Grant Wood
- Who was John Sharp?
- What happened to John Sharp after leaving Eldon?
- Who was Edward Rowan?
- What happened to Edward Rowan after the Little Art Gallery?
- What did the town of Eldon look like in 1930?
- Grant Wood's Place in Art Regionalism
- Founding an Art Colony
- Other Grant Wood Paintings & Resources
Grant Wood (February 13, 1891 - February 12, 1942) is Iowa’s most famous artist and his painting American Gothic is one of America’s most famous paintings. Wood was born on a farm near Anamosa in 1891 but moved to Cedar Rapids when he was ten years old after the death of his father. From then on, Wood lived most of his life in Cedar Rapids or Iowa City, dying of cancer the day before his 51st birthday.
Wood came to Eldon in 1930 with fellow artist and Eldon native John Sharp and Edward Rowan. He was inspired by the contrast of the modest little house with its (as he described it) "pretentious" Gothic style windows (there is one in each gable end).
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Who was John Sharp?
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John Sharp (1911-1966) was a talented Eldon native acquainted with Wood and Rowan prior to 1930. Sharp attended the University of Iowa in Iowa City between 1928 and 1930. He visited the Cedar Rapids Little Gallery where he met Grant Wood and Edward Rowan.
What happened to John Sharp after leaving Eldon?
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Paintings and Drawings by John Sharp |
Edward Rowan saw a future in art for John Sharp. Rowan awarded Sharp one of four art fellowships a few months after the August 1930 exhibits in Eldon. This fellowship enabled Sharp to travel to Davenport, Iowa for an intensive four week course of study under the supervision of painter Mr. Jaroslav Brozik. The other three artists selected included Evertt Jeffrey and Arnold Pyle of Cedar Rapids and Bernard Ferguson of Ottumwa.
Sharp maintained his connections to Wood and Rowan and joined them as a student in 1932 at the Stone City Art Colony. Sharp decided that he would study art more seriously. With the financial support of Carol M. Sax of New York, previously of Ottumwa, Sharp continued his education at the Art Students League of New York. He also enrolled at the National Academy of Design and the Greenwich Pottery School studying both painting and ceramics.
Sharp completed his well-rounded art education and relocated to New Hope, Pennsylvania where he lived and maintained a studio for a number of years. Sharp became a teacher, instructing a growing number of students. He was involved with local art and theatre efforts instrumental in founding the Bucks County Playhouse. Sharp continued painting original compositions using local scenes and people.
Sharp did not forget his Iowa roots. He was awarded three separate WPA commissions for post office murals. These murals include:
- “Autumn in Iowa,” depicting a fall farm scene and located in Bloomfield, Iowa
- “Summer,” featuring a family gathering berries and watering geese decorating the wall in Rockwell City, Iowa
- “Hunters in the Snow,” showing a typical Midwestern winter scene for Hawarden, Iowa.
On a 1961 visit to his parents in Eldon, Sharp presented Eldon’s First National Bank with his painting “Sam and Dave,” a painting of two Pennsylvania-Dutch farmers. This painting is now owned and on display at the Eldon Carnegie Public Library at 608 West Elm Street.
In later life Sharp spent winters in Palm Beach, Florida and summers on Nantucket Island, MA. In both locations Sharp maintained a studio and continued to teach art. Sharp became quite successful, and had paintings in many art museums in the United States and Canada. John Sharp never married and died in 1966 at the age of fifty-five. He is buried in a West Palm Beach, Florida cemetery. His paintings can still be enjoyed at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Bucks County, Doylestown, Pennsylvania and at the Eldon Carnegie Public Library.
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Who was Edward Rowan?
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Edward Rowan (1898-1946) was the director of the Cedar Rapids Little Gallery, referred to as simply the Little Gallery.
