Ms. Smith's taste is clearly entrenched in a fusty high modernism, popular decades ago, and still being kept alive on oxygen today. The review read like one the 40s, except her criticism of Wood being a white man (I guess the gay revelation didn't give this outsider a pass). Her "mere illustration-pure abstraction" blinders were firmly in place for this outing. Wouldn't it have been interesting for Smith to compare Wood's visual satires to his European contemporaries Christian Shad and Otto Dix? or to the Mexicans Kahlo and Rivera, who also insisted on costuming their personas to create a sense of place--and were working at the same time! She could have seen the lineage to contemporary imagists like Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Kurt Kaupner, and John Currin (all artists who are creating pictures that have not hitherto been part of our American vernacular, and all made in fastidious "illustrative" means)... but no new eyes here, she just likes the landscapes, and likes them because they remind her of the completely enervating Josef Albers (a square if there ever was one). She belittles illustration, and then praises two of his most illustrative works "Midnight Ride" and "Appraisal" HUH? and calls the artists work conservative, retrograde, and awful, and personally calls a man she never met conflicted, lonely, and sad. This bully seemed to skip the part of the biography where he was attempting to wrestle sincerely with his issues of masculinity and identity.
44
Thanks Thomas, i concur. i also add to her blinkered criticism that of New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl. Both seem almost homophobic in their apparent fear of a sophisticated and clever artist who explored and nudged the boundaries of both illustration and regionalism,. There's a lot of exploring to do within the lineage you mention, something ignored by both these older critics.
18
My memory of the people and landscape of Iowa is quite like Grant Wood’s “Gothic “ style. I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. My father was a doctor, and in those days doctors made house calls. He used to take me on some of the calls he made to see patients who lived on farms in the country. The houses and farm buildings, barns, and people were uncannily like the gothic style paintings. Even the rolling hills and roads, the black soil and grazing animals..
My parents were friends of the artist and were aware of his problems. There are many of his paintings around the town as there is in my own home. I have a charming painting of a local river in the fall. This style was not as saleable as more famous one. I understood that he was always short of money.
8
So many non-New Yorkers miffed at the author's presumed NYC snobbishness.
Perhaps this review is for you:
Gosh golly gee! I luved this show!
There wuz some purty pictures!
4
Some of us lived in NY and came from NY and find your attitude and that of Roberta Smith to be what drove us from NY. You're so cultured that you can claim the president as a denizen of your world.
27
Thanks for the art history lesson and your interpretation, Roberta. I am going back to the show tomorrow with more information. I enjoyed the show, mostly noticing originality and technique. Everyone was hovering over the pitchfork painting. I didn't join them - just as I go to the Virgin on the Rocks instead of the Mona Lisa when at the Louvre. Loved the flower pot sculptures. I was very surprised by them. I also enjoyed some of his looser paintings, maybe they were studies. and I am a fan of the Daughters of the Rev painting - fantastic faces.
4
Having grown up in the art museums of the Midwest, I have grown up with regionalists like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. I think Roberta Smith's hostility to Grant Wood is perfectly understandable -- regionalism is a rejection of the more celebrated movements in the art world in this period (maybe the exhibition could do a better job of making this point). Personally, I always loved regionalism, because there is something authentically recognizable behind the disneyfied Midwest that it depicts. Regionalists have something to say, and when you see their work at the Nelson Atkins in Kansas City or the Josyln in Omaha, it is so fun to see art that looks like people and places from the Midwest experience. Building the same connection with the more conceptual art movements of that time is a lot more work. I think it is only right that in an age when America First xenophobia dominates the country again (as it did after WW1) an art critic would want to point out the connection between the nativism of that era and the return nativism of this era. Grant Wood deserves what he got from Roberta Smith both because his work is so comfortable and because of the political echoes she appropriately highlights.
1
Everyone in the world comes from a region.
9
Big city smugness again rears its ugly head about "fly-over" country culture.
