 In conjunction with the Houston Museum of Art's current exhibition, Grant Woods lithographs a regionalist vision of the seven stone, and that exhibit, along with the concurrent one titled Art and Inspiring Art, George Bevel's Sunset Shady Valley, is on view at the museum through November 8th. And I should mention that the museum will be open until 7 p.m. this evening so that those wishing to view the exhibit following this lecture can do so. Today's lecture is presented by the Houston Museum of Art with support from the Lethler Lecture Series Fund. The Herbert P. and Mary Jane Lethler Lecture Series was established in 1993 by Mary Jane Lethler in memory of her husband Herbert with the intent of bringing outside speakers to campus to meet with classes and address the community, thereby enriching the academic experience here and carrying on the Lethler family's tradition of pursuing truth and integrity through curiosity and query, discussion, teaching and learning paraphrasing from the official description of the Lethler series. This lecture is also supported with funds by the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Program of the College, a multi-disciplinary program that leads students to interrogate the social meanings of femininity, masculinity, sexual behavior, and desire as integral to the ways that groups and individuals construct their identities within and across a variety of historical, social, and cultural contexts. I'd like to thank Martin Lang, director of the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Program, and his colleagues at the program for their support, as well as thanking Betsy Byers, chair of the Lethler Lecture Series, and our later fellow Lethler committee members. Our distinguished guest lecturer's day is Dr. Artriff Evans, who is a professor of art history at Wheaton College in New Orleans, Massachusetts, where he serves as the Mary L. Hoyser chair of the arts. Dr. Evans has taught at Heels since 1997. His VA degree from the University of Virginia was in architectural history and French literature, and his MA and PhD, both in art history, were from Yale University. Dr. Evans has lectured widely, including at the American Folk Art Museum in New Orleans, the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester, at the University of Kansas and the University of Toronto, and for the Grant Wood Art Festival in the artist's hometown of Anamosa, Iowa. Evans serves on a variety of boards, including the National Advisory Board for the Grant Wood Art Colony, and the Steering Committee for the University of Virginia's Jeffersonian Browns Initiative, and the Executive Board for Yale University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Evans is the author of numerous articles and books. His earliest book, published in 2004 and based on his Yale dissertation, is Romancing Amaya, Mexican Antiquity in the American Imagination, 1820 to 1925, and he is currently working on two additional book projects, tentatively titled Six Acres of Providence and the Importance of Being Furnished, Three Thank You Bachelors at Home, which both focus on new and cultural heritage. Evans is also the author of the meticulously researched 2010 book, Grant Wood, Alive, described in The New York Times in a review as absorbing and thoughtful, it was the winner of the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing, and was a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Randy Schiltz Award for Gay Nonfiction. This biographical study is a crucial addition to the literature on regionalist artists Grant Wood, familiar to many as the creator of the famous and iconic painting in American Gothic and other images that are considered often extolled in the western milieu. Evans' book is the most important of a handful of studies that, unlike the earlier studies on the book, carefully considered the artist's life and work in light of his sexuality, a subject that effectively had been lost over by earlier scholars. Our exhibit at the Hillster Museum of Art's full collection of all 19 of Grant Wood's lithographs was conceived not only as a way to debut that collection but also to introduce this new approach to the artist and Tripp Evans will speak about Grant Wood's lithographs, his biography and his sexuality. Now before I turn over the quote and I want to mention that we will be heading over to the museum after the question and answer session at the end of this lecture and Tripp has indicated that he will be happy to chat and entertain questions at the exhibit. And also that he'll be happy to underwrite any copies of his book. Now please join me in welcoming our elected lecturer, Dr. Tripp Evans. Thanks for the very warm welcome. Can everybody hear me? Great. It's such a truth to be hearing. I have to say what a rare opportunity it is to see all 19 of Wood's lithographs together. It's such a treat to be able to see them together and like any great museum show, one thing that you often regret when the show is down is that there's no real record in here. There is a fantastic record in the wonderful catalog that accompanies it which is really a tremendous scholarly resource so I really hand it to you for putting together this wonderful catalog. I learned a lot actually reading it myself so hats off. I thought it would be