In 1934, the self-proclaimed “farmer painter,” Grant Wood—whose iconic image of a pitchfork-wielding farmer and his dour companion, “American Gothic,” had brought him national fame four years earlier—assumed a new title: Professor Wood. Applauding the artist’s arrival at the University of Iowa, The Des Moines Register announced, “It is gladdening that Mr. Wood is not without honor in his own land.”
As fitting as the Register may have found the university’s decision, Wood’s new colleagues in Iowa City were less than pleased. Not only did they resent Wood’s populist celebrity, but they also were troubled by his rather thin academic credentials. Wood held not even a bachelor’s degree, and his primary teaching experience had been restricted to elementary and junior-high-school classrooms. Although he had spent two recent summers as a resident artist at Iowa’s Stone City Art Colony, even there he had emphatically distanced himself from the ivory tower. In a typical interview, in 1932, Wood declared: “All the really good ideas I’ve ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. You don’t get panicky about some '-ism’ or other while you have Bossy by the business end.”
Equally troubling to Wood’s new colleagues were the circumstances of his appointment. After the Stone City Art Colony folded, in 1933, Wood was named Iowa’s director of the Public Works of Art Project, a short-lived federal relief program. Because the local PWAP office operated out of the University of Iowa, he was extended an appointment to the faculty while he directed a major mural project at Iowa State University, in Ames. (Students who participated in the project received academic credit for this mural “class” taught by Wood.) To the astonishment of the art faculty at the University of Iowa, the administration made Wood a permanent member of the department when the murals were completed, in June 1934.
In Wood’s time as in our own, there was nothing new about a famous hire with unorthodox credentials. What makes Wood’s situation so compelling, however, are the personal dilemmas this new role presented for him. He craved the legitimacy of a university teaching position, yet as a leader within the Regionalist movement—a group of “homegrown” American artists who regarded academics with suspicion—he realized that the association also compromised him. His fellow Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry faced similar predicaments in their own appointments—Benton to the Kansas City Art Institute, in 1935, and Curry to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in 1936—yet in Wood’s case, the issue was also painfully exacerbated by his closeted homosexuality. On the one hand, he was forced to tacitly endorse Benton’s attacks on the academy—diatribes that often conflated academic elitism with homosexuality—and on the other, he faced hostile colleagues only too happy to use his secret against him.
Benton’s 1935 essay “Farewell to New York,” published during Wood’s first year at the University of Iowa, placed Wood in a particularly uncomfortable position as Benton’s comrade-in-arms. Benton declared that American art had been thoroughly polluted by “the concentrated flow of aesthetic-minded homosexuals into the various fields of artistic practice. ... Far be it for me to raise my hands in any moral horror over the ways and tastes of individuals. If young gentlemen, or old ones either, wish to wear women’s underwear and cultivate extraordinary manners it is all right with me. But it is not all right with the art which they affect and cultivate. It is not all right when, by ingratiation or subtle connivance, precious fairies get into positions of power and judge, buy, and exhibit American pictures on a base of nervous whim and under the sway of those overdelicate refinements of taste characteristic of their kind.”
Leaving behind the “lisping voice and mincing ways” of the Eastern academic establishment—Benton had been teaching at the New School, in New York—he declared his intention to return to his native Midwest. “The people of the West are highly intolerant of aberration,” Benton explained in admiring tones, "[and] in the smaller cities, there are no isolating walls of busy indifference where odd manners and cults can reach positions of eminence and power.”
Although Wood made no comment on Benton’s essay at the time of its appearance, he did discuss it in his review of Benton’s 1937 autobiography, An Artist in America. Rather heartbreakingly, Wood—whose closeted homosexuality was perfectly well known to Benton—wrote: “Benton has included a blistering, and, I believe, healthful commentary on present-day art and intellectualism, and has a great deal to say about the parasites and hangers-on of art in general, with their ivory-tower hysterias and frequent homosexuality. Perhaps Benton has not been just in everything he has said. I do not know. But I do know that he has brought out into the open things that ought to be discussed frankly and sincerely.”
The last thing Wood needed in 1937 was for the topic of homosexuality in American art to be brought out into the open—especially given the relationship he had developed in the preceding years with his personal secretary, Park Rinard. In 1940 Wood’s department chair would seize upon this connection to force the artist out.
Wood’s leave of absence from the University of Iowa in 1940-41 has often been explained as a dispute over pedagogy; his heavy-handed teaching methods, lack of formal training, and resistance to theory were a continual source of complaint. Although those factors certainly played a part in the case mounted against him, Wood’s colleagues also raised the more destructive charge of his homosexuality. First published in 2005 by Joni L. Kinsey, a professor of art history at Iowa, this previously unreported dimension of the 1940-41 controversy explains Wood’s crippling depression of that year.
As far back as 1936, Wood had openly clashed with his department chair, Lester Longman. Dedicated to modernizing the university’s art program, Longman considered Wood’s instruction style and work hopelessly outdated. With the addition of Horst Janson to the department, in 1938, Wood acquired a second nemesis. Not only did Janson join Longman in condemning Wood’s teaching, but he also blamed the artist for his own temporary dismissal by university officials, also in 1940, for taking students to a Picasso exhibition in Chicago (Longman had immediately reinstated Janson). Although Wood’s involvement in Janson’s firing has never been proven, earlier in the same year Wood had written a letter to the administration citing his grievances against Longman. Denied his request to establish an independent “creative art” department removed from Longman’s control, Wood threatened to resign—the very result, of course, that Longman hoped for. To Longman’s disappointment, Wood agreed instead to a sabbatical for the 1940-41 academic year.
