The Italian Renaissance in American Gothic: Grant Wood and Piero Della

The Italian Renaissance in American Gothic

Luciano Cheles Grant Wood spent three months in Munich, Germany, from September to December 1928, to supervise the execution of the stained-glass window he had designed for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (fig. 1). He had been to Europe before. He first traveled there, with his lifelong friend and fellow artist Marvin Cone, in the summer of 1920. They sailed to Liverpool, then, after a brief stay in London, they traveled to Paris, which was the principal destination of their trip; from there they paid a short visit to Antwerp.1 Wood returned to Paris in June 1923 for a more extended period, during which he attended courses at the Académie Julian but spent some of the winter in Italy. He went to the French capital again in 1926 to attend an exhibition of his work. Until the late 1920s Wood’s paintings were characterized by the retardataire impressionist style common in America in those years. Then his approach changed radi- cally. His forms became more stylized, precisely contoured, and carefully arranged with figures depicted at half length close to the picture plane, sometimes set in a landscape; he also developed a taste for brightly colored patterns. Wood attributed this transformation to the “Gothic” paintings he had seen during his stay in Germany, and in particular to the work of Hans Memling, an artist he had “studied assiduously” for many years. He also explained that “the lovely apparel and accessories of the Gothic period” made him realize that “in the very commonplace, in [his] native surroundings, were decorative adventures.” The early Flemish and German art he saw in Munich allegedly precipitated his decision to distance himself from the modernist movements that had initially drawn him to Europe and to seek inspiration from his native Iowa. Wood was to become one of the leading proponents of the regionalist movement that developed in the United States during the Great Depression.2 Scholars have tended to view Wood’s account of his sudden change of style and subject matter as simplistic, noting that, well before his 1928 trip to Germany, visits to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as well as his earlier travels to Europe would have provided the artist with ample opportunities to acquaint himself with the masters of the Flemish and German Renaissance, and that an interest in midwestern subject matter is also evident in some of his early work. The Munich conversion claim was also challenged by the discovery in the 1980s, after cleaning, that Wood’s Portrait of John B. Turner, Pioneer (Cedar Rapids Museum of Art), a work repre- sentative of his new style, was executed before his trip to Germany, as the signature and date of 1928 that lay hidden beneath the frame attest (the painting was later reworked and

This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). dated 1930). Scholars nevertheless accept that the Munich experience greatly con- tributed to the stylistic change. As well as increasing Wood’s familiarity with Memling, Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach, Dieric Bouts, and Albrecht Dürer, it exposed him to Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a movement prominent in the German artistic scene in the second half of the 1920s, whose style was notably characterized by streamlined, flat, and neatly delineated forms.3 Wood’s debt to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Flemish and German masters cannot be denied; however, the monumental poise and severity of some of his synthetically rendered figures also bring to mind quattrocento portraiture. It should be noted that hard- line realism is not an exclusive feature of “Gothic” and Neue Sachlichkeit painting: it equally characterizes early Italian art, which was an important source of inspiration for German artists at the beginning of the twentieth century.4 Equally, since Flemish painters, and Memling in particular, had a strong impact on a number of Italian Renaissance masters, it would be rash to treat Wood’s bright coloristic effects and his figures depicted at half length before a landscape as the direct and sole outcome of his fascination with the northern tradition.5 1 Grant Wood and Emil Frei A close consideration of Wood’s output suggests that a number of his best-known Art Glass Company, Munich, paintings, including American Gothic (see fig. 8) derive, both compositionally and icono- Germany, Memorial Window, 1928–29. Stained glass, 24 x 20 ft. graphically, from works of the Italian Renaissance, especially examples by Piero della Veterans Memorial Building, Francesca (ca. 1412–1492). Wood hardly ever mentions this artistic tradition in his writ- Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Art © Figge ings.6 Yet the view that he must have been familiar with it is not based on striking visual Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/ resemblances alone. As we will see, it is also endorsed by archival and circumstantial Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. evidence related to the intellectual stimuli available to the artist in Cedar Rapids and to his travels abroad. Identifying the influence of the Italian Renaissance in Wood’s oeuvre is important, for it makes one realize that the artist’s knowledge of the history of art was even broader than previously thought, thus confirming that Cedar Rapids in his day was culturally quite sophisticated. By extension, it reminds us that regionalism does not equate with provincialism. Tracing Wood’s Renaissance sources also provides us with new insights into his creative process and finished work, for, as I will argue, the artist used Italian imagery with considerable subtlety, in most cases to convey messages that alter the surface meaning of the paintings.

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 2 Grant Wood, Adoration of the References to the Italian Renaissance may be found in Wood’s work as early as 1921 in Home, 1921–22. Oil on canvas Adoration of the Home (fig. 2), a large allegorical painting that was meant to serve as a bill- attached to a wood panel, 31 1/4 x 82 x 1 1/2 in. Cedar Rapids Museum board for a Cedar Rapids real estate office. Adoration depicts a woman at the center seated of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Peter F. on an elevated, throne-like structure with a child at her side, symbolizing Cedar Rapids Bezanson, 80.1 and Education respectively; another woman personifying Religion behind them; and 3 Grant Wood, study for Memorial on either side a number of male figures representing a variety of professions (carpentry, Window, 1926. Watercolor. Private farming, etc.), as well as Demeter, the goddess of the Bountiful Harvest, and Mercury, the collection. Reproduced from Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood: god of Commerce. The immediate source for Wood’s composition was a mural entitled The Regionalist Vision (Yale Univ. Industry—Banking—Commerce, executed by Allen Philbrick for the interior of the Peoples Press, 1983), 66. Art © Figge Art Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids. But both works are structured like Renaissance altarpieces Museum, successors to the Estate 7 of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed depicting the enthroned Virgin surrounded by saints. Wood seems to have accentuated by VAGA, New York, N.Y. the Italian Renaissance elements of his source: the miniature house the central woman 4 Piero della Francesca, Polyptych holds in her right hand is a motif so unusual in American art that it is tempting to treat it of the Misericordia, 1445–62. as a borrowing from medieval and Renaissance representations of saints carrying models Oil and tempera on panel, 107 1/4 x of chapels and churches. There were examples of such paintings in London’s National 129 15/16 in. Museo Civico, Sanse 8 polcro, Italy. Permission courtesy Gallery, which Wood visited on June 24, 1920. This visual reference and the triptych-like Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività format of Adoration of the Home present home-ownership humorously as “sacrosanct”—an Culturali e del Turismo—Soprin interpretation underscored by the work’s title. The figure of Mercury is another likely tendenza per i Beni Architettonici, Paesaggistici, Storici, Artistici ed Renaissance allusion: it seems to have been inspired by the most celebrated artistic render- Etnoantropologici di Arezzo. ing of the god: Giambologna’s bronze statue (Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence). Photo, Alessandro Benci The stained-glass window that Wood produced for the Cedar Rapids Veterans 5 Grant Wood, Small Sketchbook Memorial Building, generally regarded as the artist’s first major work in the new style, of Ideas for the Memorial Window also betrays the influence of quattrocento painting. The window depicts the Republic (detail), 1927–28, page 25. Pencil on paper. Figge Art Museum, City as a giant abstracted female figure shown frontally, beneath whom are six small soldiers of Davenport Collection, Grant representing conflicts from the American Revolution to the First World War. The art- Wood Archive, Davenport, Iowa. ist’s composition, as Wanda Corn has remarked, is rational and unusually understated: Art © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood “Wood’s memorial is solemn but not melodramatic or sentimental. Indeed, there is a Graham/Licensed by VAGA, deliberateness of design, a clarity of parts.”9 It has been argued that Wood’s 1928 trip to New York, N.Y. Munich acted as catalyst for the artist not only because it consolidated his interest in the precise craftsmanship of German and Flemish painting but also because the stained-glass window technique of painting on flat, geometric pieces of glass led him to experiment with neatly delineated abstract shapes and symmetrical designs.10 However, it is clear