The Little Gallery was funded by the American Federation of Arts. Rowan graduated from Harvard University with a Masters in Fine Arts in 1928. The American Federation of Arts engaged Rowan to conduct an experiment in community fine arts. He was sent to Cedar Rapids to interest people in the arts and to educate communities about how to provide art opportunities with limited finances. The Carnegie Corporation of New York granted $50,000 to the project, which was expected to run three to five years. This funding established the Little Gallery.
In 1930 Rowan completed extension work by organizing a gallery in a rural community for one month. Whether his acquaintance with Sharp directly influenced Rowan’s decision to conduct the project in Eldon or if Rowan chose Eldon for other reasons, we cannot know for sure. We do know Rowan wanted…
“…to show that a small Midwestern community, entirely isolated from certain contacts, will still respond most heartily to them when the opportunity for appreciation of the fine arts is given.”
Rowan rented the A.G. Daniels’ house at 710 West Elm Street in Eldon, Iowa during the month of August 1930. Rowan’s wife Leata and their three small sons also came to Eldon. The house was located just east of Kremer Funeral Home on Highway 16. A fire destroyed the home in 1990 and the lot now serves as parking.
Three rooms on the first floor were used to hold exhibitions with a new show opening each Sunday afternoon. Rowan and his wife hosted receptions and gave art talks to the public. They provided classes in drawing and watercolor for children of all ages and music appreciation classes for older youth. All activities were free and open to the public.
Initially Rowan chose an exhibit of watercolors and paintings by Frederic Tellander, a noted Chicago painter, as well as sculptures and bronze works by Hunt, Diederich, Borglum, Berge and Harriet Frishmutt. The Tellander collection was already on a tour through Iowa.
The week of August 10 Rowan highlighted eight Cedar Rapids artists, including work by Wood. The third week dealt with the graphic processes, etchings, aquatints and wood blocks. The final exhibit featured Wapello County artists Joseph Townsend Funk of Ottumwa, John Sharp of Eldon, and others.
Rowan used local artists and work currently available to keep expenses low. Rowan invited artists to stop in Eldon during their travels and share their talents. Artists gave public talks and provided educational opportunities. One of the artists invited was Grant Wood.
What happened to Edward Rowan after the Little Art Gallery?
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Edward Rowan continued to serve as the director of the Little Gallery in Cedar Rapids (1928-1934). Wood and Rowan collaborated on special projects in the Cedar Rapids area, including the Stone City Art Colony. Rowan also lived in an ice wagon, just like Wood and the students, but Rowan’s wagon was simply white with flower boxes. In 1934 Rowan was promoted to Special Assistant to the President of the American Federation of Arts, F.A. Whiting. The Federation offices were in Washington, DC, where Rowan lived until his death in 1946. Rowan supervised artists producing federal-sponsored murals across America. He was responsible for:
- directing selection juries
- providing design criticism
- offering technical assistance
Rowan moved away from Iowa, but he kept active ties with Midwestern artists and continued to advocate and promote their work. Rowan remained a strong proponent of the arts and traveled extensively in the United States and Canada giving lectures about the evolving American Art scene. He frequently returned to Cedar Rapids to visit old friends. The legacy of his career was the 8000 artists he served as both a mentor and friend.
Edward Rowan died in 1946 and is buried in the Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
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What did the town of Eldon look like in 1930?
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In 1930 the town of Eldon was a small but booming railroad community. Rowan said that Eldon was a…
“…little community of 2,000 where many of the inhabitants have never seen an original work of art.”
On a small map of Iowa, Rowan noted that Eldon was the “end of the paved road,” and indeed it was. At that time the highway from Eldon to Selma had not been built. Rowan was very interested in discovering how the people of Eldon would react to his exhibits. His hope was…
“…to demonstrate that people as isolated as these Eldonites are sincerely interested in the finer things of life if… [the art] can be brought to them.”
Rowan also hoped to awaken interest in the arts in the nearby city of Ottumwa. He seemed to have some success, as the Ottumwa Courier reported that…
“…response to…the gallery…in Eldon...has been very good, not only from Eldon but from Ottumwa and neighboring communities.”
