Solve, create, share and talk about jigsaw puzzles

Grant Wood—Spring in the Country, 1941

Bookmarked Bookmark Solve this jigsaw puzzle later
ShareShare with your friends
ReportReport as inappropriate
90
131
Solve puzzle
90 pieces
131 solves
Solve puzzle

Thanks for sharing. Here is your html-code:

Why are you reporting this puzzle?

"In spring of 1941 in Iowa City, with war abroad and anxious foreboding at home, Grant Wood began sketches for Spring in Town, which he finished that summer in Clear Lake along with Spring in the Country. Images of peaceful productivity, Wood's last Midwestern idylls (he died in February 1942) supported a galvanizing national myth: after the U.S. entered World War II, Saturday Evening Post enlisted Spring in Town as patriotic propaganda. Totalizing in its presumption of a homogeneous, white, middle-class, national audience, the Post presented the tidy neighborhood scene overlooked by a church as a response to the question "For What Are We Fighting?"

"Although manifestly tranquil, Spring in Town belies a traumatic personal memory. This painting, completed while Wood vacationed in a cottage dubbed "No Kare - No More," emerged unconsciously from his greatest care of all: the childhood loss of his father and of the family's Anamosa farm. Significantly, Wood's first conception of the picture coincided with the fortieth anniversary of father's death on March 17, 1901. And as he began his composition, Wood chose for its central clapboard structure a house that stood at the edge of a cemetery. The earthen plot in Spring in Town doubles as garden and grave, while the figures surrounding it evoke family members who go about life without father, exiled to Cedar Rapids, to town.

"Spring in the Country conjures a blessed time before that shattering experience. Here, father arrives with his plow horses, as child Wood helps mother set seedlings in the earth. In a prequel to Spring in Town, mining a happier memory, the artist presents his boyhood self in literal contact with the Iowa soil. It is a compensatory dream of reunion with his parents and his original home, defying mortal realities in his final year."

https://grantwood.uiowa.edu/springtime-myth-and-memory-grant-woods-last-paintings
Why this advertisement?

Comments

Please sign in to comment. Don't have a profile? Join now! Joining is absolutely free and no personal information is required.

Bommom

Yes, Pat, a good likeness! Thanks for reminding me about Clausen.

patw

The Allotment Garden by Sir George Clausen revisited.

Bommom

You're welcome. I'm sure Nev will have a nugget of information. :-)

Bill_I_Am

Thanks for giving us this prequel, Gayle. It's so beautifully innocent and pristine Grant Wood. I can hardly wait to hear what Nev has to reveal about it.

Why this advertisement?
  • Have you solved today's jigsaw puzzle?

    Every day, we present you with a jigsaw puzzle that we curate for you. You will find it on our daily jigsaw puzzle page or follow us on Facebook to get it in your news feed. Solve it and share it with friends and family to give them a daily beautiful and mindful brain workout ♥