Scooting Back to Anamosa

By ROBERT HUGHES

Grant Wood at the Whitney: afresh look at an American icon

The worst fate an artist can suffer, late in life, is being famous for a single work. The worst after death is oblivion. Grant Wood (1881-1942), the American regionalist painter whose retrospective of 84 drawings, prints and paintings opened last week at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, suffered both. There was a time when millions of Americans who would never have looked inside a museum knew, from reproduction, one painting of Wood's, American Gothic: he with the pitchfork and faded bibbed overalls, she of the dowdy mien and disapproving eye, in front of that white frame house. For the mass audience it was the most famous painting in the world. The runner-up was Leonardo's Last Supper; and after that, what? The Mona Lisa? The Washington portrait by Peale? It hardly matters; the pre-eminence of American Gothic as a popular icon has not been challenged in several generations, since Wood painted it in 1930. Its fame sank Wood's reputation and took the rest of his work with it.

His national popularity ended some years after the Great Depression, which had fostered it. Americans were no longer so eager to embrace those formalized visions of Midwestern fecundity, the pre-industrial Eden. They were less threatened and so needed less solace. By 1950, the remaining audience for Wood had split into two groups: a small band of loyalists in the American heartland, who continued to venerate his work as distilled American truth, and everyone else, who considered him to be less than a footnote in the history of modern art, a provincial cornball.

Yet the tribal law of the art world is that nothing is immune to revival. In March, a drawing by Wood flabbergasted everyone by selling for $143,000, and now the Whitney show (which travels over the next year to museums in Minneapolis, Chicago and San Francisco) will undoubtedly create even loopier bids for the few works in Wood's small mature oeuvre that are not already in museums. It seems felicitous that Grant Wood's reviving angel, the art historian who has worked on him for a decade and who curated this fascinating show, should bear the name Wanda Corn. Moreover, the time is ripe. Once again, Americans are bemused by the deflation of their dreams. As it was in the '30s, the ethos that linked virtue to reward through honest toil is in deep trouble. Granted, the nostalgia for Wood's Midwest is now laced with self-evident ironies; one might say that it is a nostalgia not so much for a rural way of life as for a means of seeing a rural ethos without irony. The revival of Grant Wood is as good a cultural index of Reagan's America as the launching of Robert Rauschenberg was of Kennedy's.

A country boy who lived mostly in small cities, Wood drew nearly all the fundamental images of his work from the first ten years of his life on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa. No artist was more accommodating to his clients; his first mural commission, The Adoration of the Home, 1921-22, showing a group of allegorical figures around a cornfed goddess of the hearth who holds up a model house built by the Cedar Rapids developer Henry Ely, is a masterpiece of kitsch. But when unleashed, his imagination would scoot back to Anamosa every time.

He went to Europe in 1928 to study the Northern Renaissance portraits on which American Gothic is based, and to examine the work of Patinir and Bruegel, from which his aerial views of landscape were partly derived. He did not look at modern art when he was there, although there are some mild homages to it in his later work: the purposeful, bland, geometric rotundity of skirts and cows' backsides bears some likeness to the derivations from Leger one sees in the English vorticist William Roberts. His addiction was to the consoling udder, not the maddening verre d'absinthe.

As Corn points out, the eroticism that might have been an attribute of his figures is transferred entirely to the landscape they inhabit. Wood's people are nearly always emblems of either innocence or rectitude: pink and doll-like when they are not harsh and sanctimonious. But the hills are like green breasts and buttocks, heaving perceptibly in his preferred light, that of a young spring morning. The plowshare slices into them suggestively. His best landscapes from the '30s, like Spring Turning, 1936, are votives to the original dea mater: man makes his brown tattoos on that vast pelt, but they will pass, and he and his horses are no more than fleas.

Wood's eyeline for many of these landscapes floats oneirically up in the air; he was fond of aerial perspective, the Bruegelian God's-eye view, as in his hovering vision of Arbor Day, 1932. Sometimes, with less happy results, he conflated it with Hollywood. The night view of Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931, is straight out of a Disney animation, and indeed the influence of Walt on Wood looks stronger than is usually acknowledged. In his curious Death on the Ridge Road, 1935, a painting of an impending car crash, the fatal truck coming over the brow of the hill has its wheels off the ground and skewed in the exact convention of cartoons.

At worst, Wood was almost everything his critics said: vulgar, provincial, cute, mannered, and untruthful about the realities of country life. His paintings have much less documentary truth to offer about the Midwest in the '30s than Margaret Bourke-White's camera, but there are no photographs of Eden. This show allows us to see what Wood's assets were: mainly, the deep lyricism rising from his certainty that he had discovered a vein of imagery no other painter had mined.

We also see, as an unexpected bonus, what a good painting American Gothic was. Major cliches become invisible after a while, and Curator Corn has made a valiant effort to strip the accretions from this one. She has included a hilarious collection of cartoons and ads based on American Gothic--an inspired piece of contextual criticism. Far from being a lampoon of conservative Midwestern farmers and their wives, American Gothic is, as she points out, "not about farmers, not about a married couple, and not a satire." Thirty-two years' difference in age lay between its models, Wood's sister Nan and a Cedar Rapids dentist named McKeeby. The subject of American Gothic is in fact a small-town Midwesterner and his unmarried daughter, and once this is seen, the details of the painting fall into shape, as Wood meant them: the pitchfork becomes a scepter of paternal authority, a weapon for fending off suitors and perpetuating spinsterhood; its shape is echoed in the limp seams of the man's overalls, foreshadowing his own masculine debility; and so forth.

Without making exaggerated claims for her subject, Corn has restored a missing fragment of the American imagination. Wood was not a great painter, but he epitomized some deep-struck hopes and illusions, and he deserves understanding. This will be a popular show, and it should be.

--By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.