Word: woode
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...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...
...Wood's eyeline for many of these landscapes floats oneirically up in the air; he was fond of aerial perspective, the Bruegelian God's-eye view, as in his hovering vision of Arbor Day, 1932. Sometimes, with less happy results, he conflated it with Hollywood. The night view of Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931, is straight out of a Disney animation, and indeed the influence of Walt on Wood looks stronger than is usually acknowledged. In his curious Death on the Ridge Road, 1935, a painting of an impending car crash, the fatal truck coming over...
...worst, Wood was almost everything his critics said: vulgar, provincial, cute, mannered, and untruthful about the realities of country life. His paintings have much less documentary truth to offer about the Midwest in the '30s than Margaret Bourke-White's camera, but there are no photographs of Eden. This show allows us to see what Wood's assets were: mainly, the deep lyricism rising from his certainty that he had discovered a vein of imagery no other painter had mined...
...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's sister Nan and a Cedar Rapids dentist named McKeeby. The subject of American Gothic is in fact a small-town Midwesterner and his unmarried daughter, and once this is seen, the details of the painting fall into shape, as Wood meant them: the pitchfork becomes a scepter...
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...