inter-war American landscapes: Grant Wood

Last year I had been examining a series of landscape paintings, from very different countries, that seemed to share nothing but their inter-war timing. Paul Nash, Eric Ravilius and Harry Epworth Allen were British, Reuven Rubin was Israeli, Dorit Black was Australian and Rita Angus was a New Zealander. I concluded that in all these landscapes, the boldly presented hills and roads emphasised their treatment as mass and form. And like cubist painting decades earlier, the mountains became interconnecting planes of varying depth. In fact the simple, strong and bold lines were still quite cubist in feeling.

Grant Wood, Fall Ploughing, 1931. Figge Art Museum

So how did the American artist Grant Wood (1891–1942) compare and was he exposed to landscape art from other countries? In 1913 he enrolled at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied the world of contemporary art. And during the 1920s, he made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, including post-impressionism.

Since I was unfamiliar with Wood’s work, I will cite the findings of the University of Virginia with confidence. The composition of Wood's landscapes employed modernist tools freely. Trees, hills and people were distinctly streamlined, and the streamlining was employed to the same effect that it was on everything from architecture to automobiles in the 1920s and 30s: it created a sense of vast and easy movement, only in this case it was through an open landscape rather than contained in a piece of machinery.

Grant Wood, Near Sundown, 1933. Uni of Kansas

Further, modernist compositions from Sheeler's American Landscape to the houses of the International Style relied heavily on sharp and linear geometry. Wood also employed this kind of geometry in his paintings, not only in the arrangement of the scene, but in the actual execution itself. The sharply retreating lines of crops or trees, interrupted by an angular farmhouse in Fall Ploughing 1931 and Near Sundown 1933 were indicative of Wood's interest in this, as well as the carefully rectangular layout of such paintings as Spring Turning 1936. The regularity found in many of these compositions was a similarly modernist tool.

Art Deco appeared to have been Grant Wood's modernist niche, one he adopted more readily than any other offshoot of modernism. In evolving a style of artificial geometries, clean surfaces and relentless patterns, he was like the Art Deco decorators of his day. Although he surely would not have admitted it readily, the unlikely pairing of modernism and the regionalist Grant Wood bore unexpected fruit.

Grant Wood, Stone City Iowa, 1930. Joslyn Art Museum Omaha

In my previous post, I thought that bright sunlight and cast shadows in all the landscapes helped to define the natural forms. And importantly, for all the artists, the springy hills left almost no space in the painting for sky. Both these characteristics were equally relevant to Wood.

For a last comparison, look how Grant's British contemporary Paul Nash (1889–1946) remained entranced by the English countryside, recording the hilltops outside Oxford or Swanage in Dorset. He used vivid colours to reflect the heat of summer, or a bouncy tennis ball to display optimism in Event on The Downs 1934.

Paul Nash, Event on the Downs, 1934. Dulwich