Grant Wood: A Life - Hardcover

Evans, R Tripp

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 030726629X ISBN 13: 9780307266293

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group, 2010

Synopsis

He claimed to be "the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn't a single thing I've done, or experienced," said Grant Wood, "that's been even the least bit exciting."

Wood was one of America's most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an "almost mythical figure," recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of America's traditional values--a simple, decent, homespun tribute to our lost agrarian age.

In this major new biography of America's most acclaimed, and misunderstood, regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed to have been anything but plain, or simple . . .

R. Tripp Evans reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed of himself. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him. He appeared to be a self-taught painter with his scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore but he was classically trained, a sophisticated artist who had studied the Old Masters and Flemish art as well as impressionism. He lived a bohemian life and painted in Paris and Munich in the 1920s, fleeing what H. L. Mencken referred to as "the booboisie" of small-town America.

We see Wood as an artist haunted and inspired by the images of childhood; by the complex relationship with his father (stern, pious, the "manliest of men"); with his sister and his beloved mother (Wood shared his studio and sleeping quarters with his mother until her death at seventy-seven; he was forty-four).

We see Wood's homosexuality and how his studied masculinity was a ruse that shaped his work.

Here is Wood's life and work explored more deeply and insightfully than ever before. Drawing on letters, the artist's unfinished autobiography, his sister's writings, and many never-before-seen documents, Evans's book is a dimensional portrait of a deeply complicated artist who became a "National Symbol." It is as well a portrait of the American art scene at a time when America's Calvinistic spirit and provincialism saw Europe as decadent and artists were divided between red-blooded patriotic men and "hothouse aesthetes."

Thomas Hart Benton said of Grant Wood: "When this new America looks back for landmarks to help gauge its forward footsteps, it will find a monument standing up in the midst of the wreckage . . . This monument will be made out of Grant Wood's works."

About this title

Review:

Winner of The Marfield Prize: The National Award for Arts Writing

"[Written] with verve, nuance and the excitement of discovery. . . a fascinating, audacious and empathic portrait."
--Donna Seaman, Kansas City Star

"Evans provides Wood and his work with layers upon layers of depth, creating a portrait of a fully realized, three-dimensional man whose work and life is fascinating and distinctly American."
--Dustin Michael Harris, Chicago Sun-Times

"Absorbing and thoughtful... Evans dismisses the artist's folksy declarations and devotion to Regionalism as a mere cover, an expedient camouflage, for his tortured private life."
--Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Book Review

"Sumptuous, eminently readable..."
--Sam Coale, The Providence Journal

"Evans's in-depth, gendered readings of Wood's paintings situate him in the longer history of male artists' gendered self-portrayals (bracketed by Oscar Wilde and Jackson Pollock), providing a useful new insight into Wood's place in American art."
--Publishers Weekly

"This audacious, ingenious and powerful book blows the lid off the study of Grant Wood, the creator of America's best-known work of art, aptly titled American Gothic. Evans frankly acknowledges Wood's homosexuality, which earlier biographers avoided entirely, and mines layer upon layer of meaning in his fascinating paintings that earlier writers completely missed. This is certainly one of the best and most psychologically penetrating studies ever written on an American artist, but it's more than that. It is a book that transforms our understanding of what goes on in the American heartland--and of the swirling currents and undercurrents of American life."
--Henry Adams, author of Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock.

"A fascinating and heartrending portrait of an artist forced to sacrifice his right to happiness and wholeness."
--Booklist (starred)

About the Author:

R. Tripp Evans is Professor of Art History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. He is the author of Romancing the Maya: Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820-1915 (2004). He received his doctoral degree in the history of art from Yale University and has served as a visiting lecturer at Yale, Wellesley College, and Brown University. He and his partner, Ed Cabral, live in Providence, Rhode Island.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 030726629X
• ISBN 13: 9780307266293
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432