Hide/Seek is on view at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery through February 13. See it and get the catalog.
Grant Wood, Arnold Comes of Age, 1930
"...it would be a mistake to see his working in an American vernacular as a simple retreat from modernism. Instead, he inflected traditional forms and subjects with a knowing take on art history and the complexity of social mores; he was a notable satirist, for instance, of American pieties, and his landscapes are so stylized that they become abstractions. In Arnold Comes of Age, the wistful youth set against the homoerotic scene in the background suggest the tension and difficulties faced by gay men who stayed behind in Middle America--or gay men, as was Wood, who returned to their native grounds after realizing they could not find a home in the big cities of America or Europe either."
For much deeper look at this portrait and the artist, read Tripp Evans' revelatory Grant Wood: A Life, newly out from Knopf.
Comments