GRANT WOOD (American 1892-1942)
“Corner of the Mill, Amana”
Oil on composition board
Signed lower right “Grant Wood” and dated 1930
13” x 15”
Estimate.............................
$60,000-$80,000
Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by Carl Flick in 1930 thence by decent through the Flick Family.
Exhibited: Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art “Regionalism In The Amanas – Paintings by Carl Flick (1904-1976) and His Friend, Grant Wood”. January 25, 1997 – March 16, 1997.
The offered lot was executed the same year as
Wood’s magnum opus – “American Gothic” and stylistically is
probably most similar to his study for this work. Both the size of the support
and material of the support are the same. Similar
too in both works is the quick unrestrained brushwork used in both renderings.
Oil washes, dry scumbling together with loose strokes and scratching. The
offered lot should also be compared to Wood’s study for “Stone City”. Executed
in 1930, it too is the same size and painted on the same type support and in a
similar plein air fashion. Wood’s painting “Black Barn” , painted
in 1929, also corresponds technically and stylistically to the offered lot.*
The genesis of this painting offers a great insight
into the humanity and humility of Grant Wood. In response to a letter asking for
advice on painting, in 1929 Grant Wood traveled to the Amana religious Colony
near Cedar Rapids, Iowa to meet the author of the letter, a struggling young
artist named Carl Flick. An account of this meeting was chronicled in a period
Cedar Rapids Gazette news article in which was written: “A few months ago,
Mr. Wood received a letter from Carl Flick of West Amana. He wished information
concerning proper brushes for painting foregrounds in landscapes. The well known
Iowa artist went down to answer the query personally. There he found, with no
art training, no experience that had taken him beyond the peaceful valley where
seven old fashion villages sleep, a colonist painting atrocious poster scenes
with brushes dipped in genius. Grant pushed aside the vivid copies of gaudy
sunsets and Venetian moonlights to show the young man the wealth of painting
material that lay around him – the corner of the mill, his own back
yard, the quaint blue doorways, the picturesque stone homes and the millrace
fringed with pickerel weed and willows. The advice Wood gave to Carl flick
to paint what is in your midst was to become one of the rallying cries of
regionalism and was of course the lesson Wood himself had learned after so many
trips to Europe in his own search of art. In a letter written to an admirer in
1932, Flick wrote of his work; “It was then he (Wood) opened my eyes to the
beauties of my surroundings and showed me how to sketch. Through Mr. Wood’s
influence I learned to see objects around me in a different light.”
What motivated Wood to respond to Flick’s letter in
person is unknown. One might suppose Carl Flick’s simple upbringing in the
Amana colony and his lack of any formal art education was the common ground,
which generated the empathy that motivated Wood to seek out Carl Flick. Or
perhaps the maturing Wood saw in Flick the perfect or purest candidate for his
forthcoming Regionalist art movement. An individual raised with no outside
interference from the material and modern world and reared in the heart of
America. What is known from numerous period newspaper accounts is that Wood
befriended Flick and indeed began tutoring him. He instructed Flick to paint the
beauty of his surroundings and is recorded to have painted along side Flick in
the Amana Colonies. Soon Wood and Flick’s works would be exhibited together
and as Grant Wood’s career exploded with the unveiling of “American
Gothic”, Carl Flick’s works received more and more attention. Wood continued
to paint in the Amanas with his painting “Young Corn” being executed there
in 1931. The subject, setting and confidence of the offered lot reveal the
transition from Wood’s less confident style of earlier years to his mature
period. A rare and important heretofore unpublished work from one of America’s
greatest painters.
*See: James M. Dennis Grant Wood A Study In American Art and Culture University of Missouri Press, 1986, Page 79, plate 81, page 102 plates 11 and 10.