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). that Wood had intended to give the composition a hieratic quality from the outset, that is, before his Munich trip. In the fairly detailed sketch Wood submitted to the memorial window commission in December 1926 (fig. 3), all the characters but one have rigid frontal or near-frontal poses, the exception being the cannoneer of the War of 1812, at center left, whose bare torso has a sensual twist that was eventually straightened.11 The soldiers depicted in the memorial were perceived as expressionless, a feature that a January 1929 article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette attributed to the fact that the stained-glass window was executed by southern German craftsmen who, accustomed as they were to dealing with religious figures, turned the infantrymen into “uniformed saints.”12 The Gazette article likewise noted that the figure of the Republic “floats in the cloud giving the spiritual effect achieved in many of the Renaissance paintings,” implying that she evoked the image of a Madonna.13 It is a perceptive remark, for the general design is based on the typology of the Virgin of Mercy, who shelters a group of people under her outspread cloak, the most famous example of which is the centerpiece of Piero della Francesca’s polyptych preserved in the Museo Civico of Sansepolcro, his hometown (fig. 4).14 Indeed, Wood may have modeled his stained-glass window precisely on this painting. A sketchbook featuring the artist’s earliest rough drawings for the project includes one that depicts the central figure with arms outspread over the heads of the soldiers (fig. 5). The drawing appears to be based on Piero’s Madonna, as indicated also by the halo that exalts the Republic’s head and the frontal depiction of her face. Wood ultimately did not include the halo, which would have been unsuited to a secular figure, and opted for the profile mode.15 Two features of this figure as she appears in the stained-glass window endorse the view that she derives from Piero’s Madonna: the gown’s high waist and the linear rhythm of its heavy folds. Unlike Piero’s Virgin, Wood’s allegorical figure wears no cloak, but the arched top of the stained-glass

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). window encompassing the figures below fulfills a similar sheltering function. The formal comparison may be extended to the polyptych as a whole: the stained-glass window’s row of soldiers seems to have been inspired by the saints standing on either side of Mary. The unusual image of the bare- chested and barefooted cannoneer in Wood’s memorial deserves particular attention. Commenting on a finished drawing showing a sensuous and languid figure (fig. 6), R. Tripp Evans has pointed out that “the soldier appears less like a Federal-era infan- tryman than a sort of Americanized Saint Sebastian.”16 This remark lends further support to the view that the Piero polyptych is a possible source for the stained-glass window, for, to the left of the Madonna, we find a similarly postured and muscular Saint Sebastian (who was a captain of the Praetorian Guard, i.e., a soldier), and, next to him, Saint John the Baptist clutching his staff. Wood’s partly unclad military man holding his priming iron seems to derive from the merger of these two contiguous religious figures. Wood’s idea of using a Renaissance altarpiece as a prototype for the Veterans Memorial window may have been suggested to him by the nature of the material: stained glass is traditionally associated with ecclesiastical architecture. Moreover, the reliance on Christian iconography to honor the sacrifice of soldiers is not uncom- mon.17 Wood’s approach, however, is especially sophisticated. He based the design of his commemorative image on a Renaissance masterpiece, which, as well as depicting martyrdom (that of Christ and of the saints who died to defend His message) and compassion (the Virgin of Mercy), is structurally similar to the facade of the Memorial 6 Grant Wood, Sketch for Soldier Building: both are essentially made up of an upright rectangular section incorporat- in the War of 1812 (Cannoneer), ing an arch at the center, bracketed by two wings and an apron-shaped top (fig. 7).18 1928. Charcoal, ink, and pencil on paper, 79 3/4 x 22 3/4 in. Figge Moreover, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a replica of that in Arlington National Art Museum, City of Davenport Cemetery, features at the top of the building, just as the crucifix, the ultimate symbol of Collection, Davenport, Iowa, sacrifice, is placed on the highest pinnacle of the altarpiece. Museum Purchase, 1965.8. Art © Figge Art Museum, successors Wood’s iconic painting American Gothic (fig. 8) also appears to be based on one of to the Estate of Nan Wood Piero’s major religious works. The genesis of this composition is well known.19 Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, made an oil painting of a nineteenth-century Gothic-revival-style house he first saw New York, N.Y. in Eldon, Iowa, in August 1930 (Smithsonian American Art Museum), and shortly 7 Veterans Memorial Building, thereafter a pencil sketch on a white envelope (private collection), which, as well as the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 2015. Photograph by Diana Lynn same house, featured a female figure together with a man holding a rake, placed close to Ferguson the picture plane.20 The painting that resulted from these works was completed in the autumn and exhibited at the Forty-Third Annual Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in October. It was an instant success, attracting national attention. But it also provoked controversy, especially locally, for some saw in the painting a satirical depiction of midwestern puritanical

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 8 Grant Wood, American Gothic, values. However, the prevalent interpretation at the time was that it celebrated a whole- 1930. Oil on Beaver Board, some lifestyle based on Christian morality, work, and the family.21 30 3/4 x 253/4 in. The Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American As in the original pencil sketch, the two figures pose frontally in the painting’s immedi- Art Collection, 1930.934. Art ate foreground; the male figure, shown clutching a pitchfork rather than the rake that © Figge Art Museum, successors was originally envisaged, engages our attention with his piercing look. Scholars have to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, long dwelled on American Gothic’s striking visual characteristics—the simplicity of its New York, N.Y. design; its linear realism; and the figures’ careful spatial arrangement, flattened forms, and 9 Piero della Francesca, Resurrection, bewitching stillness. Specific sources have been proposed for it. Corn has noted that the ca. 1459–60. Mural in fresco and composition recalls nineteenth-century photographs of farmers posing stiffly in front of tempera, 88 9/16 x 78 3/4 in. Museo their homes, holding pitchforks and other implements associated with their occupation.22 Civico, Sansepolcro. Photo, Enzo Mattei Matthew Baigell, viewing the male farmer as threatening and sinister, has speculated that he may have been modeled after the popular devil-with-pitchfork motif in order to present the Christian fundamentalism of the Midwest as evil.23 Thomas Hoving, on the contrary, points to “striking similarities” between the male figure and Dürer’s Self-Portrait with Fur- Trimmed Robe (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), which has been interpreted as representing the artist as Christ.24 The static frontality and intense gaze of the farmer do indeed lend him a Christlike appearance.25 However, rather than to Dürer’s impersonation of the Savior, which relies on the typology of the Salvator Mundi, as his gesture evoking blessing indicates, the figure seems indebted to the Jesus of Piero’s Resurrection (fig. 9).26 Two features, which find no equivalent details in Dürer’s painting, suggest it: the imple- ment Wood’s male protagonist grasps solemnly, which corresponds to the banner of victory held by Christ; and the patterns formed by the stitches on his overalls, which parallel the emphasized structure of Christ’s torso. The rhyming forms inAmerican Gothic offer further support of this hypothesis. This feature caught critical attention when the painting was first shown in public: in his review of the Exhibition of American Painting and

