We are art tourists. We haunt art museums and read art exhibition catalogues. At The National Gallery, we are ecstatic but have fits of the vapors which we treat with inhalers, or rush outside to breathe fresh air if we can find the way out. It is difficult to experience the same rapture at small museums in the midwest. I calculate that we must travel 200-600 miles to see good art, and 600 or more to see great art.
This summer we are not traveling much, but recently visited two art museums in Iowa.
We are fond of Iowa City, though there has been so much “development” that I no longer recognize the skyline. There are hundreds of new condominiums built in a style I call Socialist Chic or Gulag Grit. And the stores are always changing: Iowa Book and Supply, once known as Iowa Book & Crook, no longer sells books, or even supplies, and technically should be renamed Iowa Sweatshirt. The Mill, a popular bar/restaurant, frequented by generations of Writers’ Workshop intelligentsia and carpenters with Ph.D.’s, has actually been demolished.
One thing I was confident of: there was a new art museum. The 1969 building where I used to sit raptly cross-legged in front of my favorite Jackson Pollock painting was pommeled and destroyed by a flood in 2008. A gorgeous new museum finally opened a few years ago. I approve the building, but the most exciting news is: The Jackson Pollock is back. This painting, called Mural, 1943, was Pollock’s largest painting. And it feels like my painting, because I communed with it when I was young. Peggy Guggenheim, who donated it to the university, used to have it in the foyer of her house in New York.
Cedar Rapids is a bigger town, and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art is a world-class museum: I do not say this lightly. If you are a fan of regional art, you will go gaga. I was enthralled by Grant Wood’s paintings, and also became acquainted with another regional artist, Marvin Cone, who worked with and traveled abroad with Grant Wood in 1920.
Grant Wood (1891-1942) was born near Anamosa, Iowa, and raised in Cedar Rapids, where he lived off and on most of his life. He is best known for American Gothic, a painting I have never admired. His brilliant American Impressionist paintings, slightly surreal landscapes, poignant portraits, and WPA murals must be seen to evaluate his versatile talent.
Take a look at this rolling landscape with round trees. It looks a bit like pastry. It evokes the pastoral midwest of my childhood, before cell phone towers dotted fields and industrial farmers cut down all the trees. Everything is so very green. No interstate disrupts the peace. I’d love to live in the country – the country of the past.
In 1934 Wood began teaching at the University of Iowa and also worked as the Director of the Public Works of Art Projects in Iowa. I have seen the spectacular murals he designed in Ames at The Iowa State University Library. Wood designed them: other artists painted them. Here is a panel:
Cone (1891-1965) was obviously influenced by Wood’s style, but his work is quieter and his colors paler. He is famous for his cloudscapes, which are bizarre and indecipherable to me. Still, it is fascinating to see the echoes of Wood’s influence on Cone, who is himself an excellent artist, and it is satisfying to see the art in Cedar Rapids where both Wood and Cone lived and worked.
