Sultry Night

I did a double-take. Yep, that was indeed a naked man right there on the wall in the middle of the Tipton library. Remarkably progressive for this small farming town near our campground in Iowa. And a remarkable example of how Grant Wood’s artistic genius has been given short shrift by the pop culture focus on his famous pinched-faced farmers.

Wood spent most of his life just down the road from where I grew up. He taught at my alma mater, the University of Iowa from 1934 to 1941. And yet, like most folks, I knew little about him other than that he painted American Gothic.

This gigantic homage to Wood’s best known farmers is touring Iowa at the moment.

And what a far cry from those farmers the one in this lithograph of Sultry Night was. American Gothic always seemed like a caricature to me, something this farmer clearly is not.

Grant Wood’s self portrait.

The library has one of a very limited edition of these prints because when it was produced in 1939, the postal service banned it from being mailed to customers as obscene, so only 100 were ever sold.

Spring Turning

Much of Wood’s work depicted the land that surrounded him, like this painting that so perfectly illustrates the serene beauty of the farmland in the part of Iowa where I’m from—something I tried in vain to capture with my camera while we were there.

Daughters of Revolution

But there were a few other notable departures from the expected. Like this piece Wood called Daughters of Revolution, where he depicts the founding fathers as cross-dressing members of the DAR standing in front of a recreation of Washington Crossing the Delaware.  Imagine how that went over in 1932.

There is wide speculation that Grant Wood was gay. I can only wonder what his body of work would have been like had he been let out of the closet.