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Sculpture, published in the Chicago Evening Post on October 28, 1930, the critic Clarence J. Bulliet remarked that the pitchfork pattern in American Gothic is echoed on the farmer’s overall bib and, turned upside down, on the upper-story window of the Gothic-revival house behind him. Bulliet likewise noticed that the motifs on the female figure’s apron were reiterated in the curtains.27 Subsequent criticism has dwelled on the interrela- tionship of shapes and details in this painting, as well as in later works by Wood, such as Victorian Survival (1931, Dubuque Museum of Art) and the lithographs Sultry Night and Honorary Degree (fig. 13), both executed in 1937.28 Echoing forms are one of the hallmarks of Piero’s style, the result of his strong sense of arrangement and geometric tendencies, which prompted him to look for patterns and schematic shapes in whatever he chose to depict.29 If the image of the Savior is the main source of American Gothic, it is reasonable to suggest that the male protagonist’s identification with Christ may be treated as a comment on his strong religiosity. The idea that he has been depicted as the quasi-embodiment of Christianity is hinted at in a letter Wood wrote in 1941, in which he remarks that the man “is prominent in the church and possibly preaches occasionally.” While stressing that the painting’s figures are 10 Grant Wood, Arnold Comes of Age “basically solid and good people,” Wood concedes that they are “very self-righteous” and (Portrait of Arnold Pyle), 1930. Oil have “faults and fanaticism.”30 on pressed board, 26 3/4 x 23 in. Sheldon Museum of Art, University The visual reference to Piero’s Jesus in Wood’s painting corroborates the interpreta- of Nebraska–Lincoln, Nebraska tion of the work as critical of Iowans’ religious dogmatism. Perhaps it is even intended Art Association Collection, N-38. to suggest that dour and straight-laced people are emotionally and intellectually dead. Photo © Sheldon Museum of Art The funereal overtones of American Gothic have already been remarked. After seeing 11 Piero della Francesca, The Baptism it at the Chicago show, a Mrs. Inez Keck wrote a letter to the editor of the Des Moines of Christ, ca. 1450s. Egg on poplar, 65 3/4 x 45 11/16 in. The National Register, published on November 30, 1930, stating that “Return from the Funeral” might Gallery, London. Image © 2016 have been a more suitable title. Evans has described the male figure as a “living corpse.” The National Gallery, London Piero’s spectral image of Christ emerging from the tomb would have had a strong appeal 12 Grant Wood, Saturday Night for Wood, who was morbidly interested in deathly matters. It is worth recalling that Bath, 1937. Charcoal on paper, 19 x 23 in. The Museum of Fine American Gothic was painted on the premises of a funeral home, in a studio that also Arts, Houston, Gift of Dr. Jack acted as living quarters, which David Turner, the funeral director who was also his Tausend in memory of Mary Nesbit mentor and promoter, provided Wood from 1924 to 1935.31 The Resurrection image is, Tausend moreover, an unsurprising source when one considers that Grant Wood came from a For figs. 10, 12 : Art © Figge Art strict Quaker household for whom Christ’s rising from the dead had strong resonances.32 Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed Piero’s Resurrection may have inspired another painting Wood produced in 1930: by VAGA, New York, N.Y. Arnold Comes of Age (Portrait of Arnold Pyle) (fig. 10), which celebrates the twenty-first birthday of his assistant. Like Piero’s fresco, this work depicts a severe, neatly outlined figure, framed by two trees, who confronts the onlooker with a mournful expression. The visual borrowing seems to have been made, once again, to underscore the meaning of the

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). painting. The clue is provided by the two trees, a sapling and a mature one in full foliage, which, together with such elments as the butterfly, river, shocks of harvested corn, and young bathers, rep- resent the passing of youth as a fundamental and transformative event.33 The metaphoric meaning of these motifs corresponds, in fact, to an interpretation that has been given to the bare and bushy trees in the Resurrection. William G. Waters, commenting on these details in his 1901 monograph on Piero, remarked that “perhaps there is here a touch of symbolism of death and rebirth.”34 Wood, who had a keen eye for symbols, could have picked up on this remark or even interpreted the two trees along similar lines independently. He may have based Arnold Comes of Age on Piero’s fresco precisely because, like the earlier work, it deals with the theme of a transition from one condition to another. This suggestion is further supported by the presence of the two bathers. Evans has pointed out that these naked figures recall the images of Adam and Eve’s Expulsion from Earthly Paradise that feature in the background of many medieval altarpieces of the Nativity or Crucifixion to remind viewers of the reason for Christ’s redemptive mission. He posits that Wood borrowed the motif to allude to the loss of innocence.35 While the suggestion that the Iowa artist followed the old masters’ practice of thematically relating miniature figures to the principal subject matter of a painting is compelling, a different interpretation of the bathers may be provided. These figures are a likely reference to baptism, a traditional symbol of regen- eration, that is, transformation. Piero’s Baptism of Christ (fig. 11) immediately comes to mind, for, in the middle ground, to the right of Saint John, appears a catechumen stripping in preparation for baptism. The posture of Wood’s bent-over youth in Arnold Comes of Age matches that of Piero’s figure to such an extent that one may consider it a near quotation intended to further strengthen the theme of coming of age. Wood’s later works corroborate his fascination with quattrocento paintings. Henry Adams has already remarked that Sultry Night, which depicts a naked man standing next to a water- ing trough washing his body, and the charcoal drawing Saturday Night Bath (fig. 12), showing a nude farmhand immersing his bucket in the trough while his companion removes his shirt,

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 13 Grant Wood, Honorary Degree, both produced in 1937, “bear 1937. Lithograph, 11 3/4 x 7 in. an interesting resemblance to Figge Art Museum, City of scenes of the Baptism of Christ, Davenport Collection, Davenport, Iowa, Museum Purchase, 1965.35. as well as to paintings of Christ Art © Figge Art Museum, rising from the tomb to reveal Successors to the Estate of Nan himself in all his glory,” and Wood Graham/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y. mentioned Piero’s rendering of these subjects.36 Two features of Saturday Night Bath endorse his observation. The first concerns the format of the drawing: its top edge is, unusually, lunette-shaped, a common Renaissance format (see fig. 10). The second is the detail of the stripping man: like the nude bather in Arnold Comes of Age, this figure echoes Piero’s catechumen, albeit in reverse.37 The depiction of the washing habits of the Iowans in terms of the Christian rite of purification is probably a hyperbole intended to make fun of their piousness. Piero’s Baptism may have informed another work Wood produced in 1937: the lithograph Honorary Degree (fig. 13), which humorously illustrates the artist’s receipt of an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin the previous year. The emaciated professor shown on the right holding the doctoral hood over Wood’s head approximates Saint John’s baptizing gesture, while the academic at left, who presents the artist with his diploma, echoes the pose of the first angel on the left. The tracery of the stylized Gothic window at the center of the composition and the streaming sunlight evoke the tail and wings of the dove that hovers over Jesus’s head in Piero’s composition. The identification of the awarding ceremony with Christ’s baptism serves to mock the solemnity of the event and, self-deprecatingly, deflate the importance that the university authorities were attributing to Wood.38 Other features of Wood’s art might also be linked to Piero: the geometrization of forms, rigorous compositional structuring (including the adoption, as in American Gothic, of the golden section), and the spatial plunges generating emphatic diagonals (see, e.g., Parson Weems’ Fable [1939, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth] and Spring in Town [1941, Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Ind.]), all recall the master’s enthusiasm for mathematically and geometrically conceived pictorial arrangements.39 Another typically Piero-esque feature is the brooding or absent look on the faces of a number of Wood’s figures (the “expressionless” soldiers in the Veterans Memorial window, the portrait of Arnold Pyle discussed above, and that of the young boy featured in Plaid Sweater [1931, University of Iowa Museum of Art] are obvious examples).

