Happy 135th birthday, Grant Wood!

Grant Wood, best known for his iconic American Gothic, lived and worked most of his life in and around Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His legacy in the area—in addition to an exhaustive collection of his work in the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art permanent collection—includes an annual art festival, a grade school (my alma mater!) and even the entire region’s public education agency—all in his name.

Of course, no Cedar Rapids student’s education is complete without thorough coverage of Wood’s stylized, iconoclastic, humorous and sometimes political oeuvre. And this Cedar Rapids student came away with a lifelong love of his work.

Grant Wood was a pioneer in a loosely coordinated artistic movement called Regionalism, which eschewed modernist, abstract trends like Impressionism and Cubism in favor of stylistic, romanticized views of everyday rural life in the 1930s. The Regionalists were less concerned with the trendy politics of 1930s Social Realists than with renouncing the hegemony of popular European art and culture and celebrating the honest work ethic and modest demeanor of the Midwest.

In 1928, Wood received a commission to create a giant stained-glass window for the American Legion in Cedar Rapids. In preparation, he traveled to Munich to study ancient stained-glass techniques under Germany’s famed master craftsmen. The window he created, featuring a 16-foot Lady of Peace standing over six life-size soldiers representing the Revolutionary War through World War I, was a masterpiece of technique, form and color. Though as far as Google and every search term I can think of are concerned, it never had a name. But you can see it in all its shimmery namelessness here:

Fun fact: The model for the Lady of Peace figure was his sister, Nan Wood Graham, who was also the model for the female figure in "American Gothic."

Despite the window's unmistakable American themes, it drew fire from misguided patriots who criticized Wood for studying with the Germans—the enemy!—so soon after the Great War. One of the most vocal groups was the local chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution.

Wood’s elegant response: Daughters of Revolution, a satirical painting showing three dour spinstresses standing self-righteously—one, pinky extended in haughty indignation, holding a teacup in my grandmother’s china pattern—in front of Emmanuel Leutz’s famous Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Wood’s point, lost completely on the knee-jerk reactionaries the painting so elegantly mocked, lies in the fact that Washington Crossing the Delaware—that beloved icon of American patriotism—was painted by a German.

I loved this painting before I even knew its story. The delightfully smug women drew me in because their spiritual progeny hung just a few branches over on my family tree. The Blue Willow teacup fascinated me because its cousins served as my grandmother’s everyday dishes. (Have you ever eaten green Jell-O from a blue plate? It looks very-not-deliciously brown.) And that shape—that relentless horizontalness—made the painting such a challenge to display in any setting ... like right here on my blog.

My relentlessly horizontal framed print of Daughters of Revolution—which has followed me through six houses, apartments and condos in Cedar Rapids and Chicago—now hangs in our relentlessly long Grant Wood Alley front hallway, and one of my grandmother's Blue Willow teacups sits safely on a tastefully underlit shelf with a small collection of other blue-and-white ceramicware in my bedroom. They are quite literally among my favorite possessions. 

And I am proudly and dutifully as a Cedar Rapidian sharing these works and their stories here so you can enjoy their oft-overlooked brilliance and awesomeness in celebration of Grant Wood's birthday.

Art: Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring, James Ensor

At first glance, James Ensor's 1891 Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is perhaps a silly take on Halloween imagery. Or an homage to the memento mori ("remember that you [have to] die") traditions of Medieval and Renaissance art that placed skeletons, skulls and other symbols of mortality among the world and activities of the living. Or a metaphor for the last gasps of Impressionism and its emphasis on color and light at the expense of representational accuracy.

While the latter probably has a grain of truth to it—Impressionism in Europe had largely been killed by the emotional distortions and manipulations of Expressionism by 1891 (think of Edvard Munch's 1893 The Scream)—the skeletons and the pickled herring in Ensor's painting were more along the lines of prescient precursors to the illogicalities of Surrealism and the unorthodox silliness of the Avant-Garde.

And they were totally about his pettiness.

Ensor actually painted Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring in response to negative reviews of his work. In his world of distortions, illogicalities and silliness, the art critics are the skeletons (one with a few wisps of hair on his otherwise balding head, the other with an ostentatious hat that's failing to make him look important) and Ensor is the pickled herring. And the whole idea is bizarre and probably lost to everyone to whom it hasn't been explained.

Today, though, Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring is a relatively obscure work of dark humor with light-hearted imagery that starts 21st Century viewers down the path toward the increasingly spooky, scary traditions of modern Halloween. So enjoy its silliness now. And be sure to lock your doors and hide your pickled herring before the end of October.

Art: Horizontal Tree

Horizontal Tree
Piet Mondrian
1912

A series of increasingly Cubist tree paintings marked Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s transition from representational and Impressionistic art to the Neoplastic geometries of white, gray and primary colors framed in horizontal and vertical black lines for which he is best known.

 
These later paintings—created in pursuit of a harmonious universal beauty told through a simplified visual vocabulary—were the culmination of the geometric-abstraction De Stijl (The Style) movement he co-founded in 1917.

