Grant Wood

Grant Wood advocated for art based on what he called “an American way of looking at things.” Along with Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, he was one of the primary artists associated with Regionalism, an approach to painting marked by an emphatically realist approach as well as by subject matter drawn from rural American life and its landscapes— epitomized by Wood’s iconic painting American Gothic (1930). Though he lived in his native Iowa for most of his life, his early travels to Europe were formative; a 1928 stay in Munich left him deeply impressed by the precision and lucidity of Northern Renaissance art. During this time, Wood developed the visual vocabulary that would sustain him for the rest of his career: simplified but finely delineated treatment of forms, flattened areas of color and pattern, and saturated color and tone that border on the uncanny.

Dinner for Threshers is a finely worked study for the left part of a painting of the same name that depicts the midday meal during threshing season, when farmers would join together in communal labor. Two men prepare to enter the house, washing their hands and combing their hair; the remaining parts of the full image depict a long table lined with farmers and a kitchen where women prepare the meal. While the subject derived from Wood’s memories of his childhood in rural Iowa, he drew on the visual conventions of religious painting to represent this microcosm of idealized community, endowing a mundane moment with the meaningful air of ritual.