New Road

1939

Grant Wood

Painter, American, 1891 - 1942

We look down across a stylized landscape of rolling green fields divided into quarters by two sand-colored roads in this square painting. The scene is lit from the upper left, and the horizon almost brushes the top of the composition. Closest to us, in the lower left corner, one road curves into view from behind a green hill and drops steeply down into the valley below. An area of peach and tan in the lower right corner could be the base of a sawed-off tree trunk. There are two wooden posts just beyond it, and a sign affixed to one reads, “SOLON 5 MI.” The road stretches almost straight into the distance, where it is intersected by a second road, running nearly horizontally across the painting. The land rises and falls in gently swelling hills to either side of the roads and deep into the distance. Fields covering those hills are crosshatched with clay-orange brushstrokes over a blend of celery and pea green. To our left, in the valley, the edge of a white farmhouse with a clay-red roof nestles among pine and dark green trees. Another cluster of round trees, like a bunch of pompoms, sits in a field along the road, to our right. Across the bisecting road, also to our right, is a brick-red barn and white windmill standing before more trees. Touches and a few swipes of white suggest a horse and chickens in front of the farmhouse. The road sweeping down past these buildings is dotted with white fence posts. One of the hills rippling into the distance is topped with a tan-colored plot of land. In the top quarter of the composition, the narrow sky is filled with a shimmering blend of short, dense strokes dotted across the canvas, ranging from soft blues on the left to peach and pale pink on the right. The artist signed and dated the work in red paint in the lower left corner, “GRANT WOOD 1939” following a copyright symbol.
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The Iowa artist Grant Wood was one of the leading midwestern American regionalist painters. Created in 1939 after a three-year period in which Wood concentrated on lithography, New Road and its companion Haying are representative examples of the idealized rural landscapes that the artist had begun to paint in 1930. Such works, rendered in a detailed, deliberately naïve style, typically include the cultivated lands, farms, manual farm machinery, windmills, and domestic animals characteristic of Iowa. New Road depicts a landscape on the route between Cedar Rapids and Lake Macbride. A rustic sign at the upper right inscribed “SOLON 5 MI” indicates that the gravel lane leads to Solon, a small city in Johnson County in eastern Iowa just south of Cedar Rapids. The intersection at the center of the composition echoes the cruciform pattern of the signpost. The dramatic vantage point looking directly down the steeply descending pathway imbues the bucolic scene with a sense of excitement. Landscapes such as New Road serve as both optimistic celebrations of better times to come and subtle portrayals of the state of American life as it turned from the calamities of the 1930s to the even more ominous, existential challenges of World War II. Suspended in time and poised at a particularly fraught moment in the history of the country, they are replete with the ambiguities and subtle ironies that underlay Wood’s seemingly benign, straightforward regionalist vision.

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas on paperboard mounted on hardboard

  • Credit Line

    Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Irwin Strasburger

  • Dimensions

    overall: 33 x 37.9 cm (13 x 14 15/16 in.)
    framed: 53.3 x 58.4 x 3.2 cm (21 x 23 x 1 1/4 in.)

  • Accession

    1982.7.2

More About this Artwork

Article:  Iowa Artists Craft Complex Visions of the Rural

How artists based in Iowa, from the early 20th century to today, have crafted their own visions of the region.

Article:  15 LGBTQ+ Artists to Know

Discover the lives of 15 LGBTQ+ artists and their art, much of which you can see at the National Gallery.

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: New Road, 1939

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist; sold to Irwin [1880-1953] and Clara R. Sax [1889-1981] Strasburger, White Plains, New York, by 1944;[1] bequest 1982 to NGA.
[1] Darrell Garwood, Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood, New York, 1944: 222, 254.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1939

  • Fine Arts Festival, Memorial Union, University of Iowa, Cedar Rapids, 1939.

1981

  • John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood: A Portrait of Rural America, Cedar Rapids Art Center; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University; Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri-Columbia, 1981, no. 148.

1985

  • America in Transition: Benton and His Contemporaries, 1920-1940, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, 1985.

1987

  • Extended loan for use by Vice President and Mrs. George Bush, Vice President's House, Washington, D.C., 1987-1989.

1990

  • Loan to display with permanent collection, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, 1990-1991.

1991

  • One-Hundredth Birthday Anniversary Celebration, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, 1991.

1994

  • Barn Again, National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., 1994, no catalogue.

1995

  • Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; Davenport Museum of Art, Iowa; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, 1995-1996, no. 55, pl. 9.

2000

  • Illusions of Eden: Visions of the American Heartland, Columbus Mus. of Art; Palais Liechtenstein, Vienna; Ludwig Mus., Budapest; Madison Art Center; Wash. Pavilion of Arts and Sciences, Sioux Falls, 2000-2001, no. 9, repro. (shown only in Columbus).

2008

  • Walt Disneys wunderbare Welt und ihre Wurzeln in der europäischen Kunst [Disney's Wonderful World and its Roots in European Art], Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich; Helsinki Art Museum, 2008-2009, no. 90, repro.

2016

  • Grant Wood and the American Farm, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, 2016, no catalogue.

2018

  • Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2018, no. 95, repro.

Bibliography

1971

  • Garwood, Darrell. Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood. (New York, 1944) Reprint Westport, CT, 1971: 222.

1975

  • Dennis, James M. Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture. New York, 1975: 93-94, 159, color pl. 36.

1981

  • Czestochowski, Joseph S. John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood: A Portrait of Rural America. Columbia, MO, 1981: fig. 148.

1988

  • Wilmerding, John. American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art. Rev. ed. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988: 182, repro.

1992

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 384, repro.

1995

  • Roberts, Brady M., James M. Dennis et al. Grant Wood: An American Artist Revealed. Exh. cat. Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; Davenport Museum of Art, IA, and the Worcester Art Museum, MA, 1995-1996. Davenport and San Francisco, 1995: 3, 73, color pl. 10.

2000

  • Stearns, Robert, et al. Illusions of Eden: Visions of the American Heartland. Exh. cat. Columbus Museum of Art, OH, 2000: no. 9, fig. 9.

2018

  • Haskell, Barbara, and Glenn Adamson. Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables. Exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2018: 30, color pl. 95.

Inscriptions

lower left: c GRANT WOOD 1939

Wikidata ID

Q20193228

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