Hiding in Plain Sight - James Maroney Inc.

of the Van Vechten sisters and of his patron John B. Turner, Pioneer are, outwardly
anyway, typical of the Conservative, Neue Sachlichkeit style.
The Verists chose portraiture as a vehicle for their malicious idiom because, as forms,
landscape and still life did not provide as direct a platform for the ruthless and trenchant
commentary they had in mind. Unlike the Verists, we will soon see that Wood used both
landscape and portraiture to make his statement. Confident of his adaptation of the new
style, Wood intended his early portraits—at least to the extent a timid homosexual dared
make them so—as Verist exposés first and as conventional likenesses second. Even so,
Wood was wary about rolling out any hint of his new content, so cautious, in fact, that
Corn, Dennis, Milosch and Kinsey, while all noting the influence of the Neue
Sachlichkeit upon Wood’s work, see no need to plumb its deeper influence.
Grant Wood, coming of age in the “Anything Goes” era but in Iowa, far from the
decadent, urban centers, particularly the Weimar Republic, had instinctively concealed
his homosexuality. Clearly, Wood had wanted his audience to hear only the cheery
melody running gaily along the surface of his work. It is, then, exactly here that Wood’s
biographers come under the spell of a flawed assumption: that in Munich, Wood had
recoiled from Bohemianism and started on his way to becoming an “avowed Regionalist”
or even that Wood was, at heart, a jolly good-natured soul. The misunderstanding arises
because his biographers do not detect the change in tone played now in a minor—not a
major—key deep below the surface of his patently new style.
When he arrived in Europe, he was undoubtedly astonished to see that mainstream
society appeared to tolerate a variety of outlandish—even deviant—behavior, that
Bohemianism was not conducted secretly but openly, and that he too could participate. In
1928, Wood heard the raw, gruesome melody emanating boldly from the Verists and
from that point forward, he would make their message his own.
In 1928, the state of craftsmanship in leaded glass may well have been superior in
Germany but it was sex that drew Wood to Munich. Christopher Ishelwood, author of the
Berlin Stories, upon which the musical Cabaret was based, went with W. H. Auden in
1929 for the same reason. For inhibited, upper class Englishmen and Bohemian American
artists, Germany meant “working-class boys in tight leather shorts, any of whom could be
had for a warm meal and a mug of beer.” 48 Homosexual fantasy was for sale on the cheap
in Munich in 1928. Wood could go out all night and play the prince and, no doubt, he
bought warm meals and tankards of beer for a great many pretty young men: he stayed
for three, glorious months.
Without much discussion of the insalubrious social and economic conditions that greeted
Wood upon his arrival in Munich, Dennis speculates that in the towering Memorial
48 Rewald, et al., op. cit., p. 15
28