appropriate to start with an image of Grant Wood at his lithographic stone in 1937. In 1937 Wood was really a household name in American art. He was of course known as the creator of the most iconic American painting still, American Gothic seven years earlier and was really heralded as a leader of the American scene or regionalist movement at this point. Tonight I will be looking at his work for associated American artists. His work as a printmaker between 1937 and 1941 with references to some of this paintings as well where they help illuminate the way that he was thinking. I think it's a printmaker. There were literal cross lines in his work, the kind of technique that he used for his printmaking. But there are also lines that he crossed in terms of historical models, medium and his negotiation of public and private themes. The second part of the lecture will be focused on Sultry night, his 1938 lithograph with a close reading of this. There's a kind of distillation of many of the themes that we see in some of his other prints. This print too crossed a few lines and was a center of probably one of the greatest controversies that Grant Wood had to weather during his professional career. It is to all Grant Wood scholars really the most interesting of his prints and so it bears a much closer reading. And it is today also part of kind of a great art historical mystery that I'll unfold for you all at the end. It's been really fun and unfortunately I unfolded after the book came out. But I've been pursuing it nonetheless. So I feel like I'm required by law to show an American graphic. In some way within the first five slides of any American graphic lecture, Grant Wood, which I should say, Wood's shift from painting to lithography was in some ways as radical as his earlier shift in 1929-30 from his much earlier Impressionist style, which you see here a lot in 1924. And a lot of people don't realize that he was really a very talented Impressionist painter for most of the 1920s to the mature style we know of his work. That sort of hard image, Northern Renaissance inspired kind of very black and graphic type of form that we see in American Gothic which was, of course, the painting that cataculted him to fame. You also see, in addition to his change in style here, a changing theme that also affects the subject matter of prints that we'll be looking at, which is the people in places of his childhood, essentially. When Wood comes back to Cedar Rapids in 1930, after a good decade of traveling to European cities and other urban centers in the US, it was a permanent return. In fact, his autobiography, it was never completed, it was called Return from Okimia. The idea was that he was leaving the Okimian world behind for Cedar Rapids. So this was a huge sort of divide in a row for him, stylistically and in terms of sort of how he defined himself. It also meant that he returned to his sister Nan, the model in American Gothic, and his mother, Patty. The three of them normally lived together until he was in his mid-40s, but they shared a single room above a carriage house, a funeral park. So it was a little bit of an Adams family setup where Nan and Patty and Wood all shared his living in studio space together. The front door of the studio, by the way, was the 19th century coffin lid. They had sort of opened it and it was part of the sense of humor now where they were living. But the shift from painting to prints that happens with this association with American artists happens in conjunction with three other major shifts in life, and you might even call them crises. Professional, personal, and artistic. So in 1934 Rankinwood joins the faculty of the University of Iowa. And this leads also to a wide range of public lecturing. He becomes a much more public figure, which was both great for him as a sort of profile of his career as an artist, but it also had real dangers as well. Better known than he became, the closer often interest began to circle into his personal life. And as a closet man, it was increasingly difficult for him. At the University of Iowa where his department chair eventually tried to get him out of the department through a kind of not-so-quiet whispering campaign in the early 1940s. So this was a big shift for him going from painter to painter and an academic. It was a huge period of personal people for him as well in the late 1930s. So in 1935, in one year, Nan moves out west with her husband Ed Graham. She was in fact Mary while she was living with her mother in Grant. Her husband was in a centaurium for many of those years. And also in 1935 Wood's mother, Cattie, goes through an extended illness of dogs in 1935. She had really been to rock. He had lived with Cattie, as I said, his whole life until the age of 45. And right around this time period in 1935, as his mother is going through her final illness, Grant Wood surprised everybody by marrying this woman. This is Sarah Sherman-Maxson who would be married not long after his mother dies. And to folks in Cedar Rapids she wore a sort of unsettling resemblance to Cattie Wood, his mother. And began what was a rather troubled marriage. They were married for about three years. So in addition to all of these personal upheavals in his life, Sarah insists that they leave Cedar Rapids and move permanently to Iowa