29
What's going on with this reviewer? She accuses the artist of being everything from a nativist to a fascist to a repressed homosexual to a bib overall wearer for godsake. Clearly she thinks he is a Trump supporter.
22
Why do you suppose he wouldn't have been? Regionalism is a reaction against the elite art movements of the time -- sound familiar?
1
He likely would have been. Lots of parallels between his era and ours.
2
Saw this last night. Far more interesting and rewarding than the writer makes out. Also how the heck was his gender fluid? That's not what being a possibly closeted homosexual (in itself wild conjecture) implies.
21
One small math correction - he died not "two days shy of this 50th birthday", but two hours shy of his 51st.
12
I've always liked The Appraisal so I must take issue with your description of the woman as "mannish" - because she has work to do rather than wear makeup and such? How provincial of you. And how city of you to described her lovely Plymouth Rock laying hen as a bantam. You've missed a lot in your own appraisal.
39
The one thing that Roberta Smith has made painfully clear is that her world view is amply illustrated by Saul Steinberg's View Of The World From 9th Avenue (https://curiator.com/art/saul-steinberg/view-of-the-world-from-9th-avenue) which shows everything west of the Hudson River as useless details on a map not worth inspecting. If one's perspective is as narrow as Ms. Smith's, then surely nothing of Grant Wood's America could be revealed regardless of his talents. She would need a larger intellectual net to cast to know where Grant Wood was coming from. I threw up a little in my mouth when she decided to inspect whether Wood was a closeted gay man. This is a writer's tactic from the 50's and 60's which I recall being used on Bob Dylan in the mid-sixties. Back then you could suggest someone might be gay and it was enough to ruin their reputation. I didn't know anyone still tried to pull that one. I wish I could make it to this show; I'm sure it would make for a very pleasant day.
27
Thank you Jim!
6
The title of this article is irksome:
"An Artist’s Shortcomings, on Display at the Whitney"
Who is this person to talk about shortcomings concerning Grant Wood?
Roberta Smith, you will never achieve what Grant has achieved.
Ever.
Call yourself clever, but you are not an artist.
20
I’ve always thought that the three women pictured in Daughters of the Revolution bore a striking resemblance to Mitch McConnell. Kin, perhaps?
10
Quite surprised at the tone of the review.
"The younger woman, watching the older, is proud and confident (and also slightly mannish)."
I see no mannish quality in this face. This was a curiously personal comment that didn't belong in a review, as it attempted to guide the viewer's opinion and reinforce misogynistic standards. The face to me IS proud and confident, and is of one who was dressed for her farm work, and not gussied up to please anyone. She is a beauty and is proud of her life's work!
35
This is a mean review that reveals a lack of awareness of the aesthetic of rural America. And it fails to address the most important question: why do people of all kinds love Wood?
25
As an Iowan, I take perverse pleasure in how "East Coast elites" (and I write that as a bleeding heart liberal) look down upon many things from between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Ms. Smith's snarky review sets a new benchmark (perhaps she didn't enjoy her time at Grinnell College?). While Wood was no doubt a flawed person and flawed artist, there is also no doubt he was influential, in addition to being popular, both as an artist and a teacher. Instead, Smith seems to want us to believe he was a rube whose art bordered on the degenerate, and that an artist wearing overalls is somehow more demeaning than an artist wearing a beret. I am looking forward to a trip to New York City later this month, which includes a visit to the Whitney.
28
This review seems more about the reviewer than the artist. There are lots of great paintings here, but the reviewer seems focused on presenting how modern and fine-thinking she is with her superior liberalism as compared to the backward and nativist (and somehow also gender-fluid) Mr. Wood.
24
I can only agree with the previous reviewer. I generally like Smith’s work, but this review is little more than a series of insults strung together. Smith clearly thinks Wood’s initial fame was undeserved (sure, why not?), and she seems to take noticeable pleasure in rehashing some of Wood’s subsequent misfortunes. Perhaps this is because she thinks regionalism is some sort of artistic precursor to the alt-Right: “a pathetically blinkered ideology,” “steeped in pious nostalgia and American nativism.” (Worse still, the movement seems to have been made up of white men (gasp!)).