Unfortunately, however, Rowan’s dream that these exhibits would spark sufficient interest in Ottumwa to start an art museum never materialized.
Grant Wood's Place in Art Regionalism
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Grant Wood (1891-1942) became the spokesman for the Regionalist painting movement, when he famously and (somewhat outrageously) remarked that he “got all his best ideas for painting while milking a cow.” As part of playing that role, he frequently wore bib overalls in photos. Even if he did milk cows when he was a young boy, as an adult, this was not a part of his life as an artist.
In his uncompleted autobiography, he states that he always remembered his life on the farm from 1891 to 1901 and drew from those memories for his paintings. It is important to understand that he was using the farm life of the past for his inspiration and ideas. Evidence of modern life on the rural landscape, like telephone poles and tractors, rarely appear in his work.
Wood made his living as an art teacher in public schools until the late 1920s when he was persuaded to live off his artwork and his ability as a decorator. Although he had little formal art training, Wood followed the somewhat usual path for artists at that time when he traveled to France to paint and study art.
In later years, back home in Iowa with his rising fame as a Regionalist painter, Wood sometimes played the unrefined and untutored artist. The truth was he had been exposed to many contemporary methods of producing art in Europe, all lessons that he incorporated into his own art.
In France, he absorbed styles—particularly the loose brushwork and attention to light of the Impressionists—that are reflected in hundreds of his paintings of mainly rural subjects. These paintings can be found throughout Iowa, even in the study of the governor’s mansion at Terrace Hill in Des Moines.
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Grant Wood, designer. Memorial Window, 1928-29. Emil Frei Art Glass Company, Munich, Germany (fabricator). Stained glass, 24 x 20 ft. Veterans Memorial Building, Cedar Rapids. Courtesy of the |
Wood later traveled to Germany to complete a stained glass mural he was commissioned to do for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. In Germany, he was exposed to German and Flemish Renaissance painting, particularly the work of Hans Memling, Hans Holbein, and Albrecht Dürer, whose style influenced his later portraits, including American Gothic.
Wood ranged far and wide in finding influences, techniques, and styles to make his art. In his early work, there is evidence of the strong influence from the Arts and Crafts style and American Renaissance painting, such as in a mural he did for a Cedar Rapids real estate developer (for which he used a composition largely taken from murals done in a local bank). He simply adapted those lessons and produced work which was clearly his own.
Regionalism in art may be in any style and may be defined as painting what an artist lives with, in, or around. During the Great Depression, few artists could afford their way to Europe to study. In this sense, the Regionalist movement arose at an opportune time: helping artists realize the value of local subject matter when there was little choice for the artist to travel elsewhere. Regionalism included Wood’s theory as written in Time Magazine’s December 1934 issue:
“…regional art rests upon the idea that different sections of the U.S. should compete with one another just as Old World cities competed in the building of Gothic cathedrals. Only thus, [Wood] believes, can the U.S. develop a truly national art.”
Regionalism was not, however, exclusively about making art nor was it an invention of Wood’s. In Iowa, poet and writer Jay Sigmund suggested the idea of Regionalism to Wood. Sigmund, along with author Ruth Suckow reasoned that artists of any medium should focus on what they know rather than trying to emulate artists from New York and the East. At the University of Iowa, Professor Mabie argued for Regional theatre with a similar viewpoint on Regionalism as Wood held for Regionalist art.
Wood eventually became a principal spokesman for Regionalism in art for two reasons: first, because his painting American Gothic achieved almost instant fame and second, in the summers of 1932 and 1933, Wood ran a successful art colony at Stone City that received a great deal of attention from the national press. This too gave both Wood’s ideas and the concept of Regionalism a national audience and legitimacy in the art world.
