the Ice-Wagon Art Colony. So many pupils enrolled for the course that every bedroom in the village was taken. Inventive pupils found a stable of 14 abandoned ice wagons, dragged them to a meadow, fitted them up as gypsy caravans, painted the sides with gaudy murals. From miles around the farmers went to gape at artists and ice wagons, were charged 10-c- admission for sightseeing. After two seasons, however, the colony was unable to make expenses, went bankrupt.

To help teach at Stone City appeared a handsome dark-haired young man named Arnold Pyle who is the subject of Grant Wood's best-known male portrait, Arnold Comes of Age. Painter Arnold Pyle not only taught at Stone City while it lasted but now frames some of Grant Wood's pictures, helps prepare his panels for painting, acts as his unofficial business manager. His portrait, too, was on view at last week's Manhattan show.

In fact the only famed Grant Wood picture that was not to be seen there was the Daughters of the Revolution, an oblong panel of three grim-faced spectacled spinsters standing in front of a framed engraving of Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware. Since last January, it has been the property of Emanuel Goldenberg of Bucharest. Rumania, better known to the U. S.'public as Cinemactor Edward G. Robinson (The Whole Town's Talking). Patient Actor Robinson, who walked into the Ferargil Galleries and paid cash for it, was unable to enjoy his picture until last month when it was released from the Grant Wood show in Chicago's Lake-side Press Galleries.

Most newsworthy Wood item at the Manhattan show was a pencil drawing on brown wrapping paper called Adolescence lent by Clarence Guy Littell, president of Chicago's R. R. Donnelley & Sons Co. (The Lakeside Press). It showed a gaunt, pinfeathered Plymouth Rock cockerel rising in the faint light of early dawn between his plump parents for his first lusty crow (see cut). The drawing was made in 1933. Recently Artist Wood's good friend and competitor, Thomas Benton, saw it, grew hugely excited, wrote Grant Wood that if he did not make a painting of it at once, Benton would do a picture on the same subject. Adolescence will probably be Wood's next painting.

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