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Iowan artist Grant Wood produced a
charming lithograph of just such a national ritual, possibly Arbor Day, in which a public
school teacher and her students celebrate a public event of planting a tree as a symbol of
national perpetuity and rich national resources (fig. 3). Wood was a Regionalist artist,
someone who believed that American culture could produce a characteristic artistic vision
that did not require the emulation of European art. Regionalism sought out subjects and
styles of imagemaking that would deepen Americans' awareness of their own national
culture. Oftentimes, Wood did so with tongue-in-cheek, with a robust consciousness of the
narrowmindedness and provinciality of many Americans. But he also painted the native
wealth of what he saw such as the rolling prairie and neatly manicured towns of Iowa. He
portrayed the rural world of the midwest with the caricaturist's eye for the type, whether
person, period, or place. Characteristic of Wood's art, Tree Planting Group (fig. 3) uses
a naive style drawn from folk tradition and decorative art in order to suggest something
that is true in the manner of a popular tale or folk memory. The naive style and the
selection of nostalgic subjects recalls such popular visual culture as Currier & Ives
prints and the contemporary sentimentality of Norman Rockwell, but interposes between the
artist and his subject-matter a wry distance that makes his pictures a subtly ironic act
of reflection on the prospect of painting the American character. [3] ...[continue] |
| 3. The best study of Grant Wood is Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist's Vision, exhibition catalogue (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). |
