Grant Wood

Grant Wood called himself “a farmer-painter; the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done or experienced,” Wood said, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.”

Wood was celebrated for having the common touch, perceived to be a simple man whose simplicity was not an artifice, but the very essence of his character.

In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed—and misunderstood—regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed as anything but plain, or simple . . .

R. Tripp Evans makes clear that Wood’s 1930 American Gothic and scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore stand in direct contrast to the dark, complex painter he was. We see that although Wood claimed to have been a self-taught painter, he was a sophisticated artist, trained in Paris and Munich in the 1920s. He was known for his heartland traditionalism and piety, but was in fact deeply ambivalent about religion. He maintained lifelong deeply idiosyncratic relations with family and spent most of his life hiding his homosexuality.

Drawing on letters, the artist’s unfinished autobiography, and his sister’s writings, as well as a cache of materials that were in his ex-wife’s possession, Evans brilliantly illuminates both the artist and the man.