There’s a new biography out about famous American (and Iowan) painter Grant Wood (R. Tripp Evans’s “Grant Wood: A Life”) and a review in the NYTimes reports it doesn’t paint the typical portrait of Grant as the “simple, homespun, rustic Iowan he may have seemed to be.” And it questions Midwest travel marketing that welcomes people to “Grant Wood Country” and Wood’s vision “of the values that made this country great!”
Instead, the book reportedly argues that Grant and his work have another side – that’s more shall we say eccentric or contrarian even sensual and sly. Those rolling hills of Anamosa County depicted in his famous painting “Stone City?” – the author says they unmistakably refer to rounded mens’ buttocks (Grant, while married to a woman, was homosexual we’re told) and I won’t even mention what a field of sprouting cornstalks represents. Go ahead, take a guess.
It does have me wondering more about the Grant Wood poster we have hanging over our bed that shows three dour old Daughters of the American Revolution holding tea cups. I’ve always found it amusing but now could it mean something else? See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/books/04book.html?scp=1&sq=Grant%20Wood&st=cse
