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Grant Wood's Corn Room Mural
5/26/2007 - 5/26/2010
For the first time since 1992, Grant Wood's Corn Room Mural will be shown in its entirety. The permanent installation of the mural will be accompanied by a small, rotating group of Regionalist prints from the permanent collection.
The mural was initially donated to the Art Center in 1986 by Tower Properties, Ltd., but when the corporation went into bankruptcy in 1989, the courts made the donation invalid and ordered it to be sold at auction. In 1995, this auction was held at the Sioux City Art Center, and the mural was purchased by Sioux City attorney Alan Fredregill for $80,000. He spent the next year looking for a permanent home for the Corn Room, ultimately donating it to the Art Center where it was accessioned into the permanent collection.
Corn Room is a significant transitional work for Wood's development. His conception of Regionalism, the only Modernist art movement to come out of the Midwest, emerges in this mural. We can see his embrace of the local subjects and native landscape familiar from Wood's mature, Regionalist works of the 1930s, but the mural is executed in an earlier, painterly technique where he created his imagery by removing paint from the prepared canvas. This subtractive technique resulted in severe damage to the canvas when it was covered in the 1950s. The conservation process saved the mural, but the resulting damage has dimmed the imagery and shifted his colors towards the golden-brown visible today.
The mural, when seen in the context of the other works in the exhibition by Wood, provides visitors with the opportunity to see how Wood matured as an artist, developing the style that brought him national and international recognition. The Fredregill Fund, established by the Sioux City Art Center's share of the auction selling price, has allowed the acquisition of a number of Regionalist prints by Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton that will be on display with Grant Wood's Corn Room.
Wall texts from the exhibition gallery
Grant Wood (1891-1942)
biography
Grant Wood is the only artist born in Iowa with an international reputation. His best-known painting, American Gothic (1930), has become an iconic image of rural America. Wood spent the majority of his art career living and working in Cedar Rapids. He was the head of the Iowa section of the Public Works of Art Project which ran from 1933-1934.
Wood was the most prominent artist in the Regionalist art movement in the 1930s, and he remained a proponent of its approach to art for the remainder of his career. This movement was a democratic art accessible to everyone and reflecting local, rather than imported from Europe or elsewhere, interests and traditions. The ideas Regionalism describe are connected to the immediate, local audience for the art.
The Corn Room Mural is a typical example of the kinds of landscape visible in the surrounding countryside, and its genesis -- as one of four murals commissioned by a local businessman, Eugene Eppley, for hotels in Council Bluffs, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, and Sioux City -- describes the types of relationship between artist and audience Wood hoped Regionalism would foster everywhere in America. This close connection between artist, community, and locale was an essential part of the broader agenda of Regionalism.
the process
Wood's technique in painting this mural was subtractive -- his assistant Carl Eybers would put a thin layer of paint on a prepared section of the canvas, and Wood would then wipe away from that paint to create the corn stalks, buildings and other imagery visible. The mural is faded today both because of this subtractive technique and because it was painted over. The lengthy conservation process to remove the paint and wallpaper that covered up Wood's painting could not restore it to its original brightness.
This mural was originally painted as a decoration for the Martin Hotel in Sioux City. It was one of four murals commissioned by Eugene Eppley for the dining rooms of his hotels in Sioux City, Council Bluffs, Cedar Rapids and Waterloo. Painted around 1927, The Corn Room Mural is an important early example of Wood's emerging Regionalist approach. It is one of his first works to be drawn specifically from local concerns, and it prefigures his shift towards a more highly detailed realism following his 1928 trip to Munich, Germany, to supervise the manufacture of the Memorial Window for the Cedar Rapids Veteran's Memorial Building.
the historical context
Grant Wood's Corn Room Mural is historically important because it shows that Wood was developing the ideas and approaches that would become Regionalism several years before he produced his first clearly-Regionalist works and achieved critical success with his invention: Woman with Plants (1929) and American Gothic (1930). Both these paintings have their origins in the specific landscape of the Midwest, but fuse their local subjects with formal concerns drawn from seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Wood's concerns with landscape, visible in the Corn Room Mural, remain a constant reference point for his Regionalist works: it appears as the background to Woman with Plants and in the famous house seen behind the couple in American Gothic. The central imagery in one of the main panels -- conical piles of harvested corn -- reappears in his later work, notably as the central focus of his lithograph, January (1937), in the painting Iowa Cornfield (1941), and in his last known work, an oil sketch from 1941 called Iowa Landscape.