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 14 Grant Wood, Dinner for Threshers, Piero is not the only master of the 1934. Oil on hardboard, 20 x Italian Renaissance to have had an 80 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and impact on Wood’s later work. For Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd, instance, Dinner for Threshers(fig. 14), a 1979.7.105 © Fine Arts Museums panel celebrating rural America through of San Francisco. Art © Figge Art the depiction a group of threshers enjoy- Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham/Licensed ing a communal meal, calls to mind by VAGA, New York, N.Y. Giotto’s Last Supper in the frescoes in 15 Giotto di Bondone, The Last the Arena Chapel in Padua, of which a Supper, ca. 1306. Wood, 16 3/4 x similar version is preserved in the Alte 16 15/16 in. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. bpk, Berlin/Alte Pina Pinakothek (fig. 15). Analogous features kothek/Art Resource, N.Y. include the sharply defined elemental forms, their solidity, and the arrangement of the figures. This influence was perceived at the time by the art critic of the New York Times, who remarked in 1934 that Wood’s painting recalled the Italian artist’s “monumental simplicity.”40 Like the midwesterner’s central characters, the apostles in Giotto’s paintings are rhythmically matched across the dining table, and a number of them are depicted from behind. Wood may have used a reproduction of Giotto’s composition bought at the Alte Pinakothek in 1928 as the basis for his work, for the Munich Last Supper, unlike its fresco equivalent, features a decorated balcony running along the wall. This might have provided the inspiration for the ornamental wallpaper and box-like feature on the wall in Dinner for Threshers. The evocation of the Last Supper was probably intended, like the depiction of the male figure in American Gothic as Christ and of the bathing rituals of farmers as baptism scenes, as gentle send-ups of Iowans’ religious zeal.

Piero in Iowa and Beyond

The repeated borrowings from Piero in Wood’s work suggest that the Iowa artist had a special predilection for this master. This need not surprise us, for Piero, who had been neglected for four centuries after his death in 1492, enjoyed a strong revival in the early decades of the twentieth century.41 Interest in Piero’s work grew especially in the wake of modernism. Postimpressionism and cubism predisposed artists and critics to respond to such distinctive features of his art as the emphasis on geometric order, the sparing use of detail, the flat forms, the precise sense of placement, the reliance on mass and color

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). rather than chiaroscuro, and the figures’ stillness and apparent lack of emotion. Piero was revered in Britain by the critics and artists of the Bloomsbury group who gathered in Virginia Woolf’s salon.42 In France he enthused Gertrude and Leo Stein and some of the artists who frequented their circle (in particular, Henri Matisse).43 Piero made a strong impact in America, too.44 Charles Sheeler declared in an interview that Piero, whose Legend of the True Cross frescoes in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo he had seen in 1909, made a “very vivid impression” on him and transformed his approach to painting.45 Fellow precisionist Elsie Driggs found in Piero’s work confirmation for her desire for structure and order, for simplicity and strength,” and called her Pittsburgh (1927, Whitney Museum of American Art) “my Piero della Francesca.”46 Marsden Hartley went to Arezzo in 1922 and described the frescoes at length in his diary, raving about their “incomparable sense of arrangement,” “majesty of style,” and “austere peace and simplicity,” referring to Piero as “my main idol.”47 Donna Cassidy has convincingly argued that Hartley’s hieratic representations of New England fishermen were likely inspired by Piero’s works.48 Contrary to public perception of Wood, the artist grew up in a culturally stimulating environment and was fully cognizant of aesthetic developments in the United States and abroad. Nan Wood Graham recounts that her brother and Marvin Cone would “spend the early dawn hours copying the Old Masters together.”49 Cedar Rapids boasted a liberal arts institution—Coe College—and a thriving Art Association (est. 1905), which was housed in the Carnegie-funded library and mounted exhibitions on loan from Chicago and the East Coast. In 1928 the Carnegie Corporation financed the establishment of Cedar Rapids’s Little Gallery, an art center with an ambitious range of activities that were much praised by the leading modernist critic Forbes Watson when he visited in 1929. As youths, Wood and Marvin Cone actively contrib- uted to the events of the Art Association.50 Cone, who, after training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, spent a short period (1918–19) in Montpellier, France, during which he attended the art school on an occasional basis, is likely to have been an important influence on Wood.51 Wood was intellectually adventurous, and his own early artistic training was far from provincial. He avidly read Ernest A. Batchelder’s articles in The Craftsman, which advocated a pictorial abstraction based on the orderly arrangement of lines and masses, and attended the summer courses Batchelder ran at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft in 1910.52 As James Dennis has argued, through Batchelder’s teachings, Wood would have become acquainted with Arthur Wesley Dow’s theories of composition, which disavowed the illusionistic imitation of nature.53 Denman W. Ross, who was Batchelder’s instructor at the Harvard Summer School of Design and had a significant impact on his aesthetic approach, should be treated as another major indirect source.54 Dow referred to Piero in his widely used manual Composition, while Ross, who is attested to have gone to Sansepolcro on three occasions to see the Resurrection and quite probably also saw the Legend of the True Cross frescoes in Arezzo about the same time, recommended studying Piero’s composition.55 Wood’s European trips provided him with opportunities to become acquainted with the artistic traditions of the past as well as with recent and contemporary movements. When he visited the National Gallery, London, in 1920 he is unlikely to have missed the three Pieros on view—The Nativity, Saint Michael, and the aforementioned Baptism of Christ—which were among its highlights. Of his winter 1923–24 trip to Italy, only his stay in the southern city of Sorrento is well documented; however, it is reasonable to suppose that he also explored some of the country’s main art centers. A recently emerged account by the American sculptor Lawrence Tenney Stevens, whom Wood first befriended when

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). he attended the Académie Julian, attests that they visited Rome together.56 A humorous Christmas card Wood concocted and sent to his family and friends in 1923, which features a photomontage of the artist flying “From Paris to Rome” (Cedar Rapids Museum of Art), provides confirmation that he set foot in the capital.57 A postcard dated February 19, 1924, which was forwarded to Wood care of the Banca Commerciale of Palermo by his Sorrento hotel, indicates that he also made a trip to Sicily.58 Wood, however, would not have had to visit London’s National Gallery or travel through Italy to discover Piero, for, from the early 1920s, a spate of publications appeared in English that considerably enhanced the Italian artist’s reputation. The master’s style had already been highly rated by John Addington Symonds in The Fine Arts, volume 3 of that author’s Renaissance in Italy (London, 1877; New York, 1879; repeatedly republished in the following few decades);59 by Bernard Berenson in an essay that first appeared in 1897 in his volume The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance (republished in 1909, and in 1930 accompanied by a picture of the Resurrection);60 and by William Waters’s well-illustrated 1901 monograph, which was widely reviewed.61 In 1923 the Princeton University scholar Frank Jewett Mather Jr. published his authoritative volume A History of Italian Painting, which devoted four pages to Piero and reproduced the Resurrection, among other works.62 In the same year, the third volume of Élie Faure’s influential History of Art and the widely read magazine The Arts also featured a number of pages on the Italian master.63 In 1927 Roberto Longhi published his seminal monograph Piero della Francesca, which approached the master from the formalistic standpoint. It appeared in French in the same year, and in English in 1930.64 Piero’s rise from neglect to enthusiastic appreciation is also attested by certain liter- ary works of the time. It is evoked by Edith Wharton in her 1924 novella False Dawn (The ’Forties). Set in 1840s New York, it deals with a young man who is sent to Italy by his father to acquire works of art by established seventeenth-century masters but instead buys paintings by early Renaissance artists, an action that prompts his father to disinherit him. These paintings, which, we learn, will grow immensely in value in the following fifty years, include a portrait by Piero.65 In a 1925 essay in his popular book Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist, Aldous Huxley described Piero’s Resurrection as “the greatest picture in the world.”66 This claim seems to have met the approval of the art cognoscenti: Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recalled in 1941 that when Huxley made the statement, “many of us applauded.”67 The book’s positive reception and commercial success boosted Piero’s notoriety among the educated public at large.68 The particular essay became so well known that the 1930 edition of the Baedeker guide Rome and Central Italy drew travelers’ attention to the town of Sansepolcro by noting that among its artistic treasures was the Resurrection, citing Huxley’s endorsement.69 By 1931 Thomas Craven could declare in his best-selling survey of Western painting, Men of Art, that the fame of Piero had “lately risen to Olympian heights.”70 Circumstantial evidence suggests that Wood is likely to have been familiar with at least some of the above publications. The library at Coe College—an institution for which he designed opera sets as a youth, and where his friend Cone taught from 1919 until he retired—had a copy of Symonds’s 1900 edition of Renaissance in Italy, of Waters’s 1901 edition of the Piero monograph, and of the 1909 edition of Berenson’s survey of central Italian art.71 Piero’s presence in Cedar Rapids is also proved by Cone’s lecture notes.72 These deal with a wide range of artistic traditions and include two lec- tures on Piero, whom he calls “one of the greatest and noblest figures in all painting.” He quotes from Giorgio Vasari’s sixteenth-century life of Piero and from Huxley’s, Craven’s, Mather’s, Faure’s, and Longhi’s volumes referred to above, as well as from Regina

