Word: corns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Forget a few details and for the month of June Melissa Sue Anderson, America's favorite corn queen from "Little House on the Prarie," was a regular Harvard freshman. Ignore the fact that her dress was a little flamboyant, her language a little flamboyant, her language a little cliched. Don't worry that her make-up was thicker than Rustoleum, or that her blue eyes could stop you like a rabbit in front of headlights. So what if she made no move without two directors, three camera operators, light men, sound men, make-up men, script supervisor, innumerable assistants with...
...works in Wood's small mature oeuvre that are not already in museums. It seems felicitous that Grant Wood's reviving angel, the art historian who has worked on him for a decade and who curated this fascinating show, should bear the name Wanda Corn. Moreover, the time is ripe. Once again, Americans are bemused by the deflation of their dreams. As it was in the '30s, the ethos that linked virtue to reward through honest toil is in deep trouble. Granted, the nostalgia for Wood's Midwest is now laced with self-evident ironies...
...Corn points out, the eroticism that might have been an attribute of his figures is transferred entirely to the landscape they inhabit. Wood's people are nearly always emblems of either innocence or rectitude: pink and doll-like when they are not harsh and sanctimonious. But the hills are like green breasts and buttocks, heaving perceptibly in his preferred light, that of a young spring morning. The plowshare slices into them suggestively. His best landscapes from the '30s, like Spring Turning, 1936, are votives to the original dea mater: man makes his brown tattoos on that vast pelt...
...also see, as an unexpected bonus, what a good painting American Gothic was. Major clichés become invisible after a while, and Curator Corn has made a valiant effort to strip the accretions from this one. She has included a hilarious collection of cartoons and ads based on American Gothic-an inspired piece of contextual criticism. Far from being a lampoon of conservative Midwestern farmers and their wives, American Gothic is, as she points out, "not about farmers, not about a married couple, and not a satire." Thirty-two years' difference in age lay between its models, Wood...
Without making exaggerated claims for her subject, Corn has restored a missing fragment of the American imagination. Wood was not a great painter, but he epitomized some deep-struck hopes and illusions, and he deserves understanding. This will be a popular show, and it should...