Grant Wood and the Politics of Regionalism

There was talk about hicks, chauvinism, “Amurricanism”, regionalism and a corrupt bohemianism. The potted pansies of Boulevard cinquante-septieme and the East side boys didn’t like his work and relegated Mr. Grant Wood to the corn belt with the label “fascist” tagged onto him.

—Reginald Marsh, “On Grant Wood,” Demcourier

Regionalism was on the rise in the 1930s, and Iowan Grant Wood was its most visible and controversial champion. Although he published few words and was a painstaking artist who produced a modest body of paintings, Wood became a lightning rod for praise and derision during the last twelve years of his life. Beginning with the instant acclaim of American Gothic in 1930 and ending with his death in 1942, this mild mannered, plainspoken painter in bib overalls became a public figure and blazing icon—the leading apostle for the regionalist cause as well an easy target for those who scorned it.

Since the 1940s, Wood has suffered more than his fair share of scorn, much of it due to his association with the slippery and often misunderstood notion of regionalism. To fully understand Wood, it is necessary to have a fuller appreciation of regionalism. In its most general sense this essay is a case study of the uses and abuses, the perceptions and misperceptions, of a crucial concept often linked to the American Midwest. More specifically, this article is designed to broaden our understanding of the fundamental meaning of regionalism and Wood’s relationship to it during the 1930s and early 1940s, to place his midwestern-rooted art and ideology within the larger context of the many-faceted regional impulse of his times, and to suggest its ongoing relevance in the present.

Fig. 1.

Grant Wood (studio portrait), 1941. Unidentified photographer.

Courtesy of the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa; City of Davenport Art Collection, Grant Wood Archive.

During the last twelve years of his life, Wood’s regionalist stance attracted lavish praise and deep contempt. As the poster boy for regionalism, Wood was extolled in Time magazine as “the chief philosopher and greatest teacher of representational US art” and the nation’s “most fervid believer in developing ‘regional art’.” Elsewhere he was hailed as a genius who has

Fig. 2.

Grant Wood, Stone City, Iowa, 1930. Oil on wood panel.

Courtesy of the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; gift of the Art Institute of Omaha, 1930.35. Art © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by vaga. New York, New York.

Fig. 3.

Joe Jones (1909–1963), American Farm, 1936. Oil and tempera on canvas, 29 13/16 × 39 15/16 in. (75.7 × 101.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 36.144.

With permission of the Joe Jones Estate. Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

“carried out an undertaking . . . without parallel in the history of American art.”¹ In 1934, Gertrude Stein praised Wood as “the foremost American painter,” and declared, “We should fear Grant Wood. Every artist should be afraid of him, for his devastating satire.”² Yet as the whipping boy for highbrow critics on the left, Woods was lampooned as a simpleminded escapist, and his paintings were lambasted as childish doodlings with “trees made of tissue paper, absorbent cotton, and sponge rubber” and as being “completely derivative in both symbol and technique from the Europe that the Middle West has supposedly thrown off.” They were also scorned as idyllic dreamscapes and “fat toy territory” without a “trace of insight into the real weather of his Middle West—dust storms and drought, slaughtered pigs, unsown crops, or crops plowed under.”³

Wood remained a polarizing presence after his death, becoming one of the most celebrated and reviled painters in American history. Thomas Hart Benton eulogized his departed ally as a godlike figure whose work will forever stand as a shining monument above the “refuse of America’s prewar decadence,” a beacon pointing the way for “a...