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Shoolman and Charles E. Slatkin’s The Enjoyment of Art in America (1942), which also discusses Piero. Cone’s dwelling on Piero’s “impersonal” and “detached” style indicates familiarity with Waters’s monograph (and, possibly, with Berenson’s brief essay, which was the first to describe the master’s style in these terms). Piero was also revered by another acquaintance of Wood’s, Edward Rowan, the energetic director of the Little Gallery. Rowan appears to have played a significant role in Wood’s life: the artist’s 1935 pastel Return from Bohemia (Figge Art Museum) depicts Rowan at the top of a hierarchical composition that also includes the artist’s mother and sister, and his first patron, David Turner.73 In an article published in 1932, Rowan described Piero as “that incomparable, abstract and impersonal fifteenth-century painter at Arezzo,” and quoted a passage from Mather’s volume that coincides with one of the texts cited by Cone in his lecture notes on the Sansepolcro master.74 Such enthusiasm is not surprising, given that Rowan had been a graduate student of Harvard University’s School of Fine Arts (1926–28) and trained at the Fogg Museum under Edward W. Forbes, who was especially interested in Piero.75

Forms, Functions, and Significance of Wood’s Appropriations

Wood’s Renaissance appropriations are of various types. Sometimes he transposed the basic structure of a specific painting to the work he was creating. On occasion, he selected specific elements from trecento and quattrocento works of art and inserted them, in slightly modified form, into his modern-day compositions. Wood also reused individual details from Renaissance paintings in combinations: the bare-chested soldier in the memorial window is the result of merging two saints from the Sansepolcro altarpiece, for example. All artists learn from tradition—in other words, “borrow” from other artists—but Wood’s Renaissance motifs and compositions are not uncomplicated emulations; they are pastiches, acknowledged imitations, esoteric references intended for his personal delectation. As argued above, they mostly serve to provide satirical subtexts to seemingly serious works.76 They fulfill a function similar to that of the symbols and private jokes that scholars such as Corn and Evans have identified in Wood’s output, and in particular in the images he realized after his “return from bohemia.”77 By insist- ing that his new homespun style was sparked by his appreciation of the northern art he saw in Germany in 1928, Wood diverted attention from his Italian sources, thus ensur- ing that the paintings’ recondite meanings remained hidden from view. The presence of the Italian Renaissance considerably enriches our view of Wood. It provides further evidence that his acquaintance with international artistic traditions was wide-ranging and, by implication, that Cedar Rapids, far from being a cultural backwater, offered ample opportunities to broaden one’s artistic horizons. The Italian presence also confirms that Wood’s art is not a straightforward and transparent celebra- tion of American ordinariness, contrary to what the artist claimed, and disproves the popular myth that regionalism was jingoistic and isolationist.78 Wood’s enthusiasm for Piero attests to his modernist outlook for, as we have seen, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Renaissance master had become a cult figure among avant-garde artists, who appreciated his reduction of subject matter into simple geometric shapes. This enthusiasm was shared by the other members of the so-called Regionalist triumvirate, Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. According to Craven, “Night after night, month after month, [Benton] devoted himself to the various schools and masters, to Michael Angelo, Rubens, Piero della Francesca, El Greco and the Orientals.”79 Laurence E. Schmeckebier, a personal friend

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). and biographer of Curry’s, suggests that the latter was well acquainted with the Italian master,80 and this finds visual confirmation in a number of murals the artist executed in the 1930s.81 The infatuation with Italian painting did not conflict with the patriotic spirit of the art programs launched by President Roosevelt’s administration during the Great Depression (the Public Works of Art Project [PWAP], set up in 1933, and the Section of Painting and Sculpture of the Treasury Department, which took over in 1934)— initiatives in which Wood was involved at a local level after having been appointed PWAP Iowa Director in 1933. Early Italian Renaissance muralists were in fact greatly appreciated by the program’s principal promoters as examples to imitate because they painted for the community and extolled ethical and civic ideals.82 Piero’s frescoes were particularly esteemed because of their seriousness, clarity, and visual freshness, as well as for their “modernity.” The artist George Biddle, who can be credited with the original idea of a government-sponsored mural program (he suggested it to Roosevelt, with whom he attended Groton School), often referred to Piero in his diary. On January 1, 1935, when he was working on the mural Society Freed through Justice for the Department of Justice, Biddle wrote that he had dreamed of being Piero. On May 3, 1948, he reminisced, echoing Huxley: “I devoured his work. I used to think ‘The Resurrection of Christ [at] Sansepolcro’ the most beautiful painting in the world.”83 Edward Rowan, who left the directorship of the Little Gallery in 1934 to take up the post of assistant technical director of the PWAP, planned a field trip to Italy in 1936 for the officials of the Section to see the works by Piero (and other frescoes).84 For his part, Edward Bruce, director of the program, declared in a speech that he drew the artists’ attention to

a little village I know in Italy nestling in the Apennine Hills which is called Borgo San Sepolcro. In that village there is a little town hall no bigger than the average country post office. Also, in that village lived a great artist. His name was Piero Della Francesca, and he painted there the greatest picture in the world, The Resurrection of Christ. Whenever I am in Italy I make a pilgrimage to Borgo to see that picture, and I find my soul refreshed from seeing it, as do the thousands of pilgrims who visit it each year. I hope the day may come when we, too, may develop a Piero Della Francesca.85

Conclusion

As this article has indicated, Piero was strongly present in America’s visual culture of the first decades of the twentieth century. Yet this presence has gone largely unde- tected by postwar scholarship, and thus Wood’s debt to the Italian artist has been overlooked. Wood’s own mythical account of the impact “Gothic” painting had on him—the Munich epiphany that is supposed to have led him to find true inspiration in the local culture of his native region—has also obscured the role that a master belonging to a concurrent, but different, visual tradition played in his development. Piero’s influence on Wood was at least as important as that of the northern painters; however, we have no reason to view the artist’s interest in Italian and northern traditions in binary terms, as conflicting and thus mutually exclusive. Both traditions must have appealed to him. After all, they coexisted and cross-fertilized each other in Renaissance Italy. In light of Wood’s imaginative re-creations and reinterpretations of the master’s art, it is tempting to see him as the American heir to Piero della Francesca whom Edward Bruce was longing for.