 
And while these colorful, geometric masterpieces are icons of abstract art and continue to be powerful influences over architecture, graphic design and fashion, I find his tree paintings to be far more thoughtful, evocative, disciplined and noble.

Art: September

Like Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and a host of iconic 20th century painters, Gerhard Richter has developed a signature visual vocabulary of sometimes photorealistic images obscured to varying degrees in scrapes, blurs, flecks, and pulls of wet and dry paint. Evoking at once powerful movement and misty tranquility, his works require a commitment of effort and time to absorb. 

His September (2005) utilizes this technique to stunning effect. Two silvery twin towers, the tops of which disappear into monumental clouds of opaque browns and blacks, stand defiantly against horizontal winds of scrapes and streaks and blurs. The painting captures a moment of enormity with grace and respect and breathtaking radiance.

Art: The Burghers of Calais

(Original French title: Les Bourgeois de Calais)
1889
Auguste Rodin
Impressionism (1872-1892)

The relatively short-lived period of Impressionism in art was as defined by what it wasn't—clear lines, plausible composition, realistic depictions of figures and the space they occupied—as by what it was: impressions of visual perception told through explorations of changing light and color and even through the rough-hewn textures created in paint using varying brush strokes. A radical departure from the longstanding—though always evolving—rigors of academic Realism, the fresh ideas of Impressionism on canvas quickly inspired similar reinterpretations of artistic norms in music, literature and sculpture.

Enter François-Auguste-René Rodin.

Classically trained and well-established in creating representational art, Rodin saw Impressionism's dreamy figure studies and craggy, dimensional textures as a vocabulary he could use to render bold ideas, subjective emotions, and plays of shape and light in sculpture. His raw, turbulent works brought new, profound depth to the revolutionary cacophonies that had so far been constricted to the flat canvases of Impressionistic paintings, and his most riveting use of this complex, muscular multi-dimensional language is in his mighty Burghers of Calais. The sculpture depicts six men walking to their martyrdom to liberate the French town of Calais during the Hundred Years' War. The men are overcome with terror and anguish and resignation and peace all at once, and Rodin sculpted the figures with such a masterful mix of Romantic realism and primitive rawness that you can see and understand their every emotion from your every angle. The piece is enormous in size and exaggerated in scale and arguably unfinished in its rendering, all of which invite you to approach it with your own perspectives, examine it with your own curiosities and appreciate it with your own conclusions.

French law decrees that no more than twelve original casts may be made of any work by Rodin, which means The Burghers of Calais tells its weighty story in museums and university campuses all over Europe and the United States, including a single figure from the piece who stands resolutely at the entrance to the University of Iowa's Boyd Law Building.

I make a point to see my reproduction of the work every summer on my annual pilgrimage to visit friends in Washington, D.C. It stands with other Rodin masterpieces in a relatively austere corner of the sunken sculpture garden behind the Smithsonian's relentlessly round Hirshhorn Museum. I usually stop there on my way to the airport at the end of each visit. I walk around the sculpture a few times to reacquaint myself with the specific details Rodin included—like articulated toes to help propel the walking figures through space—and the specific details he didn't include—like eyeballs to help the figures see where they're going. Then I sit in my same spot on a little concrete ledge to take in the piece in its weighty enormousness, to contemplate the explosive change Rodin and the Impressionists brought to the way we see and understand and interpret art, and to find comfort in the fact that my Burghers will most likely stand caught in their time and this place, waiting for me year after year every time I come to visit them for as long as I live.

Art: Paris Street; Rainy Day

(Original French title: Rue de Paris, temps de pluie)
1877
Gustave Caillebotte
Impressionism (1872-1892)
Art Institute of Chicago

While technically created in the heart of the Impressionist period—which indulged itself in explorations of light, color and brushstroke techniques at the expense of clear representation and plausible perspective—Paris Street; Rainy Day reigns in Impressionism's visual indulgences with cleaner lines, realistic human figures, and vanishing-point perspective that extends almost mathematically from the rectangular cobblestones in the foreground to the ambitiously double confluences of angles at the distant ends of the forked street. To enhance the effect, Gustave Caillebotte paints the figures in gradient levels of focus, creating a photorealistic contrast between the three figures enjoying relative visual clarity in the middle distance, the three (well, two and a half) figures who are too close to stay in complete focus at the front of the painting, and the increasingly-less-defined human shapes receding into the misty distance.

While providing a convenient context for allowing distant figures to fade to gray—along with filling the setting with shimmers of Impressionistic light and reflection—the misty weather in the painting also allows for the curvy shapes of umbrellas and hunched people to provide visual counterpoint to the geometries of the streets and buildings ... plus it gives the figures a range of purposeful movement, whether they're casually dodging raindrops or hurrying to get somewhere dry. The overall effect is a graceful collaboration of shape, energy, atmosphere, physical presence and measured social observation.

