Behind That Humble Pitchfork, a Complex Artist

(NYTimes) The cover of R. Tripp Evans’s “Grant Wood: A Life” does not depict “American Gothic,” the painting for which Wood is best known. Instead it features a lush green landscape, replete with rolling hillside and curving country road. On that road is a truck colored so prettily, picturesquely red that it suggests a freshly painted barn. There is a naïve-looking simplicity to the way this image has been rendered.
Look again. This is a picture called “Death on the Ridge Road” (1935), and it is as menacing as it is sweet. Continued