In its 1934 Christmas issue, Time magazine ran a cover story about Regionalist artists and featured their work in the first ever color spread in that magazine. Time proclaimed that a “truly American art” was being born at last, and asserted that these Regionalist painters were creating it. It spoke of an art form free of the strange “isms” of modern European art (cubism, surrealism, etc.), and a print of American Gothic accompanied the article.
The article focused primarily on:Missourian, Thomas Hart Benton (1889 – 1975) who painted Missouri scenes among other things, but lived and worked in New York City; Iowan, Grant Wood and Kansan, John Steuart Curry (1892 – 1942), who painted pictures of life in Kansas, but lived and worked in Connecticut. Wood was the only one of these three artists who really “walked the talk,” – that is, he was the only one of the three who really lived in the place he was painting.
Eventually, Benton returned to Missouri from New York and Wood helped Curry land an artist-in-residence position in Wisconsin, thus leading all three artists to live their lives more closely to their public personas and to their subject matter.
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Stone City Art 
Grant Wood with his decorated ice wagon at Stone City Art Colony, Stone City Iowa, 1932. |
Founding an Art Colongy
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Wood’s first attempt at creating an art colony was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Wood lived and painted in a studio across the alley from a funeral home in what had been the funeral home’s carriage house and stable. Wood hoped that other barns along the alley might be remodeled into studios, resulting in an artist colony in Cedar Rapids. Unfortunately it was not financially feasible for other artists to remodel and live in the more rundown barns along the alley, and his dream of a Cedar Rapids art colony never materialized.
Stone City, Iowa
In 1932 Wood’s second attempt to found an art colony in Stone City, Iowa, was much more successful. It operated for six weeks the first summer and eight weeks the second, establishing Wood’s credentials to represent Regionalism.
Ten ice wagons served as dormitories, one house was remodeled as classroom and studio space, and another house was used for community space. The colony attracted painters from Iowa and elsewhere, and its “campus” excited the mostly young participating artists. Many of these artists would later work with Wood in the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) after he was appointed head of Iowa’s PWAP in 1934. Because of Wood’s commitment to the PWAP, the colony did not continue.
The appointment to the PWAP in many ways became Wood’s third attempt to mold young artists into a Regionalist team. Together he and his crew of novice artists worked on murals, designed by Wood, for the Parks Library of Iowa State University.
These murals are one of the great achievements of the New Deal art patronage. Although considered artistic triumphs, the task of cooperatively producing the murals left many of the participants dissatisfied. Eager to make their own art, the students later resented Wood’s control over the project and felt they were painting Wood’s murals for him. As a result, this third effort for an artist colony did not work out as Wood had idealized.
Other Grant Wood Paintings & Resources
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Wood painted more than just American Gothic and these creationscan be viewed in museums all over Iowa and around the country.
Museums with Grant Wood Paintings
and Other Grant Wood Information
- Amon Carter Museum (owns Parson Meems' Fable)
- The Art Institute of Chicago (owns American Gothic)
- Carnegie-Stout Public Library (owns Appraisal and Victorian Survival)
- Cedar Rapids Museum of Art (owns Woman with Plants, amoung others)
- Des Moines Art Center (owns The Birthplace of Herbert Hover)
- Dubuque Museum of Art (owns Iowa Autumn, Indian Creek)
- Figge Art Museum (owns Return from Bohemia and Self Portrait among others)
- Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (owns Dinner for Threshers)
- Grant Wood Art Gallery of Anamosa
- Grant Wood Murals of Iowa State University (owns When Tilage Begins and
Other Arts Follow murals) - Grant Wood's Studio 5 Turner Alley
- Joslyn Art Museum (owns Stone City, Iowa)
- Smithsonian American Art Museum
- Smithsonian Grant Wood Archives of American Art
- State Historical Society of Iowa (owns the American Gothic House)
- Stone City Art Colony
- Williams College Museum of Art (owns Death on the Ridge Road)
- The World of Grant Wood