Hiding in Plain Sight - James Maroney Inc.

By 1928, Wood, aged 37, was also tired of all that wholesome goodness bubbling forth
hypocritically from the hard-working, church-going folks back home. Consequently,
when he stumbled upon the impious message emanating from the Verist painters, it was
to be the Verists with whom he identified. On the surface, however, Wood’s style most
resembles the Conservatives; America had, after all, been the victor in the Great War, not
the vanquished, and once back home in Cedar Rapids, he knew the American public was
in no mood to be openly satirized.
The Verists’ game was to look beneath whatever sturdy façade a subject had got up to
deal with the pain of a lost war and then brusquely rip it off. For whatever reason,
masquerade and hypocrisy were near-universal 1920s social occupations and depending
upon whether one lived in the American Midwest or in Europe, one’s effort at cover and
dissimulation differed only by degree. What attracted the Verists was the grotesque, the
disquieting, the macabre, the over and under sexed, the too-rich and the too-poor. Into
their searing caricatures, the Verists compressed as much distortion and exaggeration as
they could pack into one picture. To sit, in 1926, for Otto Dix was first to submit to the
creation of a Dix and second, if at all, to a likeness as the sitter saw herself or, as she
desperately hoped, she were seen by others. Obviously, commissioning Mr. Dix, as in
1926, did the Journalist Sylvia von Harden, required tremendous self-assurance, unless,
of course, she had foolishly thought she had nothing to hide and everything to reveal.
Such was the “school” into which timid, deeply-closeted Grant Wood of Cedar Rapids
inducted himself when, in 1928, he stopped in Munich.
So, if Wood had altered his style in slavish deference to the Conservatives, his post-
Munich, outwardly conventional, Neue Sachlichkeit style would be evident in Portrait of
Nan, 1933.
Corn, Dennis and Milosch all invite us to see a loving likeness of the artist’s sister,
“stylish and contemporary” and painted, he is supposed to have said, to “make up for the
abuse to which he had subjected her in American Gothic.” Corn continues in this vein:
that to “heighten the decorative effects of the picture,” Wood arranged for Nan to wear a
blouse he had decorated with large black polka dots and “jaunty black ribbons” at the
shoulders. The scalloped waves in the green drape, held back by an “antique drapery
knob,” would, in Corn’s view, echo her lovely, marcelled hair.
Corn notes that in her hands, Nan holds two rather odd attributes—a baby chick and a
ripe plum—both, the sitter later maintained, chosen by Wood “for decorative reasons.”
The artist is, in Corn’s words, supposed to have “liked the chicken…because it echoed
the color of [Nan’s] hair. The plum reiterated the shape of the dots in her blouse and
repeated the rose color of the wall behind her.” Corn assures us that while Wood “never
chose attributes for his sitters on stylistic grounds alone, he undoubtedly liked the chick
because, as it perched, young and vulnerable, in the cupped hand of his sister, it
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