City. So all of his family connections, all of his connections to the town where he lived, of his boiling and growing up years, were severed in 1935. We also see a real, you know, sort of difficult period for him in terms of painting. This was a period that would really hit kind of a dry spell. And not just a dry spell, but the paintings he was completing were not always necessarily being critically received as well as his earlier works. So spring turning, you're seeing it here from 1936 is really the one major painting that he created between 1936 and 1939. And this is for a painter who was rather productive for early in the 30s. We see at the beginning of his association with printmaking, a real dry spell for painting. And he turns from painting partly too because of the way that landscapes like this one were critically received, from the very beginning woods highly mannered and almost kind of abstracted landscapes had never been sort of as well received as portraits or as genre scenes. And there are a lot of reasons for that. People thought they were too abstract. They thought they were too mannered. In fact, what himself said I know that I have these landscape mannerisms and I'm having a hell of a time getting rid of them. Underlinas was a subtle and sometimes not so subtle suggestion that they were eroticized or sensual, that they appear to represent bodily forms. And when you read Wood's return for his manuscript for his autobiography, Return from Bohemia, you see the way that he describes the land. We don't have enough time for me to go into this, but he is always describing the Iowa farmland as masculine and muscular. And there's no mother earth in his autobiography. There's always a notion of a raw and exposed male body. So you often do see these muscular forms in these landscapes and critics like Henry McBride were a little unsettled by this. So this was one review of spring turning who saw it in a satire and he thinks that he's sort of poking fun at the seriousness of farming. Wood's satire goes too far, I think. That is making fun of nature. You can't do that to anything as serious as spring. Something will surely happen to Grant Wood soon, wait and see. There was a veiled threat of if you don't stop with these landscapes we kind of know what kind of person you are. So when Associated American Artists approached Grant Wood initially in 1934 to join their stable of artists who were creating prints for a much water and an antibiotic public it was really kind of a salvation for what he was in this terrible dry spell. He did not have a predictable income from his painting. Suddenly he was associated with a very wonderful, stable of fellow artists including of course his fellow regionalists, I think you have Tom Jones here at Currie and Thomas Pardante. Associated American Artists had been founded in 1934 by Reeves Louis Dahl and Maurice Learman and their business model was to get a stable together of well known artists. A lot of these are American-seen or regionalist artists, folks who were invested in rural imagery. These prints were then marketed by mail through catalogs. They're also sold in department stores which you can see. They were told for only $5 each. They are considerably more valuable today but they were considered a sort of democratic, economic way for collecting public repression could have original access to original works in the art. These were struck in editions of 250 and again you could order them from the mail, you could buy them from the department store, they were even out of those places like Rears Digest and Time Magazine where you could pick these up and they really became widely collected. It was a democratic approach to selling original art but for Wood it was also a way out almost even emotionally in terms of turning to a new medium. Here's a quote from his good friend Hazel Brown, a good friend of his from Sea Rapids, in describing his early printmaking. She said, Wood began carving stone with a concentration of determination seen in people who are working off a man. He literally dug into the stone as if his life and peace of mind handed him over. He really did in his period. He was searching for a new creative outlet. Now both Wood and associated American artists had in mind a sort of business model that we see in Courier of the Eyes. Courier of the Eyes is the sort of well-known 19th century printmakers who actually founded it exactly 100 years before Associated American Artists in 1934. They marketed, mass marketed cheaply produced hand-tinted prints between five cents and two dollars and they were marketed much the same way. So Courier of the Eyes is thinking about this kind of a democratic model they're also sort of tapping into notions of nostalgic rural imagery of America and Wood himself by Courier of the Eyes. And we'll see that in some of his prints. In fact he did also help one of his early patrons in the 1920s assemble his own collection of Courier of the Eyes prints. So they kind of run as a theme underneath some of the imagery that we see in today. Now I'll give you just a brief overview of the 19 prints and some of them I'm going to come back to in greater detail. But in 1937, three years after initially signing the original agreement with Associated American Artists, Redwood produces these two