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). Notes

This article is part of a larger research project on Piero della Francesca in the United States that I began at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2006–7. I am thankful to the staff of the museum for providing a stimulating and supportive scholarly environment, and to the Terra Foundation for American Art for the award of a one-year Senior Fellowship. Special thanks are due to Virginia Mecklenburg, my Smithsonian adviser, and to Jane Milosch, Henry Adams, Sean Ulmer, Teri Van Dorston, Wallace Tomasini, Andrew Wallace, and Bob Drahonal for generously providing information on Grant Wood and Iowan culture. I am particularly indebted to Dorothy Johnson, Georges Roque, Pierre Sorlin, Emily D. Shapiro, and the anonymous readers for their invaluable comments on various versions of this article. 1 The two youths’ trip to Europe is well documented in Cone’s 1920 diary (Marvin Cone Archives, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art), a transcript of which is available online: http://www.crma.org/Content /Collection/Marvin-Cone.aspx. 2 Wood’s account of his conversion is reported by Irma René Koen, “The Art of Grant Wood,” Christian Science Monitor, March 26, 1932, 6. 3 Horst W. Janson, who lectured at the University of Iowa from 1938 to 1941, where Wood was also teaching, was the first scholar to associate the latter’s post-Munich paintings with Neue Sachlichkeit. See Janson, “The International Aspects of Regionalism,” College Art Journal 2, no. 4, part 1 (May 1943): 110–15. On the importance of the Munich visit for Wood’s stylistic evolution, see Lincoln Kirstein, “An Iowa Memling,” Art Front 1 ( July 1935): 6; James M. Dennis, Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1986), 68; Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), 25, 28, 70, 74; Jane C. Milosch, “American Gothic’s Munich Connection: A Window into Grant Wood’s Regionalism,” in American Artists in Munich: Artistic Migration and Cultural Exchange Processes, ed. Christian Fuhrmeister, Hubertus Kohle, and Veerle Thielemans (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), 247–60; and R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 67–71. For the new dating of John B. Turner, see Evans, Grant Wood, 65. 4 The Bavarian-born Neue Sachlichkeit artists Georg Schrimpf and Christian Schad, whose styles have been especially associated with Wood’s (Dennis, Grant Wood, 77; Milosch, “American Gothic’s Munich Connection,” 252), visited Italy repeatedly and sought inspiration from quattrocento art. Wolfgang Storch, ed., Georg Schrimpf und Maria Uhden: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Charlottenpresse–Frölich & Kaufmann, 1985), esp. Wieland Schmied, “Georg Schrimpf und Italien,” 10–12; and Nikolaus Schad, “Le ‘Réalisme magique’ de Christian Schad: Les années de formation et de maturation: Rome/ Naples (1923–1925)–Vienne (1925–1928),” in Christian Schad: Peintures, dessins, schadographies (Paris: Schirmer-Mosel, 2002), 27–35. 5 Paula Nuttall, From Flanders to Florence: The Impact of Netherlandish Painting, 1400–1500 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2004); and Till-Holger Borchert, ed., Memling: Rinascimento fiammingo (Milan: Skira, 2014), esp. the essays by Paula Nuttall, “Memling e la pittura italiana,” 38–51, Federica Veratelli, “I tratti del potere: I clienti italiani di Hans Memling,” 52–65, and Borchert, “Memling e l’Italia,” 66–77. 6 Wood’s only known written mentions of Italian masters are in Wood, “The Writer and the Painter,” American Prefaces: A Journal of Critical and Imaginative Writing 1 (October 1935): 3–4. He cites Tintoretto in connection with Thomas Hart Benton’s practice of modeling his figures in clay before painting them, and Filippo Lippi with reference to Robert Browning’s poem “Fra Lippo Lippi.” 7 On Adoration of the Home, see esp. Jane C. Milosch, “Grant Wood’s Studio: A Decorative Adventure,” in Grant Wood’s Studio: Birthplace of “American Gothic,” ed. Milosch (Cedar Rapids: Cedar Rapids Museum of Art; New York: Prestel, 2005), 82–83, who remarks that the painting originally featured side panels, like a triptych; and Evans, Grant Wood, 51–53. 8 See, for instance, Carlo Crivelli’s Saint Jerome and Masaccio’s Saints Jerome and John the Baptist. The visit to the National Gallery is recorded in Cone’s diary. 9 Corn, Grant Wood, 66. 10 Dennis, Grant Wood, 68; and Milosch, “American Gothic’s Munich Connection,” 253. 11 See Milosch, “American Gothic’s Munich Connection,” 249, for the dating of the drawing. Corn (Grant Wood, 66) believes this was produced shortly after the contract was drawn on January 25, 1927. 12 Naomi Doebel, “Memorial Window for Island Building Will Be Symbol of Peace and Tribute to Heroic Dead,” Cedar Rapids Gazette, January 13, 1929. 13 Ibid.

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 14 For recent English-language studies on the artist, see James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist & Man (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014); and Larry Witham, Piero’s Light: In Search of Piero Della Francesca; A Renaissance Painter and the Revolution in Art, Science and Religion (New York: Pegasus, 2014). 15 The sketchbook in which Wood noted his preliminary designs for the memorial window provides further evidence that he turned to the Italian Renaissance for inspiration, for it includes an accu- rate drawing of Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà. Grant Wood, Small Sketchbook of Ideas for the Memorial Window, 1927–28, page 36, Figge Art Museum, City of Davenport Collection, Grant Wood Archive, Davenport, Iowa. 16 Evans, Grant Wood, 66. 17 Catherine Moriarty, “Christian Iconography and the First World War Memorials,” Imperial War Museum Review 6 (1991): 63–75; and Jennifer Wingate, Sculpting Doughboys: Memory, Gender, and Taste in America’s World War I Memorials (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2013), 150–53. 18 The window design’s derivation from Piero’s Polyptych of the Misericordia has been perceived by the Chicago architect Thomas Beeby, who has also noticed Piero-esque qualities in the mural cycle titled When Tillage Begins, Other Arts Follow that was realized under Wood’s supervision in 1934 at the Iowa State University in Ames. In the preface to a monograph on the Des Moines–based architecture firm Herbert Lewis Kruse Blunck, Beeby exalts Iowa’s artistic heritage by drawing attention to the “astound- ing murals by Grant Wood that portray the settlers engaged in everyday tasks while possessing the grace and repose of a Piero della Francesca saint,” and to Cedar Rapids’s “stained glass window created by the same artist [that] shows the sheltering female figure of the same Piero luminously enfolding the hauntingly tragic figures of the war dead from Iowa’s past.” Herbert Lewis Kruse Blunck: Form and Technology (Milan: L’Arca, 2001), 5. Wood’s debt to Piero has also been intuitively perceived by Vincent Scully, “Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting: Environment, Art, and Illusion,” in Collaboration: Artists and Architects, ed. Barbaralee Diamonstein (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1981), 34–35: “Grant Wood [is] the gravest and noblest of [all painters] when seen on the broad stretches of wall which he respects so intensely or in his studies for them. He is not Giottesque like Rivera, but of the Quattrocento, recalling Piero and Uccello. His figures are sculpturally conceived, enthroned in clear stages of space.” 19 On American Gothic, as well as the monographs on Wood listed in note 3 above, see Thomas Hoving, American Gothic: The Biography of Grant Wood’s American Masterpiece (New York: Chamberlain Bros., 2005); and Steven Biel, American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005). 20 The oil painting and pencil sketch are reproduced in Dennis, Grant Wood, 79, 86. 21 For recent accounts of reactions to this painting, see Beal, American Gothic, 45–61; Hoving, American Gothic, 58–66; and Evans, Grant Wood, 102 –7. 22 Wanda Corn, “Grant Wood: Uneasy Modern,” in Milosch, Grant Wood’s Studio, 123–25. 23 Matthew Baigell, “Grant Wood Revisited,” Art Journal 26, no. 2 (Winter 1966–67): 117. 24 Hoving, American Gothic, 48. 25 The frontal pose is generally associated with the divine and with rulers endowed with God-given authority. Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 72–73. 26 Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (1955; Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2005), 43 and fig. 110. 27 Clarence J. Bulliet, “American Normalcy Displayed in Annual Show,” Chicago Evening Post, October 28, 1930, pt. 3, 1. 28 For the echoing forms in American Gothic, see Dennis, Grant Wood, 80; Biel, American Gothic, 27; Hoving, American Gothic, 18, 89; and Evans, Grant Wood, 101. Wood hinted that he pursued this approach when he declared in 1930: “I imagined Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with the house.” Quoted in Joan Liffring-Zug, comp., with John Zug, and Nan Wood Graham, This Is Grant Wood Country (Davenport, Iowa: Davenport Municipal Art Gallery, 1977), 4. For the visual rhyming in Victorian Survival, Honorary Degree, and Sultry Night, see Corn, “Grant Wood: Uneasy Modern,” 112; Dennis, Grant Wood, 121; and Evans, Grant Wood, 253, respectively. 29 On reiterated forms as a distinctive feature of Piero’s style, see Nicholas Penny, “Journey to Arezzo,” review of Piero della Francesca, by Roberto Longhi, London Review of Books 25, no. 8 (April 17, 2003): 3–6, who notes that, for instance, in the paired portrait of the duke and duchess of Urbino (Galleria

