Grant Wood
Grant DeVolson Wood , called Grant Wood , (born February 13, 1891 in Anamosa , Iowa , † February 12, 1942 in Iowa City , Iowa) was an American painter of American regionalism of the 1930s. His picture from 1930, American Gothic , made him known internationally.
Life
Grant DeVolson Wood was born into a Quaker family on his parents' farm in Anamosa. He had a sister, Nan, and a brother, Frank. After his father's death in 1901, Wood's family moved to Cedar Rapids . The boy initially did an apprenticeship in a local wood and metal company, but soon became interested in drawing and painting and showed some talent in this: he won first prizes at the age of 14. The early success strengthened his desire to embark on an artistic career. Together with his friend Marvin Cone, he graduated from Washington High School in Cedar Springs in 1910.
Wood then enrolled at an arts and crafts school in Minneapolis . From 1913 he took evening classes sporadically for three years at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked as a silversmith. Wood dropped out in 1916. During the First World War he was in the US Army in Des Moines for the design of the camouflage paint ( camouflage ) of military vehicles. After his release, he returned to Cedar Rapids, where he taught art in junior high school. In the summer of 1920 he visited Paris with his friend Marvin Cone, where he studied at the Académie Julian from 1923 to 1924 and visited Sorrento in Italy. In the summer of 1926 he exhibited in Paris, but did not have the success he had hoped for. When Wood was in Munich for a month in early 1928 to finish a large stained glass window, he was in Europe for the last time.
Wood has been in Europe with different painting styles, even with the Impressionism familiar, sustainable impressed him the clear early Netherlandish painting style of Jan van Eyck . The style of the early Flemish painting should take Wood soon. He moved into a studio at 5 Turner Alley in Cedar Rapids in 1924, which he used for ten years and which now houses the city's art museum.
In 1927 Wood was commissioned to design a large 24 × 20 foot (7.20 × 6 m) stained glass window for the Veterans Memorial Buildings in Cedar Rapids to commemorate the fallen of all six American wars. The soldiers depicted wore the uniforms of the War of Independence, the War of 1812, the Mexican War (1848), the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the First World War. The windows were finished by Emil Frei in Munich. In the spring of 1928, when Wood was working there on the faces of the soldiers, he frequently visited the Alte Pinakothek and studied painting from the late Gothic and early Renaissance periods . He copied the painting of Albrecht Dürer , Hans Holbein the Elder. Ä. and Hans Holbein the Elder J. Wood also learned about the emerging New Objectivity . He was annoyed about the lack of recognition of American artists by the Europeans and wrote to his sister Nan: “The local art critics and dealers do not want American art, they think the country is too big and too new for any kind of culture and too primitive and too underdeveloped to produce any artist. "
In America, success began to change Wood's life. In 1933 he founded the Stone City Art Colony near his hometown to help and promote artists during the Great Depression . In the following year 1934 he became a lecturer in painting at the University of Iowa . He soon saw himself as a mentor of a new kind of painting based on a regional American sense of art, and extended the style, previously only used for portraits, to landscapes and narrative images. At the same time, his pictures were harshly criticized as early as 1935 because of their decorative mannerism and sentimentality. After 1940 the fashion of regionalism came to an end.
Grant Wood died of liver cancer at Iowa City University Hospital the day before his 51st birthday on February 12, 1942 .
plant
Probably the best-known work by Grant Wood is the painting American Gothic, painted in 1930 . The picture suddenly made the hitherto relatively unknown painter famous. His artistic training had been fragmentary and concentrated on both craft and graphic techniques as well as the visual arts. He seems to have been completely cut off from the avant-garde currents in Europe in the 1920s. A job-related stay in Germany at the end of the 1920s changed his style of painting: He saw the huge collection of early German and Flemish painters in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and was deeply impressed by the sharp, clear outlines and the realistic representation with which the old artists lived their lives Had captured time. It is possible that he was also influenced by the pictures of the New Objectivity , namely the artists Christian Schad and Franz Radziwill .
American Gothic is not the first picture in a new style. It was preceded in 1929 by Woman with Plants , a portrait of his mother.
His only self-portrait and a collection of his work is in the Figge Art Museum in Davenport , Iowa , along with the Grant Wood Archives .
literature
- Deba Foxley Leach: Grant Wood: The artist in the hayloft . Prestel, 2005, ISBN 3-7913-3401-8 . (English)
- Kate F. Jennings: Grant Wood . JG Press, 2003, ISBN 1-57215-357-1 . (English)
- James M. Dennis: Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry . University of Wisconsin Press, London 1998, ISBN 0-299-15584-6 . (English)
Web links
- Search for "Grant Wood" in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
- Grant Wood on kunstaspekte.de
- Literature by and about Grant Wood in the catalog of the German National Library
- Grant Wood Papers Online at Smithsonian Archives of American Art
- Biography at Cedar Rapids Museum of Art (English)
swell
- ↑ Grant Wood , crma.org, accessed on March 9, 2013
- ↑ www.tilenut.com - Grant Wood Biography (English)
- ^ Grant Wood: American Gothic. Art Institute of Chicago , accessed July 15, 2008 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Wood, Grant |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Wood, Grant DeVolson (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American painter, representative of American realism |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 13, 1891 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Anamosa , Iowa |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 12, 1942 |
| Place of death | Iowa City , Iowa |