images, the planting group and Seaton and the harvest that kind of thematically linked planting and Seaton. And they are typical of the kinds of images that reflect his memories and childhood. In particular his fond memories of the Anyok County School, the Warner School House that he had attended as a child and the harvest scenes that he would have narrowed out to the age of 10 on the phone. So after his father's death when he was 10 when Wood was 10, they moved in to see Rapids in 1901. And much of his close 1930 work, I argue in his biography and others have said as well, is that they're sort of an attempt to recapture or perceive golden age before the death of his father. So many of the scenes that we'll be seeing at the farm life are memories of a boy of it in the 1890s really rather than the 1930s. So the following year he doubles his production for Associated American Artists with four images, three rural scenes including July 15th, which is, you know, we're seeing those troubling mannerisms once again in these landscapes. January, we'll come back to Sultry Night and we'll hear an awful lot about it later. And honorary degree, which is I'll mention again as well is one of his sort of more humorous prints. 1939, he produces eight prints including more rural imagery and we'll come back to some of these as well as another satirical print. 1940, only two, these very moody images of February and approaching storm in the sort of run of images, these are I think two of the more charged ones. And then in his final year of production for Associated American Artists, he produced these three works, which are all very different in a way. In March, I think he's probably one of his most dynamic and kind of abstract prints that he does for Associated American Artists. And December afternoon is probably I think his most old-fashioned of, you know, drawings to rate her career at times, especially the slag. The image on the bottom is a reprisal of a work that's an illustration called General Practitioner that he'd done before in 1937 in addition to Main Street. So he was going back to an earlier theme. So, in thinking about Wood as a print maker I'm going to show you these two and I'm sorry that they're a little bit pixelated at this size. I mean anytime you take something that tiny and blow up this big, you lose a little bit. But you know all we're able to see in these details, what a consummate and meticulous draftsman was with this medium that involved using lithographic, sort of a crazy, you know, crayon to draw on the stone or to draw them to transfer. And you can see he uses a variety of techniques including the kind of hatching that you see in True Planting Group and that little sort of stippling effect that really lovely stippling effect in honorary degree. You can also see, in addition to the crossed hatching and crossed lines the lovely way that he kind of leads into the border. Often it's really nice to receive these edges. When you go to the show you pay attention to those edges because the grass sometimes goes right into the border in a really lovely way. So as a printmaker he is this sort of consummate draftsman. And this approach also reflects that shift that I talked about earlier from it's much more painterly style, it's much more graphic, linear, sort of hard edge style. This affects the way that he works as a printmaker. And the way that he works as a painter it feels like he was already a warren printmaker even before he got started because he really didn't work as a medium at all until the mid 30s. If you look at that spring turning detail this little figure group, these two horses with the plowing figure, it's a tiny detail in the painting that's really small. And you can see that almost kind of a madly tiny brush strokes that he used to sort of build up the canvas. This is one of the reasons why he produced so little. Sometimes in the 1930s his paintings took forever to complete. And in fact they show his adoration for a tempera painting for normal renaissance. Because when you paint in tempera a medium kind of requires you to do a lot of cross-acting. Because the paint dries so quickly. He's working at oil here but it's almost as if he's working in tempera using these tiny little hatched strokes. In drawings like Pining on Sunday you can see rather than as a soft line a real attention to cross-hatching. Again the same kind of approach that he's using as a brass pen and as a printmaker. And then the last drawing I'll show you sort of in conjunction with these prints is this part of his study for really grand painting called Dinner for Threshers. In which he's played watercolor over a colored pencil here. And I can tell you when you get right up on top of this drawing it is almost impossible to see the strokes of the colored pencil. It is so seamless and I think that's what translates so beautifully also to his prints. What you also see here too is that often in grand wood main drawings like these it's independent works of art in their own right. They weren't considered necessarily preparatory drawings they were a sort of glorious reiteration of a work in a different medium. So his ability to kind of move from one medium to another really stood in a good step when he took on this work with associated American artists. Now prints allowed would