Hoping to bar Wood from returning, Longman and Janson embarked on an obsessive campaign in the fall of 1940 to discredit the artist. No doubt at Longman’s invitation, a Time reporter named Eleanor Welch went to Iowa City to investigate rumors circulating about Wood’s private life. Although the article was never published, the investigation alone had a poisonous effect on Wood. Demanding to know the identity of Welch’s sources, he pleaded with university officials to rebut her story—arguing that its allegations were “so serious that they indicate a deliberate campaign to destroy my reputation.” Longman, who publicly disavowed any connection to the inquiry, went so far as to write a conciliatory letter to Time proclaiming Wood a valued colleague. In an aside laced with innuendo, however, he added: “Mr. Wood’s personal persuasions have nothing whatever to do with our granting his leave-of-absence.”
The most explicit charge Kinsey has uncovered, recorded in the minutes of a 1941 meeting led by the university’s president, Virgil Hancher, is as brief as it is breathtaking. “It was also reported,” the minutes read, “that comment has been made on ‘the strange relationship between Mr. Wood and his publicity agent,’ the inference and intimation indicating that Grant Wood was a homosexual, and that Park Rinard was involved.” Rather astoundingly, Rinard himself is listed as one of the meeting’s participants—yet no response from him appears in the record. Writing to his friend John Reid, Wood claimed that “my feelings in this matter are too deep to translate into words.”
Halfway through Wood’s leave of absence from the university, Benton became embroiled in a controversy that only heightened the Iowa painter’s anxiety. In an interview widely reprinted in April 1941, Benton proclaimed: “Do you know what’s wrong with the art business in America? It’s the third sex and the museums. Even in Missouri we’re full of them. We’ve got an immigration on out there. ... Our museums are full of ballet dancers, retired businessmen, and boys from the Fogg Institute at Harvard, where they train museum directors and artists. They hate my pictures and talk against them.”
The Kansas City Art Institute, where Benton had taught since he left New York, reacted to his comments by refusing to renew his contract the following year. Benton retaliated by turning his dismissal into a cause célèbre. Claiming that his enemies at the Institute and the Nelson-Atkins Museum were “not quite regular in the plain American sense,” he pitched a public battle that became increasingly ugly.
Students, colleagues, and Kansas City backers loyal to Benton demonstrated that his own bigotry was rather broadly embraced. At a rally in support of Benton’s reinstatement, students from the art department marched with signs bearing the image of a pansy, accompanied by the slogan: “We Don’t Want These!” The Kansas City Journal, too, eagerly leapt to the artist’s defense. Publishing a caricature of a fey, limp-wristed Benton, “Remodeled To Suit The Institute,” the newspaper claimed: “A ‘Twist of the Wrist’ Could Regain Him His Job.”
Although the institute remained steadfast in its refusal to renew his contract (Benton told a reporter: “Sissies have won over the will of my students”), the popular reaction to Benton’s firing only reinforced for Wood—and for the University of Iowa’s administration—the danger of his exposure. Longman held the trump card, and everyone involved knew it.
In the late summer of 1941, a relieved Wood received the news that when he returned to the university in the fall, he was to be promoted to full professor and removed from Longman’s chairmanship. (In order to please all parties, university officials had transferred Wood from the department of graphic and plastic arts to the School of Fine Arts.) A number of signs that semester appeared to indicate a fresh start for the artist—he sold two large paintings, and his dealers began to plan a major retrospective for the following year—but this optimism was short-lived. Plagued by signs of poor health in early fall, Wood discovered in November that he was suffering from an aggressive form of liver cancer. Three months later, and two hours shy of his 51st birthday, he died with Rinard at his bedside.
The following decades saw the gradual decline of both Wood’s and Benton’s reputations. Benton’s 1975 obituary in The New York Times offered the backhanded compliment that “it was the untutored art lovers who loved Mr. Benton’s work the most.” Wood’s former colleague, Horst Janson, completely ignored the Regionalists in his best-selling 1962 textbook, History of Art. Beginning with the pioneering scholarship of James M. Dennis and Wanda M. Corn in the 1970s and 80s, Wood’s work eventually found a permanent place within the canon—a position initially as fraught as his teaching appointment.
Nowhere is this transformation more striking than at the University of Iowa, where after decades of near silence regarding its most famous art-faculty member, there is something of a Wood Renaissance taking shape. Recently the university inaugurated a biennial conference devoted to Wood’s legacy, and there are plans to honor him in some permanent way when its School of Art and Art History completes its post-2008-flood reconstruction. More important, through the generosity of the philanthropist James P. Hayes—the Iowa City attorney who bought Wood’s former home, in 1975—the artist’s house is slated to become an important regional research center at the university, housing visiting scholars and artists. In a rather literal sense, Professor Wood has finally found a home at the university.