Grant Wood, the Chesire Cat of American art

Fine piece from The New York Review of Books coinciding with the Whitney's retrospective.  I've known Wood, as most of us do, as the man who put the inscrutable totem 'American Gothic' before us.  It turns out he had kind of a knack for inscrutable totems.  He called himself "the plainest kind of fellow you can find," a proposition I'd be happy to dispute.

Here, for your consideration, is 'Shrine Quartet' (1939):

A slightly baffled Geoffrey O'Brien writes

I don’t think...that he can be made to disappear, wherever one chooses to situate him in the imaginary pecking orders of the dead. He hangs on the way his late lithograph Shrine Quartet hangs on: an image of the faces of four men each wearing the fez and tie of their fraternal order, casting long shadows against a backdrop of fake pyramids, the whole effect indelibly odd, at once grotesque and poignant, not quite yielding up any message beyond the precision of its own intent.

Well done, Mr. Wood, well done.

(link)