The Observer’s Artists’ Travels special in 1989 journeyed from van Gogh’s Arles to Turner’s Alps and Klee’s Tunisia. William Feaver didn’t have quite as good a gig as the lucky journalist retracing Gauguin’s South Seas steps, but his exploration of Grant Wood’s Midwest was born of a childhood obsession. A picturebook image of Wood’s Stone City had captivated him. In it, the 1930s Iowa boomtown ‘looks such a secret sort of place, unnaturally tidy, with hills folding away behind the mirror river, trees gobstopper smooth and wind pumps completing every set of farm buildings’. How would reality match up when he reached Stone City, ‘cosily in the middle of nowhere’?
Feaver started in Chicago, paying homage to Wood’s iconic, ‘supremely uneasy’ American Gothic before heading out on an all-American road trip crossing the ‘mesmerising flatness’ of Illinois into the ‘Tall Corn State’, Iowa. Although Wood studied in Paris, his art was deeply rooted in and inspired by the landscapes, townscapes and people of his native Midwest (the pitchfork-toting man in American Gothic was his Cedar Falls hometown dentist), and he painted them again and again. ‘I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa,’ he said. Feaver watched its alien beauty unfold as he and the photographer journeyed from highways to dirt roads, marvelling at ‘vast spreads, from horizon to horizon, sudden woods, different combinations of grain store, corn store, barn and dwelling’.
There were also hazards, notably a ‘big man bulging dangerously’ who clocked the pair as strangers and warned them off with casual but real menace: ‘Folks round here tend to shoot at anything that moves.’ He paused. ‘You boys better get on out.’
Despite that, they found their way to Stone City and from there to Wood’s precise viewpoint. ‘We saw the Ridge Road slip into position and the river curving correctly and the same cows, surely.’ Nothing was quite the same, as remembered childhood visions never are. ‘The quarry has spread. The trees have grown… the bridge has lost its girders.’ Even so, ‘everything looked familiar’.
