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Stone City, Iowa

Grant Wood • Painting, 1930, 76.8×101.6 cm
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About the artwork
Art form: Painting
Subject and objects: Landscape
Style of art: Regionalism
Technique: Oil
Materials: Wood
Date of creation: 1930
Size: 76.8×101.6 cm
Artwork in collection: Smart and Beautiful Natalya Kandaurova
Artwork in selections: 21 selections

Description of the artwork «Stone City, Iowa»

In 1929, Grant wood returned from Europe to his native Iowa to stay here until my last breath. It's like he looked around and decided, what better place than this? Then the artist said: "I will only paint Iowa. It will be my mission until the end of life".

Picture "The Stone City" laced with nostalgia. Pictured here the terrain was very close to the farm where he was born and grew up wood. Stone city was hardly a city in the conventional sense, this was the so-called bicommunal territory, which at that time lived workers in the quarries. And although the picture was painted during the great Depression, she breathes the sun and the joy of passing on childhood memories and feelings of the artist.

Two years after the creation of this work of wood along with a gallery owner Edward Rowan and artist Adrian Dornbush founded the stone city art colony and art school. Their goal was to unite and support the young artists suffering from lack of money and the almost complete lack of work during the Depression.

The landscape wood, as in many of his paintings of the period of regionalism, looks at the same time almost a puppet, but miraculously no less realistic. Time on these canvases as if frozen in amber, stopped in the moment when little Grant wood was happy. Here's what is surprising: having the opportunity to paint only after his father's death, the artist in his work constantly refers to memories about the time when Marvel wood was still alive. It seems like the spirit of the father forever lodged in his paintings.

Some of the buildings that can be seen on this picture, there are in stone city to this day, for example, the Church of St. Joseph, General store and a blacksmith shop.

Author: Eugene Sidelnikov
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