Tag Archives: Grant Wood

Design and Innovation

Grant Wood Lounge Chair and Ottoman

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Grant Wood Lounge Chair and Ottoman
Photos By Gail

Grant Wood designed this Lounge Chair and Ottoman in 1938 for his own living room. Henry R. Lubben, a Cedar Rapids furniture maker, manufactured the design in a variety of fabrics, with or without tasseled fringe, and sold it in department stores throughthe Midwest as the Grant Wood Lounge Chair.

In 1939, Riverdale Fabrics commissioned Wood to create a textile for them based on his 1932 painting Spring Plowing (textile design seen framed, top image). Wood died before this design went into production and the fabric was never made.

Grant Wood Lounge Chair and Ottoman

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit, Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables, on View Through June 10th, 2018 at The Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking District, NYC.

Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: American Gothic By Grant Wood

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American Gothic by Grant Wood
Photo By Gail

Premiering at the Art Institute of Chicago in October 1930, Grant Wood’s American Gothic captivated the public’s imagination and catapulted Wood into the national spotlight overnight. The painting depicts a couple — modeled on Wood’s sister, Nan, and his Dentist — who stand in front of a Midwestern house. The house is notable for its lone “gothic” window, a typical feature of the then-popular Carpenter Gothic style of architecture, in which gothic elements are used in otherwise simple, modern wood structures.

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Arts and Culture

Modern Art Monday Presents: Grant Wood, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere

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Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
Photos By Gail

In his painting from 1931, Grant Wood (1892 – 1942) depicts the legendary story of the American patriot Paul Revere, as learned from an 1863 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. From a bird’s eye view, the painting shows Revere on horseback racing through a colonial town square in Massachusetts. Despite the work’s historical subject matter, Wood did not attempt to depict this scene with factual accuracy. The houses are overly bright, as if lit by electric light, and the dramatic moonlight casts unrealistic shadows. The stylized houses, geometric greenery, and high perspective gives the painting and otherworldly or dreamlike dimensions.

Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (Detail)