This mural was papered over in the early 1950s and forgotten
until it was rediscovered in 1979 by Leah Hartman, an interviewer for the
Siouxland Oral History Program. Her interview with Carl Eybers, Wood's assistant
in painting the Martin Hotel mural, led to its being removed from the Hotel
and conserved by the Sioux City Art Center. Tower Properties Ltd., the owners
of the Martin Hotel donated the mural to the art center in the 1980s after
its recovery, but when they filed for bankruptcy in 1989, the future of
the mural in Sioux City was uncertain. Alan Fredregill purchased the mural
at the auction and donated it to the Art Center so it would remain in Sioux
City.
Grant Wood's Corn Room mural
The permanent installation of the mural has been underwritten, in part, by Bill Turner.
Eugene Eppley commissioned this mural from Grant Wood in 1927 as a decoration for the dining room of the Martin Hotel in Sioux City. It is one of four murals commissioned by a regional businessman, Eugene Eppley, for hotels in Council Bluffs, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, and Sioux City.
The mural is a typical example of the kinds of landscape visible in the surrounding countryside. It was originally painted so it filled the room, creating an environment that had the effect of standing in a corn field in Iowa. Its installation reproduces some of this effect.
Grant Wood was the main promoter of Regionalism, the American art movement that emerged in the Midwest in the early 1930s and continued into the early 1940s. Like Wood's mature, Regionalist works of the 1930s, the Corn Room employs subject matter drawn specifically from local concerns, and it prefigures his shift towards a more highly detailed realism following his 1928 trip to Munich, Germany, to supervise the manufacture of the Memorial Window for the Cedar Rapids Veteran's Memorial Building. While some critics considered these rural, predominately agrarian subjects to be stylistically native to America, others argued they were signs of a hopelessly provincial approach to art. Regionalism was both praised as the source, or damned as a backwater to American art.
Click here to to view the gallery guide for the exhibit.
(above: gallery view of Grant Wood's Corn Room Mural)
(above: gallery view of Grant Wood's Corn Room Mural)
(above: gallery view of Grant Wood's Corn Room Mural)
Editor's note:
Resource Library readers may also enjoy these earlier articles and essays among 178 Resource Library texts referencing the artist:
Resource Library articles on "American Scene" painting and "regionalism":
these audio shows
National Public Radio provides through its Programs Archive page:
The Story Behind American Gothic
from Morning Edition, July 12, 2005
American Gothic, Present at the Creation from Morning Edition, November 18, 2002 with links also
to "Centennial of Grant Wood's Birth" (June 6, 1991) and "an
interview with James Dennis, author of Grant Wood: A Study in American
Art and Culture". (February 13, 1976)
Amazon.com's feature that allows people on the Web to read text inside books including
To use this feature, search in "books," then enter title of book. When book is selected go to "look inside" and read sample pages of the book selected, which may include color images of the front cover, front flap, table of contents, excerpt such as the introduction chapter, alphabetical index, back flap and back cover. These books on American Gothic also have a word search feature, which enables registered individuals to search inside the books and pull up individual pages containing the selected words. [Click here for more on Amazon.com's project and other digitizing initiatives.]
and these other resources on the Web:
TFAO also suggests these DVD or VHS videos:
Visions of California: The Story
of California Scene Painting, produced by Paul Bockhorst for KOCE Public
Television in collaboration with The Irvine Museum, is the 1994 story of
California Scene Painting 1925-1950. Bockhorst, working with scores of
collectors and dozens of institutions and museums nationwide, has created
a three-part series of artistic delight and intellectual insight that features
almost 150 works of art.
TFAO does not maintain a lending library of videos or sell videos. Click here for information on how to borrow or purchase copies of VHS videos and DVDs listed in TFAO's Videos -DVD/VHS, an authoritative guide to videos in VHS and DVD format.
Links to sources of information outside of our web site are provided only as referrals for your further consideration. Please use due diligence in judging the quality of information contained in these and all other web sites. Information from linked sources may be inaccurate or out of date. TFAO neither recommends or endorses these referenced organizations. Although TFAO includes links to other web sites, it takes no responsibility for the content or information contained on those other sites, nor exerts any editorial or other control over them. For more information on evaluating web pages see TFAO's General Resources section in Online Resources for Collectors and Students of Art History. Individual pages in this catalogue will be amended as TFAO adds content, corrects errors and reorganizes sections for improved readability. Refreshing or reloading pages enables readers to view the latest updates.
Read more articles and essays concerning this institutional source by visiting the sub-index page for the Sioux City Art Center in Resource Library.
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