Portrait of an artist

A candid new examination of how homosexuality and America’s heartland shaped the iconic painter Grant Wood

November 07, 2010|Jonathan Lopez, Globe Correspondent

In 1930, artist Grant Wood achieved sudden national fame with “American Gothic,’’ his iconic painting of a pitchfork-wielding farmer and a stern, black-clad woman posed before a Victorian farmhouse. Hailed by Depression-era newspapers as a symbol of American values and by avant-garde intellectuals as a satire of small-town provincialism, “American Gothic’’ has since become one of the most reproduced and parodied artworks in history — spoofed in political posters for the legalization of marijuana and cartoons about Bill Clinton’s marital woes. But the true motivations behind this picture remain as difficult to characterize as the soft-spoken and deeply-closeted gay man who painted it.

A provocative new biography, “Grant Wood: A Life,’’ by Wheaton College professor R. Tripp Evans, is the first to deal candidly with Wood’s sexual orientation. Searching through archival documents, correspondence, and private papers, Evans has constructed a rich and compelling portrait of Wood that sheds new light not only on the artist’s work but on the intimate details of life in the American heartland during the first half of the 20th century.

Perhaps the book’s most surprising revelation is that Wood’s homosexuality was something of an open secret in his hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where an attitude of “don’t ask; don’t tell,’’ allowed a small gay and lesbian subculture to exist in peace, so long as it remained invisible. Respected figures in the community, including prominent businesspeople and a local school principal, shielded Wood from invidious scrutiny and encouraged his artistic aspirations. David Turner, owner of the primary funeral home in Cedar Rapids and a member of one of the county’s founding families, acted as Wood’s first patron. Turner allowed Wood and the artist’s widowed mother to live for years rent free in the mortuary’s vacant carriage house, formerly a storage facility for horse-drawn hearses.

The success of “American Gothic’’ greatly complicated Wood’s quiet existence. As the artist’s sister, Nan, who lived for a time with her brother and mother, later recalled, “Strangers now considered the studio a public place rather than the home where we lived. . . . A group arrived while we were eating, and one of them said, ‘You just go on eating; that’s perfectly all right.’ ”