Displaying items by tag: grant wood

A rare Grant Wood sketchbook from 1929 is back in Davenport after it went missing from a museum about 50 years ago, the museum said.

The 100-page sketchbook signed by Wood, the painter of "American Gothic," is again in the Figge Art Museum's possession, collections and exhibitions manager Andrew Wallace said Thursday.

The small book of drawings for the 24-foot, stained-glass window in Cedar Rapid's Veterans Memorial Building was likely stolen during an open house in 1966 at what was then the Davenport Museum of Art.

"American Gothic," the famous American Regionalist painting by Grant Wood, is on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum for the first time through Nov. 16, 2014. The masterpiece joins Wood’s "Daughters of Revolution" in the exhibition, "Conversations around American Gothic."

The two celebrated paintings of the 1930s are the focus of an historic loan exchange between the Art Institute of Chicago, the permanent home of "American Gothic," and the Cincinnati Art Museum, which houses "Daughters of Revolution." In turn, "Daughters" will journey to Chicago, Paris and London in the 2016 exhibition, "Freedom and the Brush: American Painting in the 1930s."

Julie Aronson's story of how Grant Wood's iconic "American Gothic" came to be at the Cincinnati Art Museum this fall is a lesson in not censoring yourself while brainstorming.

"This is something I always thought, 'Gee, wouldn't it be amazing?' said the museum's curator of American paintings, sculpture, and drawing. "I thought this was just a pipe dream, that it would never happen."

"American Gothic," at the Art Institute of Chicago since it was first exhibited in 1930. It rarely travels.

The Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio is presenting the exhibition Regarding Realism, which traces the history of the movement back to its inception in mid-19^th century France. The exhibition will include works by Realist pioneers such as Gustave Courbet, Jean-Francois Millet and Charles-Francois Daubigny who shared a goal to depict the world around them, including ordinary people performing day-to-day activities, faithfully.

Regarding Realism includes American artworks as the desire to capture immediate experiences rather than contrived scenes soon caught on across the Atlantic. Highlights include prints by American Regionalists Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton as well as gritty, urban scenes by members of the Aschan School like John Sloan and George Luks.

Regarding Realism will be on view at the Allen Memorial Museum through June 22, 2014.

On Saturday, July 27, 2013 the Springfield Museum of Art in Springfield, MO will reunite two portraits that have been separated for 100 year. The paintings of Lewis Allen Dickens Crenshaw and his wife, Fanny Smith Crenshaw, are by the lauded 19^th century Missouri artist George Caleb Bingham.

Bingham, a pioneer of the Luminist style, painted the portraits late in his life. Mrs. Crenshaw’s portrait has been in the museum’s collection since 1990 after being donated by the couple’s late daughter. Mr. Crenshaw’s portrait remains in the family and is on loan to the museum through Rachael Cozad Fine Art, a Kansas City-based gallery.

The Crenshaws portraits will be hung side by side as part of a permanent “exhibition” highlighting the Springfield Museum’s collection. Other featured artists include Grant Wood, Charles Sheeler and Thomas Hart Benton.

The Art Institute of Chicago announced that they have acquired Thomas Hart Benton’s (1889-1975) Cotton Pickers (1945), a critical example of American Regionalism, a realist modern art movement that gained popularity during the 1930s. Regionalist artists forsook urban life in favor of creating scenes of everyday rural life in America. Benton was a pioneer of the movement and is considered a pivotal figure in American art.

Cotton Pickers is a rare example of Benton’s large-scale paintings and it is the first oil painting by the artist to enter the museum’s collection. It will bolster the Art Institute’s world-renowned collection of paintings from the period, which includes Grant Wood’s (1891-1942) iconic painting American Gothic (1930) and John Steuart Curry’s (1897-1946) Hogs and Rattlesnakes (1930). The addition of Cotton Pickers helps the Art Institute tell the story of Regionalism more fully. Judith Barter, the Field-McCormick Chair and Curator in the American Art Department, considers the painting one of the museum’s most important acquisitions in the last several decades.

Cotton Pickers will be exhibited alongside American Gothic and Hogs and Rattlesnakes.