Study for Spring Turning

Maker Grant Wood (American, 1891 - 1942)

Collections

ClassificationsDRAWINGS

Dateca. 1936

Mediumcharcoal, chalk, and graphite, heightened with white, on paper

Dimensionsimage: 17 1/2 x 39 3/4 in. (44.5 x 101 cm.) frame: 28 5/16 x 49 7/8 in. (71.9 x 126.7 cm.) frame (opening): 17 1/2 x 39 3/16 in. (44.5 x 99.5 cm.)

SignedSigned in lower left of recto: Grant Wood 1936 [34?]

InscribedSigned in lower left of recto: Grant Wood 1936 [34?]

Credit LineThe Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Gift of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation

Status

Not on view

Label TextMost of Grant Wood's work portrays aspects of life in his native Iowa. Study for Spring Turning is a preparatory drawing for one of his expansive landscape paintings of fertile Iowa farmlands. The strongly horizontal format emphasizes the flatness of land in the Midwest, making the fields appear to stretch endlessly along the horizon. The repetition of the diamond-shaped pattern of tilled earth adds to the sense of a never-ending bounty of nature.
Wood, along with John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, was a leader of the Regionalist movement in American art during the 1930s and 1940s. Regionalists painted scenes of rural life as an antidote to the gritty realism of the Ashcan School and the abstraction of European-influenced Modernism, which had come to dominate American art in the first decades of the 20th century

Object number83.8.53