When I was growing up in Rock Island, we had a lot of local celebrities. Grant Wood wasn't one of them, even though he was born in Anamosa, Iowa, just north of the Quad Cities, oversaw Stone City Art Colony nearby, and taught at the University of Iowa, about 45 minutes away.
It was because of
American Gothic, the second most famous painting of all time, after
Mona Lisa, and the most parodied.
We hated that painting. It gave the Midwest a bad name. The goggle-eyed farmer with pitchfork looks like he's about to go storming off to protest civil rights, or gay rights, or violence in comic books. The weepy woman, her beauty faded by the boredom and isolation of farm life, dreams of escape.
Even today,
if I admit to being from the Midwest, I get "How awful it must have been for you! Nothing to do but watch the corn grow, surrounded by all those redneck bigots!"
Um...no. We had symphonies, live musicals, operas, ballets, art galleries, and museums. Iowa had the first class in Gay Studies in the world, and was one of the first states to get gay marriage.
So I didn't know much about Grant Wood until I started investigating
John Bloom, who sculpted the statue of a naked man that I got for Christmas in junior high.
In 1926, the aspiring artist won a prize for an oil painting, "The Burial," at the Iowa State Fair. The judge, celebrity painter Grant Wood, invited him to join his new Stone City Art Colony. For the next two years, they lived together, in a converted ice wagon (rather a small space!). Together they worked on murals for libraries and post offices all over the state.
In 1934, when Grant went to the University of Iowa, he took John with him.
In 1935, Grant married Sara Sherman Maxon (the marriage ended in divorce three years later). John moved to Davenport, where he married Isabel Bloom in 1938.
Sounded a lot like a spurned lover.
Sure enough. A new biography,
Grant Wood: A Life, by R. Tripp Evans, reveals that Grant was gay. When he got to the University of Iowa, some faculty members in the Art Department suspected, and they already looked down upon Grant for rejecting the status quo of European Impressionism -- ergo his screen marriage.
After his divorce in 1938, Grant had a series of handsome male "roommates." This riled the homophobic faculty so much that, superstar or not, they wanted him out. They waited until November 1941, when Wood was away on Sabbatical, then invited a writer from
Time magazine to investigate. The University President managed to put a kibosh on the story and quickly moved Wood into a new division. However, he didn't get a chance to return to the faculty that loathed him. He died of pancreatic cancer in February 1942.
But if you look carefully at his work, you can see the glimmers of homoerotic desire.
And even that stupid
American Gothic isn't heterosexist. Everybody thinks the woman is the farmer's wife, but she's his daughter.
