Grant Wood 1891 - 1942

Private Collection, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, circa 1940 (acquired from the artist)
By descent in the family to the present owners

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Cedar Rapids Public Library, November-December 1955
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Chicago, Illinois, The Art Institute of Chicago; San Francisco, California, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Grant Wood, The Regionalist Vision, June 1983-August 1984, no. 58, fig. 99, illustrated p. 56
Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art; New York, Renwick Gallery; Washington, D.C., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Grant Wood's Studio: Birthplace of American Gothic, September 2005-July 2006, fig. 98, pp. 108-9, illustrated

The Cedar Rapids Gazette, November 6, 1955, sec. III, illustrated

The following condition report has been prepared by Julius Lowy Art Conservation: The artwork is executed in tempera, gouache and pencil on paper which has been lined onto Japanese tissue. It is in stable but oxidized condition. It is also torn on the lower left corner. There is an inscription on the upper left along with the signature. Ultraviolet examination reveals no visible prior restoration but for the lining. The art work shows layers of light surface dirt and apparent embedded dirt. Staining is visible along the edges.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

In Spring Plowing, the artist plays a variation on one of his favorite themes of the 1930s – the fertile rolling hills of Iowa farm country.  The drawing was a project suggested by New York art dealer Reeves Lewenthal of Associated American Artists and marks the intersection of a number of strands in Wood's biography.

Wood's creation of a textile design was a particularly appropriate response.  A farm child uprooted to small town life after the early death of his father, as a would-be schoolboy artist in Cedar Rapids, Wood avidly read The Craftsman (1901-1916), Gustav Stickley's magazine bible of the American arts and crafts movement. Taking a Craftsman correspondence course while still in high school, Wood headed, immediately after graduation, to Minneapolis for summer study with Ernest Batchelder, the author of both the correspondence course and of an influential 1904 textbook, The Principles of Design. Although Wood's subsequent formal training in art was minimal and sporadic, constricted by his need to earn a living, the lessons and values of his early arts and crafts training remained central to the core of his understanding of art. Wanda Corn notes that throughout his life "Wood's work reflected Batchelder's insistence on simplicity, repetition of form, beauty of contour and use of pattern. [These same principles] became the basis of Grant Wood's regional style. Wood in fact, called his late style 'decorative' a testimony to his grounding in the fin-de-siècle aesthetic (The Regionalist Vision, 1983,  pp. 5-6).

The influence of the arts and crafts movement extended far beyond the formal qualities of Wood's painting and drawing. He designed and built houses in Cedar Rapids for friends and clients, and decorated interiors in a variety of styles to suit their function and their owner's preferences, including his own quintessentially arts and crafts home and studio in a converted stable where he lived from 1925 to 1934. Wood's trip to Munich in 1928, where he saw the German Renaissance art that is credited with inspiring his ultimate regionalist style, was, in fact, occasioned by his need to supervise the production of a stained glass window he had designed for the Cedar Rapids Veterans Memorial. After his marriage in 1935, Wood moved to Iowa City and restored an 1858 Victorian House. It was entirely natural then, in 1939, for Wood to take a much loved motif and turn it into a prototype textile design.

The present drawing, Spring Plowing, shares a title with a 1932 oil painting by the artist, one of a group of regionalist pictures Wood created in the 1930s celebrating the carefully cultivated Iowa agricultural landscape. James Dennis notes the "wide-angle view" that characterizes these landscapes and describes Wood painting a "span of earth, creased and folded in gently undulating contours, that continues indefinitely. . .  [Details] of surface decoration have been minimized to no more than tiny points of reference across an open plane. Abstract design, or as Wood termed it, the 'decorative', now applies to the picture as a whole; light, shadow, and the patterned imprint left on the land by clearing and cultivation have been generalized into ornate forms" (James Dennis, Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture, 1975, p. 92).

In Spring Plowing Wood summons the man-made geometries of Midwest farming practice to create a design that conjures, on a small scale, the image of a handmade quilt, and on a grand scale, the rolling, midwestern landscape that is the hallmark of Wood's most iconic works.