10 facts about grant wood

Artist

born Anamosa, IA 1891-died Iowa City, IA 1942

Biography

Painter. A practitioner of American scene painting, Wood painted views of the Midwest in a realistic style mixed with satire. His most famous work, American Gothic, is an American icon.

Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)

Artist Biography

Grant Wood studied art sporadically at the Minneapolis Handicraft Guild, Iowa State University, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Académie Julian in Paris. Numerous exhibitions in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, helped Wood establish himself as an important regional artist; by 1935 he was teaching and lecturing across the United States. Wood was a leading exponent of American Scene painting, depicting views of the Midwest, particularly his nativ

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Grant Wood is known for his stylized and subtly humorous scenes of rural people, Iowa cornfields, and mythic subjects from American history—such as the Art Institute’s iconic painting American Gothic (1930). Along with other Midwestern Regionalist painters like John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, Wood advocated for a realistic style and recognizable subjects that showed local places and common people, a radically different approach from European modernism and its push toward abstraction.

Living most of his life in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Wood studied metalsmithing with Arts and Crafts movement designer Ernest A. Batchelder before moving to Chicago in 1913. There he worked at Kalo Silversmiths Shop while taking fine arts classes in the evenings at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Inspired by the Northern Renaissance art he saw on a trip to Munich, Germany in 1928, Wood shifted from the free, impressionistic style evident in the Art Institute’s

Loch Vale(1927) to the highly detailed, tightly painted forms that characterize American Gothic. Exhibited publicly

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Grant Wood

American painter (1891–1942)

For the politician, see Grant Woods.

Grant DeVolson Wood (February 13, 1891 – February 12, 1942) was an American artist and representative of Regionalism, best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest. He is particularly well known for American Gothic (1930), which has become an iconic example of early 20th-century American art.^[1]

Early life

Wood was born in rural Iowa, 4 mi (6.43 km) east of Anamosa, on February 13, 1891, the son of Hattie DeEtte Weaver Wood and Francis Maryville Wood.^[3][4] His mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids after his father died in 1901. Soon thereafter, Wood began as an apprentice in a local metal shop. After graduating from Washington High School, Wood enrolled in The Handicraft Guild, an art school run entirely by women in Minneapolis in 1910.

In 1913, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied from 1913 to 1916.^[5] He also performed some work as a silversmith.

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