Art: Iowa Detail

Like most hardworking people, lowans like detail. Rich in sharp, exact detail was Phil Stong’s novel, State Fair, laid in Des Moines (TIME, May 9). But Phil Stong omitted one detail of the Iowa State Fair—the art contest for a sweepstakes prize. Last week as the 1932 Fair began, this year’s sweepstakes was won again, as it has been every year since 1929, by Painter Grant Wood of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, an even more passionate detail-monger than Author Stong. Other prizes went to amateur artists from Grinnell, Schaller, Independence, Des Moines, Ames, Iowa City and What Cheer. Grant Wood, 40, was born at Anamosa, Iowa. His Iowa landscapes look like photographsof landscapes modelled out of hard candy. The man-made detail—houses, pumps, fence-palings—are mathematically meticulous. The natural detail is stylized, as in a treetop indicated by a score of leaf-shapes that look as though turned out by a cookie-mould. His people have pioneer faces, gimlet eyes, snapping turtle-mouths, long vertical furrows down their faces. lowans like Grant Wood’s hard, varnishedpaintings of themselves. They had conscientiously bought his early pictures. Trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Paris Julian Academic, Grant Wood worked for 15 years under the influence of various French schools. Several years ago, returning from Munich to Cedar Rapids, remembering German primitives, he suddenly saw Iowa and lowans as hard, rich primitives. At once his painting crystallized. In 1930 he won $300 and the bronze medal of the Art Institute of Chicago. He remembered U. S. primitives—Currier & Ives prints and old furniture catalogs. lowans bought his new pictures with as much pleasure as conscience. He painted The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover at West Branch. Of his famed American Gothic, portraits of a Mid-Western farmer & wife, Christopher Morley wrote: “In those sad and fanatical faces may be read much, both of what is Right and what is Wrong with America.” Most lowans saw on the canvas only the hard, exact details of Iowa. They were flattered that Iowa’s boy chose to paint Iowa.