5: Wood and the Personal Vision
Grant Wood
Young Corn, 1931Oil on masonite panel, w29.875" x h24"
Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, IA USA
(From collection of the Cedar Rapids Community School District)
Went over last week how still life can be used as a vehicle for personal symbolism and/or aesthetic vision, and the same thing is true in landscape.
Above, a painting by Grant Wood, American Regionalist (and main artistic ambassador for my home state). It represents pretty well the stubborn sense of joy he kept in his work: hills best described as voluptuous, sun-soaked fields, everything ordered and fertile and happy.
But context: Wood worked at the height of the Great Depression. And the machine age had come to city and farm alike, automobiles were widespread and multiplying, thickets of skyscrapers were going up to accommodate urbanization and a faster pace of life. The Dust Bowl was gearing up in the southwest, and would absolutely go on to affect Iowa farms as well.
In other words, ^that all up there^ didn't exist for Wood any more than it exists for us.
So why'd he show it that way? Many possible reasons, but one of the most satisfactory is that it was intentionally created as a sort of myth, a rallying narrative about the land and about the spirit in which a relationship with the land should be approached. (The painting style would back this up; there's no straightforward realism, and instead a purposeful abstraction and idealization of the fields, trees, etc.)
But in any case, the bottom line is that Grant did use his landscapes to reject how the world actually looked, and replace it instead with something of his own. In this way, landscape can be treated not as an end in itself, but as a vehicle for whatever idea the artist would like to communicate.