Inquiry: R Tripp Evans: GRANT WOOD: A LIFE

Grant Wood is known as the iconic mid western American realist painter of the 1930s. He was “the artist in overalls”, the “farmer painter.” His work includes American Gothic, one of the most recognized paintings in the world. His rural landscapes have a broad appeal for their apparent simple celebration of the Iowan farmland. But looking beyond these superficial readings of his work, we find paintings that are unnerving; impenetrable; sometimes with a certain indefinable dread, often with a sly sense of humor and typically expressing the ambivalence Wood felt for his native environment. Far from being a simple painter of the mid west, Grant Wood is really one of the most difficult artists to understand. Tonight on Inquiry we talk with R. TRIPP EVANS, Professor of Art History at Wheaton College about his surprising and revealing new biography GRANT WOOD: A LIFE.