The severity of her judgments fits uneasily with Smith’s evaluation of individual works, which seem based on personal whim more than anything else (“Almost as good is…,” “…is among Wood’s worst efforts,” and “the Magic Realist landscapes seem best…”)
In his book “Renegade Regionalists,” James Dennis details how conservative and radial critics misunderstood regionalism by projecting their own concerns onto it. They weren’t realist enough for conservatives and the social criticism wasn’t obvious enough for radicals. Smith joins this venerable group of misunderstood reviewers.
17
This review does a terrible job of explaining what kind of art Grant Woods set out to create (he was inspired by art of the Northern Renaissance), but it does capture the feel of the artistic environment that made him so miserable toward the end of his life. Like the author of this article, many in the art world thought he was backward and backward-looking. Real art was abstract, and his work wasn't. And like the author of this article, they thought it was a weakness to behave like a Renaissance artist and create in different media, instead of focusing on the most important form, painting. You still see the same kind of hostility you find in this piece directed at anyone who is an "illustrator", and thus disqualified from being a real artist. I'm glad the article at least contains many examples of Woods' work. The best way to judge art is to try to understand what it sets out to do, and consider whether it succeeds, rather than deciding what it ought to do, and then measuring on that basis. There's a great deal to see in a Grant Woods painting, so I hope people will skip most of the article and look at the work.
49
Hear, hear! Well said, Prairie Otter.
6
What struck me most about this show is the incredible whiteness of the work. Wood's America consisted of hard working white people - people of color need not apply. I'm curious to know if he was ever exposed to people of color and they just never entered into his world view or was he overtly racist? In any event, when the story of our country is told via one of America's most acclaimed painters and that story is completely white, it's easy to understand how even to this day the contributions of people of color are overlooked and dismissed.
2
Ray: One of America's greatest sculptors is the African American female artist, Elizabeth Catlett. She was a student of Grant Wood's. She was the first student to get a master's in art at the University of Iowa in 1940. He had a big influence on her art in his admonitions to her to paint the world she knew. Catlett went on to a glorious career.
21
very strange and personally nasty review.
and unfortunately, grant wood's America did consist of white people. great to address this and its meaning for today, but really, to stick a fork in a man who died 76 years ago for that?
harsh.
4
Interesting you brought up Elizabeth Catlett. The newest dormitory at the University of Iowa, where she studied with Grant Wood, is named in her honor.
7
Ms Smith I am a huge fan of your insightful writing and look forward to reading the arts section of the NYT daily. I am a painter and tend to read your words carefully, reflecting on the nuance and meaning. Permit me for saying that this review of Grant Woods seemed almost hateful and biting as if he had somehow personally offended your moral or aesthetic sensibility. As a artist who is long dead and one who led a life of some inner pain and torment you seem to find even fault in his religious perspective, however naive and midwestern it may have been. Sometimes Art is just art and as Clement Greenberg intoned it usually does not change the course of a culture. Consider of a moment how hard to is in this society of ours for artists to make a go of it and eke out a living. As an art critic you hold power, you expect your work will be read or hope it will respected for what it is and likely believe your words will be read in context. Grant Woods work is just that.
71
Amen!
This review is needlessly hostile.
Grant Wood created The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.
What have you created, Roberta Smith?
15
I agree with this comment. Smith actually provides a quite enthusiastic review, but somehow can’t resist inserting a supremely banal unverifiable ad hominem slam, writing ‘Wood....turned his faith into a pathetically blinkered ideology, as if what is true for one were true for all.’ I actually have no idea what this sentence is saying. Smith fails to define ‘faith,’ or define that which is ‘true for one’ (what is that ‘true’ thing she is referring to?!). She actually could apply the same sentence to Michelangelo and it would mean the same. Thus proving the utter vapidity of her ‘insight.’
14
..." it seems an attempt to show how boring and repetitive he became..." As opposed to Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Jack Beal, etc., etc., etc.?
23