Grant Wood (1891–1942) was an American painter best known for his depictions of the rural American Midwest. He was a leading figure of the Regionalist movement, alongside Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, which celebrated American heartland themes and rejected the abstraction dominating European art at the time.
Born on a farm in Iowa, Wood’s early artistic interests lay in the Arts and Crafts movement. He initially trained in metalwork and jewelry design. Between 1920 and 1928, he made four trips to Europe, where he studied Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. However, a pivotal trip to Munich in 1928 changed his trajectory. There, he was deeply influenced by the meticulous detail and clear, hard edges of Northern Renaissance masters like Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling.
Upon returning to Iowa, he abandoned his earlier impressionistic style for a sharp, precise realism that often featured satirical or idealized views of rural life. In 1930, he painted his masterpiece, American Gothic. The work, depicting a farmer and his daughter (modeled by Wood’s dentist and his sister, Nan) standing before a house with a carpenter Gothic window, caused a sensation at the Art Institute of Chicago and instantly became one of the most recognized images in 20th-century art.
Wood spent much of his later career teaching at the University of Iowa’s School of Art. His work often explored American folklore (Parson Weems’ Fable) and the geometric patterns of the Iowan landscape (Young Corn, Stone City). He died of pancreatic cancer one day before his 51st birthday.
Active in others filds : Lithography, Jewelry Design, Metalwork, Furniture Making, Camouflage Design (WWI).
