Art: Scooting Back to Anamosa

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Grant Wood at the Whitney: afresh look at an American icon

The worst fate an artist can suffer, late in life, is being famous for a single work. The worst after death is oblivion. Grant Wood (1881-1942), the American regionalist painter whose retrospective of 84 drawings, prints and paintings opened last week at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, suffered both. There was a time when millions of Americans who would never have looked inside a museum knew, from reproduction, one painting of Wood's, American Gothic: he with the pitchfork and faded bibbed overalls, she of the dowdy mien and disapproving eye, in front of that white frame house. For the mass audience it was the most famous painting in the world. The runner-up was Leonardo's Last Supper; and after that, what? The Mona Lisa? The Washington portrait by Peale? It hardly matters; the pre-eminence of American Gothic as a popular icon has not been challenged in several generations, since Wood painted it in 1930. Its fame sank Wood's reputation and took the rest of his work with it.

His national popularity ended some years after the Great Depression, which had fostered it. Americans were no longer so eager to embrace those formalized visions of Midwestern fecundity, the pre-industrial Eden. They were less threatened and so needed less solace. By 1950, the remaining audience for Wood had split into two groups: a small band of loyalists in the American heartland, who continued to venerate his work as distilled American truth, and everyone else, who considered him to be less than a footnote in the history of modern art, a provincial cornball.

Yet the tribal law of the art world is that nothing is immune to revival. In March, a drawing by Wood flabbergasted everyone by selling for $143,000, and now the Whitney show (which travels over the next year to museums in Minneapolis, Chicago and San Francisco) will undoubtedly create even loopier bids for the few works in Wood's small mature oeuvre that are not already in museums. It seems felicitous that Grant Wood's reviving angel, the art historian who has worked on him for a decade and who curated this fascinating show, should bear the name Wanda Corn. Moreover, the time is ripe. Once again, Americans are bemused by the deflation of their dreams. As it was in the '30s, the ethos that linked virtue to reward through honest toil is in deep trouble. Granted, the nostalgia for Wood's Midwest is now laced with self-evident ironies; one might say that it is a nostalgia not so much for a rural way of life as for a means of seeing a rural ethos without irony. The revival of Grant Wood is as good a cultural index of Reagan's America as the launching of Robert Rauschenberg was of Kennedy's.

A country boy who lived mostly in small cities, Wood drew nearly all the fundamental images of his work from the first ten years of his life on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa. No artist was more accommodating to his clients; his first mural commission, The Adoration of the Home, 1921-22, showing a group of allegorical figures around a cornfed goddess of the hearth who holds up a model house built by the Cedar Rapids developer Henry Ely, is a masterpiece of kitsch. But when unleashed, his imagination would scoot back to Anamosa every time.