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). degli Uffizi, Florence) the corrugations on the face of Federigo da Montefeltro and the jewels worn by Battista Sforza rhyme with details of the landscape. 30 The letter, addressed to a Mrs. Nellie B. Sudduth in 1941, is partly reproduced in Corn, “Grant Wood: Uneasy Modern,” 125. 31 See Evans, Grant Wood, 93–94, 101, for Mrs. Inez Keck’s letter, and other references to the funereal. Wood’s morbid humor is also discussed by Milosch, “Grant Wood’s Studio: A Decorative Adventure,” 92–93. 32 We learn from his sister, Nan, who notably acted as the model for the female figure in American Gothic, that “the Wood family viewed Easter as the Resurrection, period. Easter chicks, eggs, and rabbits were out of place—fables, like Santa Claus—and we were to have no part of them.” Nan Wood Graham, with John Zug, and Julie Jensen McDonald, My Brother, Grant Wood (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1993), 111. 33 For analyses of this symbolism, see Dennis, Grant Wood, 73; and Evans, Grant Wood, 111–16. 34 William G. Waters, Piero della Francesca (London: George Bell and Sons, 1901), 47. 35 Evans, Grant Wood, 113. 36 Henry Adams, “The Truth about Grant Wood” (paper, College Art Association, New York City, 2000). I am most grateful to Adams for providing me with the text of his contribution. 37 Adams implies that Wood was attracted to Piero’s Baptism and Resurrection because he found Christ’s torso erotic. Critical literature has repeatedly enthused over the physical attractiveness of Piero’s representations of Jesus. See, for instance, Waters, Piero, 47. 38 On the lithograph’s satirical meaning, see esp. Dennis, Grant Wood, 121. 39 For a conveniently concise overview of Piero’s mathematical aesthetics, see Charles Bouleau, The Painter’s Secret Geometry: A Study of Composition in Art (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2014), 92–96. For Wood’s use of the golden section in American Gothic, see Brian Evans, “Number as Form and Content: A Composer’s Path of Enquiry,” in The Visual Mind: Art and Mathematics, ed. Michele Emmer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 114–15, note on 120, who, however, suggests that Wood may have been influenced by the ideas on design and dynamic symmetry of the American painter and theorist Jay Hambidge. 40 Edward Alden Jewell, “Quickenings: Visions That Stir the Mural Pulse,” New York Times, May 27, 1934, X7. 41 For recent accounts of Piero’s critical fortune, see Luciano Cheles, “Piero della Francesca in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Italianist 14, no. 1 ( June 1994): 218–60; Penny, “Journey to Arezzo”; and Witham, Piero’s Light, chaps. 8 and 9. I should also like to mention the lecture “The Piero della Francesca Phenomenon,” which Keith Christiansen gave at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1992, the text of which the author has kindly made available to me. 42 Luciano Cheles, “Copie ed echi di Piero in Inghilterra,” in Piero interpretato: Copie, giudizi e musealizza- zione di Piero della Francesca, ed. Cecilia Prete and Ranieri Varese (Ancona: Il Lavoro Editoriale, 1998), 24–26, 35n90–38n110; and Caroline Elam, Roger Fry and the Re-Evaluation of Piero della Francesca (New York: Frick Collection, 2004). 43 Luciano Cheles, “Piero della Francesca et la peinture française: De Puvis de Chavannes à Matisse,” in Fascinante Italie: De Manet à Picasso, 1853–1917, ed. Blandine Chavanne (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 63–65. Piero’s impact on Matisse is discussed by the modernist art critic Walter Pach in Pach, Queer Thing, Painting: Forty Years in the World of Art (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), 116–17. 44 For overviews covering a wide period, see Luciano Cheles, “A Century-Old Passion: Piero Della Francesca in America,” in Milton Glaser nella città di Piero, ed. Cheles (Sansepolcro: Comune di Sansepolcro e Sbandieratori di Sansepolcro, 2007), 5–21; and Cheles, “Piero della Francesca e l’arte americana,” in Piero della Francesca: Indagine su un mito, ed. Antonio Paolucci (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, in press). See also Nathaniel Silver, “An Old Master for the New World,” in Piero della Francesca in America: From Sansepolcro to the East Coast, ed. Silver (New York: Frick Collection, 2013), 13–25, who focuses on critics’ and collectors’ early interest in Piero. 45 Martin Friedman, “Interview: Charles Sheeler Talks with Martin Friedman,” Archives of American Art Journal 16, no. 4 (1976): 17. 46 Elsie Driggs, “The Search for Piero della Francesca,” in Elsie Driggs: The Quick and the Classical, ed. Constance Kimmerle (Doylestown, Pa.: James A. Michener Art Museum; Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 143–45, at 145. 47 Quoted in Marsden Hartley, Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, ed. Susan Elizabeth Ryan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 118–22.

