Celebrity cut two ways for painter Grant Wood, according to this provocative biography by art historian R. Tripp Evans. Before his painting American Gothic was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930, Wood had only a local reputation in his native Iowa; afterward he was lauded for creating "one of the finest records of America that has ever been painted," and his fame spread like a prairie wildfire. Press interest meant, however, that Wood had to create something even more complex than his paintings: he needed a sturdy cover story for himself.
Prior to 1930, Wood had "cultivated a childlike dependence, passivity, and appearance" that kept busybodies at arm's length and maintained what Evans characterizes as Wood's high degree of self-surveillance; after celebrity came his way, he presented himself as a farmer-painter (although he had never farmed) and pretended that he was self-taught (just forget he had studied in Paris and Munich). To play the part he created for himself, Wood went so far as to dress in overalls (reining in his inner dandy). Noting that Wood "considered the farmland of Iowa, above all, as a metaphor for male strength and beauty," Evans deftly analyzes the origins of the enduring power of Wood's imagery; he also strips away the totally bogus cover story of a man who was deathly afraid that his homosexuality would be exposed.
Wood's secret was hidden in plain sight. The iconography of his paintings may have appeared to be "overwhelmingly masculine" (gone was the Impressionist-influenced style that American critics at the time dismissed as "feminine"), but Evans reveals the homoerotic charge to certain works and much coded imagery. Then, there were the protégés from the mid-1920s onward; standing side by side, they would define Wood's "type" to anybody paying the slightest attention. To neutralize any suspicions that such a long line of handsome protégés might create, Wood always lived with his mother and late in life married an older woman who seemed to understand the arrangement perfectly.
Following that 1935 marriage, Wood's productivity declined, his debts mounted and he ran into trouble with his college teaching job; divorce came for the couple in 1939, an inevitability that also brought an end to an unseemly crush that Wood harbored for the adult married son of his wife. Recovering from various personal disasters, Wood tried to make changes in his life, although his last major work continued to reflect "the twin themes of exposure and punishment," sources fundamental to his greatest artistic achievements.--John McFarland
Shelf Talker: A powerful biography that both reclaims Grant Wood as an important American artist and reveals the tyranny of the homosexual closet on the man.