Seed Time and Harvest

Grant Wood is best remembered for his dedication—along with fellow artists Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and John Steuart Curry (1897-1946)—to Regionalism, an art historical movement in 1930s America that celebrated the realistic depiction of distinctly American subjects. In particular, Wood favored the people and land of the American Midwest. His famous painting American Gothic (The Art Institute of Chicago), which portrays an anonymous farmer and his spinster daughter, is an iconic representation of Middle America. Wood’s penchant for this type of subject matter was no doubt a result of his upbringing. Born and raised in Iowa, Wood was surrounded by scenes that he would later interpret in his artwork. From 1910-11 he studied under Ernest Batchelder, an advocate of the English Arts and Crafts movement, at the Minneapolis School of Design and Handicraft. This brief year was succeeded by studies at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Like many young American artists in the first half of the twentieth century, Wood traveled abroad and in 1923 enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris.

Wood’s early paintings were impressionist landscapes. A trip to Munich in 1928 to supervise the execution of a stained glass window that he designed for the Veterans’ Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids, however, dramatically changed the course of his art. Wood allegedly was moved by the fifteenth-century Netherlandish masterpieces he saw while traveling. He admired the way in which artists such as Hans Memling juxtaposed universal themes with the settings and costumes indigenous to a particular time and place. He returned to Iowa determined to imbue his artwork with the local color of his own country. He also may have been answering the call of Iowa writers Clay Sigmund and Ruth Suckow, who suggested that Midwesterners needed to embrace their roots and be proud of their heritage, when he stated: “I believe in the Middle West—in its people and in its art, and in the future of both….”

In 1937 Wood contracted with the Associated American Artists of New York to publish at least four lithographs per year. Seed Time and Harvest was one of the first images to be produced. Printed in an edition of 250, the print embodies Wood’s pride of homeland. In the 1930s, there were some 200,000 farms in Iowa. Wood pictured this agricultural abundance in the neatly patterned rows of corn that hang above the barn door, which echo the rows in the field that appear to symbolically stretch into infinity. In addition, Wood’s composition was carefully balanced and planned, particularly in the way that the rounded contours of the tired farmer and his bounty are dynamically juxtaposed with the sharp angles of the barn and wagon in the foreground. Wood’s deft handling of his printing materials is also exhibited here in the subtle shading and bold tonal effects that suggest sun and shadow.