From Deborah Solomon's 28 October
NY Times review of
Grant Wood: A Life (Knopf, 2010) by R. Tripp Evans -
Wood was only 50 when he died of pancreatic cancer in 1942. His posthumous reputation was its own forlorn drama; critics and art historians who should have known better wrote him off as a propagandist for conservative values. He was accused of fostering a shrill nationalism that was actually compared to the unalloyed evil of the Third Reich. After the war, the art historian H. W. Janson asserted that "the Regionalist credo could be matched more or less verbatim from the writings of Nazi experts on art". In 1962, when Janson published his now classic textbook on the history of Western art, he made no mention of Wood.
Wood had to wait for the arrival of postmodernism and its assault on the official story of art before he could be rehabilitated. Now he is back, and it says something about the folly and failures of art history that it took the special claims of gender studies to bring Wood's life into view in our time. Evans wants to convince us that Wood longed for what he could not have — but a longing for men was not what made him distinctive or memorable. He longed for the company of the dead and tunneled back through time in his enchanting and elegiac paintings. He deserves to be remembered as one of the essential eccentrics of American art.
Solomon comments that -
In interviews and profiles, Wood was inevitably described as a "shy bachelor", and Evans states confidently in his introduction that the artist "spent most of his life masking — not always successfully — his homosexuality". But a man who stifles his desires to the point of near extinction cannot accurately be called gay, and by the end of the book the reader has no idea whether Wood was ever intimate with a man. Affairs are hinted at, but the author is unable to document them; Wood himself claimed to be innocent of carnal satisfactions. One of his friends is quoted in the book recalling a night when Wood seems to have confessed to being chastely asexual, which is not implausible.