Paris Street; Rainy Day greets visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago at the top of the Grand Staircase as they enter the permanent-collection Impressionism galleries. Its rainy ambiance may seem dour, but the choreography of human figures and the multi-directional spatial composition are an apt invitation to explore the museum, intermingle with the other patrons and contemplate even the things that aren't immediately in focus.

So apparently we have a new recliner

My family buys nothing—NOTHING!—more important than a package of socks without first going through the Ten Steps of Painfully Indecisive Covetousness:

1. Oh, look! There’s the thing I’m actively looking to buy and it’s right here in front of me right now so my search is over and I’m going to buy it.
1a. or: Oh, look! There’s something I just stumbled on in a store that two seconds ago I didn’t know existed and now I desperately want it so I’m going to buy it.

2. But am I sure about this? 

3. Maybe I can find a cheaper and/or better version of it somewhere else.

4. But first let me take 72 pictures of it on my phone so I can remind myself in perpetuity that I don’t have it every time I scroll through my photos. 

5. It’s totally worth it to drive to five similar stores scattered across town and then to spend 30 minutes researching it online if I can save five dollars when I inevitably buy it.

6. It goes without saying that it’s also totally worth it to go back to visit it nine or fifteen times at the store where I first saw it, just to be sure I really want it or to see if it goes on sale.

7. But I’m not obsessing about buying it or needlessly delaying this inevitable purchase or anything.

8. OK, two weeks have gone by and my life is empty and chokingly meaningless without it so I’m just going to go buy it.

9. Well, shit. It’s gone.
9a. or: Now that I have it home, I’ve decided I really don’t like it so I’m going to return it.

10. I’m just going to run in to Target for a few quick things.

SO! Imagine my surprise when—mere hours after we realized that we’d probably need to buy an easy-to-use recliner with a tall back for my dad because he’ll have problems sleeping in a flat bed when he comes home from the hospital so we were going to split up and start multiple Step Ones at all the recliner stores in town this afternoon—Mom sent me an urgent text telling me to come to the first recliner store she’d visited because she’d found the perfect recliner and she’d put a hold on it and wanted me to come test it before she bought it. 

Which I did. And then which SHE did. 

Let me type this slowly for you so you can comprehend its tectonic shiftiness: My mother, the High Priestess of the Ten Steps of Painfully Indecisive Covetousness, BOUGHT AN EASY-TO-USE-RECLINER WITH A TALL BACK ON JUST THE FIRST STEP. Without even blinking.

Behold its new-reclinerness:

I’ll give you a moment to lift your jaws up from the shifting tectonic plates beneath you. 

What’s more, our awesome, truck-having neighbor Dan just happened to be free and willing to transport the recliner home for us ... and within 90 minutes start-to-finish we became the proud owners of a new easy-to-use recliner with a tall back. WITH NINE UNUSED STEPS JUST HANGING OUT IN SPACE IN A FOG OF ABANDONMENT AND CONFUSION. But maybe I can sell them individually on Etsy. 

Anyway! I had to do some major furniture shuffling to fit our new easy-to-use recliner with a tall back into our living room, but I think it’s now in a primo spot where Dad can be comfortable and not feeling like he’s jutting out into the room as he entertains visitors. And he has a bunch of medical stuff—in addition to his boombox for his books on tape—that he’ll need to keep near him, so I repurposed some decorative chests to become decorative side tables for him. Plus I cleaned them all with Liquid Gold, which those of us who like our wooden antiques to be alarmingly shiny know takes 17 days to dry. So that’s why I’m posting this artfully composed, judiciously-cropped-so-you-can’t-see-what-a-mess-the-rest-of-the-room-is photo at 7:42 instead of 4:00. 

But doesn’t my dad’s new man-corner look handsome? 

(It’d look mega-more handsome without that butt-ugly quilt and that why-the-hell-do-we-have-a-genuine-oil-painting-of-a-stranger-holding-a-gun-in-our-living-room painting. But rectifying those situations opens a whole new Ten Stages Of Painfully Indecisive Purging process. So let’s all just admire my alarmingly shiny wooden side tables for now.)

Theater: "Sunday," Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim

Never has a song captured me on so many levels and left me with goosebumps every time I hear it. Sunday in the Park with George is one of the first shows I ever saw on Broadway, and "Sunday" finishes Act I by bringing together all the characters we've met as individual people as they stand and relocate and adjust as a growing ensemble and ultimately form a living, singing, haunting, as-close-as-humanly-possible re-creation of Georges Seurat's defining painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The score of the entire show is peppered with quick little notes that evoke the peppered-dot painting style of Pointillism, and the dreamy lyrics meander through the endless combinations of colors Pointillist painters used to create light and shade and depth and movement in their work. And the last sung lyrics—"... on an ordinary Sunday!"—stand in gloriously stark contrast to the shimmering, fortissimo, every-possible-note chording in the orchestra that is powerfully, thrillingly anything but normal.