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 48 Donna M. Cassidy, “‘On the Subject of Nativeness’: Marsden Hartley and New England Regionalism,” Winterthur Portfolio 29, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 241. 49 Graham, with Zug and McDonald, My Brother, 15. This is also attested by Winifred Cone, Marvin’s widow. See Liffring-Zug, with Zug and Graham, This Is Grant Wood Country, 20. 50 On cultural life in Cedar Rapids, and Wood’s and Cone’s early contributions to it, see Hazel Brown, Grant Wood and Marvin Cone: Artists of an Era (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1987); Graham, with Zug and McDonald, My Brother, 14–15, 73; and Milosch, “Grant Wood’s Studio: A Decorative Adventure,” 79–80, who cites Watson’s remarks on the Little Gallery from his article “Mid-Western Optimism,” The Arts 16, no. 4 (December 1929): 215. 51 Cone’s diaries, 1918–19. 52 James M. Dennis, “Grant Wood’s Native-Born Modernism,” in Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed, ed. Brady M. Roberts et al. (Rohnert Park, Calif.: Pomegranate Artbooks, 1995), 43–63, at 47. 53 Ibid., 43. A remark Wood made in 1940 about his schooling suggests a predisposition to a rational- ist aesthetics resulting from an early interest in mathematics: “In high school mathematics helped me because it is so logical and good taste is largely a matter of logic.” Quoted from Liffring-Zug, with Zug and Graham, This Is Grant Wood Country, 12. 54 Batchelder acknowledged such an influence in the preface to Batchelder, The Principles of Design (Chicago: Inland Printer Company, 1906). 55 Arthur W. Dow, Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected in Art Structure for the Use of Students and Teachers (1899; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1920), 44, 46, 69. Ross’s signature was entered in the visitors’ book of Sansepolcro’s Museo Civico for May 12, 1907, May 9, 1920, and December 13, 1920. Ross is likely to have stopped and taken time to see the Legend of the True Cross frescoes on those occasions because Arezzo was the obvious base from which to visit Sansepolcro. The two towns were then connected by a railway line. See Karl Baedeker, Handbook for Travellers: Central Italy and Rome, 15th rev. ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), 61–62. Ross refers to the master’s Arezzo paintings in On Drawing and Painting (1912; New York: AMS Press, 1971), 135. On Ross’s interest in Piero, see Marie Frank, Denman Ross and American Design Theory (Hanover, N.H.: Univ. Press of New England, 2011), 161. 56 Stevens states in this account, dated November 23, 1940, which describes a trip to Iowa he made shortly earlier to see Wood: “We spent several hours there [in the kitchen]; our conversation at this time, like the bloom of a flower, reached its height. We reminisced on Paris, Rome, and Hotel Cocomella at Sorrento.” I am most grateful to John Faubion, director of the Lawrence Tenney Stevens Trust (Arizona), for drawing my attention to this document and providing a transcription of the text. 57 For a reproduction, see Evans, Grant Wood, 50. 58 The postcard was sent from Florence by an acquaintance whose signature cannot be deciphered. See “Grant Wood Scrapbook 18: Early Postcards and Letters, 1920–1931,” compiled by Nan Wood Graham, Ref. SB18-0030. Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa. 59 Symonds (Fine Arts, 234) describes the Resurrection as “the grandest, most poetic, and most awe- inspiring picture of the Resurrection.” 60 The 1930 reissue of the Piero essay was included in a volume that dealt with other Italian schools as well: Bernard Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). 61 “Piero della Francesca: A Good Book on the Early Italian Painter,” New York Tribune, Illustrated Supplement, April 14, 1901, 11; “Among the New Books: Interesting Biography of an Italian Master Painter,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 23, 1901, 16; “Piero della Francesca. By W. G. Waters,” Outlook 67, no. 17 (April 27, 1901): 967–68; “Biography,” Congregationalist, May 11, 1901, 754; “Great Masters in Painting and Sculpture,” New York Times, June 29, 1901, BR5. 62 Frank Jewett Mather Jr., A History of Italian Painting (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1923), 169–73. 63 Élie Faure, History of Art, vol. 3, Renaissance Art (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1923), esp. 86–91; The Arts 4, no. 4 (October 1923): 184–88 reproduces five details from Piero’s Arezzo frescoes as full-page illustrations. 64 Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca (Rome: Valori Plastici, 1927; Paris: Crès, 1927; New York: Warne, 1930). For the importance of this monograph, see Keith Christiansen’s introductory essay “Roberto Longhi’s Piero della Francesca,” in Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca, trans. David Tabbat (Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Stanley Moss–Sheep Meadow Book, 2002).

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This content downloaded from 160.111.254.017 on March 11, 2016 05:55:29 AM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 65 See Edith Wharton, False Dawn (The ’Forties), in Old New York (1924; London: Virago, 1985), 1–74, 70 for the quotation about the Piero portrait. I wish to thank Helen Langdon for drawing my attention to this novella. 66 Aldous Huxley, “The Best Picture,” in Huxley, Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1925), 184–96, at 185. 67 Barr’s statement is in Barr, “Modern Art Makes History, Too,” College Art Journal 1, no. 1 (November 1941): 4. 68 The influence exercised by Huxley’s book on contemporary views on Piero (and other artists) is noted by Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, vol. 1, 1894–1939 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 170. 69 Karl Baedeker, Rome and Central Italy (New York: Scribner’s, 1930), 70. 70 Thomas Craven, Men of Art (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), 76, who also mentions Huxley’s essay on the Resurrection. Craven, too, seems to have succumbed to Piero’s charms: the register of the Pinacoteca of Sansepolcro records his presence there on October 9, 1927. 71 These volumes are still listed in its catalogue: library.coe.edu. 72 The lecture notes are preserved at the Marvin Cone Archives, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. 73 Evans, Grant Wood, 74–75. 74 The article dealt with a contemporary artist whose style he perceived as Piero-esque: Edward B. Rowan, “The Painting of J. Theodore Johnson,” Art and Archaeology 33, no. 1 ( January–February 1932): 31. 75 Forbes saw the Resurrection at Sansepolcro on September 18, 1920 (as attested by his signature in the visitors’ book). During another trip to Italy, in 1928, he ordered a large-format print of a scene of the Arezzo murals, which he had installed at the Fogg Museum. I am grateful to Dr. Francesca G. Bewer (Harvard University) for this information. 76 For theoretical debates on the question of appropriations in art, see Richard Dyer, Pastiche (New York: Routledge, 2007); and Luciano Cheles and Georges Roque, eds., L’image recyclée (Pau: Presses de l’Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour, 2013), which also includes, among the case studies, my contribution “Les recyclages de Piero della Francesca,” 57–75. For the use of incongruous details as features that either disclose or conceal a work of art’s most secret aspects, and as independent vehicles of meaning, see Daniel Arasse, Le détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1996); as well as Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s detailed review of this seminal book in Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (December 2013): 649–51. 77 Corn, Grant Wood, passim., and Evans, Grant Wood, 87–88. 78 For a persuasive attempt to explode this myth, see James M. Dennis, Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1998). 79 Thomas Craven, Modern Art: The Men, the Movements, the Meaning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935), 334. 80 Laurence E. Schmeckebier, John Steuart Curry’s Pageant of America (New York: American Artists Group, 1943), 274. 81 An example is Westward Movement: Justice of the Plains (1937, Department of Justice Building, Washington, D.C.), which is based on Piero’s Victory of Constantine (Arezzo frescoes). See Cheles, “Century-Old Passion,” 12–13. 82 Sergio Cortesini, “Depicting National Identities in New Deal America and Fascist Italy: Government Sponsored Murals,” in Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen, 1930–1945, ed. Hans-Jörg Czech and Nikola Doll (Dresden: Sandstein, 2007), 38–39. 83 George Biddle Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., reel 3621, frames 147 and 270. 84 Edward Rowan to Edward Bruce, n.d. [August 1936], dated by and quoted in Cortesini, “Depicting National Identities,” 38. 85 Bruce’s text, reproduced in Peyton Boswell Jr., Modern American Painting (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1939), 92, 95, is also quoted in Cortesini, “Depicting National Identities,” 38.

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