Grant Wood’s Hymns to the Heartland | America Magazine
In its great sailing ship by the river, decorated by visitors parading its terraced decks, the Whitney Museum of American Art in Renzo Piano’s 2015 building has proven to be improbable architecture now indispensable to the New York experience (very much like its High Line neighbor, which begins directly next door). Finally able to show its permanent collection more completely than was ever possible in its former home uptown, it has to its credit the superlative opening exhibition, “America Is Hard to See,” the 2017 Biennial (the most highly praised in years) and a series of monographic shows that served to widen public appreciation of the depth and breadth of American art. To that list we can now add “Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables,” an authoritative if somewhat random-feeling show curated by Barbara Haskell, on view through May 10.
This is the largest exhibition of the artist ever mounted, with some 120 paintings, prints, lithographs, book illustrations and decorative objects. One of these is a reproduction that charmingly strikes the keynote of a life far more complex and troubled than is usually supposed. While Wood was still searching for a style he could call his own, he taught for several years at McKinley Junior High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In the 1924-25 school year, he guided 45 ninth-grade boys as they painted a frieze called “Imagination Isles” for the school cafeteria. As the class unfurled the piece, painted in a cartoon-like Art Nouveau style, one student read from Wood’s script: “No human body can visit these islands. Only the spirit can come.” You wonder how much the boy realized he was revealing his teacher’s soul: “Almost all of us have some dream-power in our childhood but without encouragement it leaves us and then we become bored and tired and ordinary…. We become so busy getting ourselves all nicely placed that we are apt to forget the dream spirit that is born in all of us.”