Answers: Grant Wood

What would you like to see emphasized or highlighted during next year's 125th anniversary of the birth of artist Grant Wood? What is his legacy? What landmarks should we look back on? What monuments remain?

FROM OUR INBOX

For me, the essay in Wood's cannon, 'Revolt Against the City,” is the key. He advocated for art expressing our regional drama, especially that of the farmer, pointing to weather and climate, but also to 'the milk strikes, the violent protests against foreclosures” of the Great Depression, 'and the heroic attempts of government to find solutions for agrarian difficulties.”

Wood himself incarnated the theme of 'understatement,” Todd Dorman used in his column ('Searching for ways to celebrate Grant Wood's impact on world,” Nov. 23), rarely even painting foul weather.

In Guernica, Picasso utilized cubism to render the ugly, modern art themes of nihilism, the daimonic, and the disintegration of form, in direct relation to advancing levels of civilized violence. In contrast, Wood's modernist 'dynamic symmetry,” where he reformed rural images along angles, was a model for beauty.

Wood wasn't alone, as E. Bradford Burns showed in 'Kinship with the Land,” Iowa regionalism generally grappled with the dilemmas of rural tradition versus modernism in relatively mild ways.

Note that while Wood's supreme decade, the 1930s, started in severe anguish for Iowans, it was a huge advancement for Wood. Meanwhile, Iowa's Henry A. Wallace went to Washington and invented the farm bill, which was a shining model, Wallace argued in 'Achieving a Balanced Agriculture,” of 'economic democracy.”

Suddenly the lowest farm prices in history, (i.e. 7¢ corn at the Central City elevator, according to my grandfather, who lost his farm,) were replaced by 'living wage” farm prices, miraculously paid by 'the seven sisters of grain!”

Out of this my grandfather got back into farming and even gave a farm for my parents to pay the mortgage. Truly, awesomely, Iowa became 'the beautiful land” once again, and we lived that beautiful life here on our farms on into the 1960s, as national revival movements, counteracting major social crises, also burst forth, like the cornfield in Wood's 'Fertility.”

Meanwhile Wood was downplayed. The door to '5 Turner Alley” was treated like mere folk art. It was, in fact, simply the door to my mother's pre-marriage apartment, for us, a minor family story, not an honored display at a museum!

Iowa changed again. Iowa the ugly re-emerged. The Wallace programs were reduced and eradicated, under a call to eliminate 'one third” of US farmers within 'five years.” Four corporations now own two-thirds of U.S. hogs.

I've now worked to renew Wallace and Wood for 30 years. Out of my experience on our farm, at Living History Farms, as a farm organizer, policy wonk, and national family farm leader, I call for us to 'Take the Fertile Chance.” 'Let us say, here on this land: ‘From this day beauty will stand.'”

Brad Wilson

Springville

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Grant Wood is the classic 'young adult can't get away from here fast enough” experience. But he came back.

I am interested in - and am researching - Wood's childhood in Eastern Iowa.

I found an interesting letter he wrote at about age 9 to the main office of an organization that he joined, the Band of Mercy.

It was a children's branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

In his letter, he called his baby sister 'Nanny”, and said he had two calves as pets and raised ten ducks, four of which they ate for Thanksgiving dinner (1899).

As for landmarks? I would love to highlight any of the homes that still exist that Grant Wood decorated.

Diane Langton

Time Machine

The Gazette

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FROM FACEBOOK

' Vicki B.: a seres of weekend programs showing his work from start to finish.

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FROM TWITTER

' @PaulDeaton_IA: He should be remembered in the images he created. Who he was personally doesn't matter as much to Iowa.