Grant wood biography and art works
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BIOGRAPHY
In , Grant Wood was born to Hattie Weaver and Francis Maryville Wood on a farm near Anamosa, Iowa, a rural town with a population of about 2, After the unexpected death of her husband in , Hattie Wood relocated with her four children to her parent’s house in Cedar Rapids. Removed from their idyllic family farm, Grant Wood and his siblings quickly accustomed to the new, urban setting that surrounded them.
Wood’s grammar school teacher, Emma Gratten, is credited as the first person to support the youngster’s interest in art. At the age of fourteen, Wood submitted a drawing of oak leaves to a sweepstakes and won first prize. During his high school years, he befriended artist Marvin Cone (), and together, they designed sets for the school’s theater department. On the night of his graduation, he left for a summer course taught by nationally known architect and designer Ernest Batchelder () at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft.
In ,
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Grant Wood is known for his stylized and subtly humorous scenes of rural people, Iowa cornfields, and mythic subjects from American history—such as the Art Institute’s iconic painting American Gothic (). Along with other Midwestern Regionalist painters like John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, Wood advocated for a realistic style and recognizable subjects that showed local places and common people, a radically different approach from European modernism and its push toward abstraction.
Living most of his life in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Wood studied metalsmithing with Arts and Crafts movement designer Ernest A. Batchelder before moving to Chicago in There he worked at Kalo Silversmiths Shop while taking fine arts classes in the evenings at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Inspired by the Northern Renaissance art he saw on a trip to Munich, Germany in , Wood shifted from the free, impressionistic style evident in the Art Institute’s
Loch Vale() to the highly detail
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Grant Wood
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Who Was Grant Wood?
Grant Wood was an American painter who is best known for his work depicting the Midwest. In , he exhibited his most famous painting, American Gothic. Among the most iconic and recognizable images in American art, it helped propel Wood to fame and launch the Regionalist movement, of which Wood became the dem facto spokesperson.
Early Life
Grant Wood was born on his parents’ farm outside of Anamosa, Iowa, on February 13, These idyllic settings would leave a lasting impression on Wood and profoundly influence his later thinking and work, though he would spend much of his life after the age of 10 in the relatively more urban setting of Cedar Rapids, where his mother moved Wood and his younger sister Nan after their father died.
Wood developed his interest in art while still in grammar school and showed promise. He continued to nurture his talents in high school where he designed sets for plays and illustrated student publications. After gradua