do a number of new things in his work. Obviously he was already a great draftsman. One of the things that the prints allowed him to do was to explore serial imagery. So the notion of putting together different images under a theme. And one of the most obvious ones that comes to mind when you look at his prints is what appears to have been an unfinished attempt to do the 12th calendar, the 12 months of the calendar. So he only got really in terms of the single main ones as far as March. We can sort of count July 15th and December after we're done within this series. But certainly this is something that Courier and I was interested in doing as well and he would have known this. So for example that image that I showed you at the beginning of Homestead in Winter. It was actually part of a four part series. He had Homestead Spring, American Homestead in Summer, Winter and Autumn. And this serial notion of showing sort of a place over time, I think was very appealing to William. And prints allowed him to do that. The most clearly serial work that he did, and this is four separate prints. They're sort of jammed together in this image, but they're actually four separate prints. You have fruits, vegetables, pain flowers, and wildflowers in the corner. These were $10 rather than $5 because they were hand colored. And they were hand tinted not by just anyone, but they were hand tinted by his sister Nan, her husband Ed, who were contracted at $100 a month to hand tint all 250 of these. It is not just an interesting sort of serial image that looks directly to Courier and I's. In fact Courier and I's did similar types of botanicals where you would look at sort of fruits or flowers in that way. But it's also a good indication of the way in which wood kind of insistently gendered in animal objects and things in his paintings, including his routine landscapes. So this sort of rounded, feminized fruit has a sort of masculine counterpart in these much more sort of elongated and fallow forms in vegetables. The same can be sort of tamed flowers and wildflowers. The tamed flowers are sort of made to look like a sort of feminine Victorian print and the wildflowers, you know, sort of more rugged and raw. We see this kind of masculine and feminine kind of balance going on, all feminine in his work. As we'll see, his prints were no exception. So the other thing that prints allowed what to do was to go back to his painting and mine it again for a new material. So tree planting group in that initial pair of prints is really a reprisal of his Arbor Day from 1932. There's not a one-to-one correspondence here. It's the same genre scene, but it's allowed him to sort of go back to his work and find fruitful creativity from his own earlier work. And this sort of reverse as well. His prints begin to allow him to think about new forms of painting sometimes in a one-to-one kind of comparison. So his January, which comes out in 1938, leads to the 1941 painting of January. Remember that when you were making your print it's in reverse, which is why we see sort of reverse of the image when he finally creates the painted version. So prints were beginning to allow him to sort of look back at his own work and use it in new and interesting ways. He also, in addition to revisiting imagery, he revisited themes in a way. So his Daughters of Revolution, which was caused a sort of you know, mini scandal with the Daughters of the American Revolution who believed rightly that they were being satirized here, has its male equivalent. You know, again, that's sort of gender parity that he's given to these satires. And his Tri-Portech, where he portrays a humorous image. Again, these sort of pillars of small town life placed in a setting that makes them look lightly ridiculous. But he loves these figures too. He's not entirely sort of poking fun at them. But in both cases, the punchline is in the background. So whether it's Moytza's heroic image of Washington crossing the Delaware and these are the Daughters of that Revolution, or the shadows cast across the sort of fake image of Egypt behind the Shriners. Another avenue that prints allow him to explore was the exploration of the immediacy of print. Images of other contemporaries and recent events and sometimes inside jokes. And this is a good example of that in an honorary degree. We're seeing a self portrait of Wood at the center. There are a couple of really lovely caricatures in this show that I could look at, one for 1925 and one for later on. But there he is sort of caricaturing himself having received in 1936 an honorary degree of letters from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He's kind of poking fun at himself. And the guys on either side are actually colleagues of his at the University of Iowa. Norman Forster, who's one of the members of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and Carl Seashore there on the right. So this is a way for him to create a genre scene. It's on a biographical. The print medium is kind of allowing him to do something much more quick and contemporary that a grand painting wouldn't allow him to do. You also see him poking fun at his own career in the sense that you know what the Gothic window above is the reference, of course, to American Gothic. In fact he jokingly referred to this as spelastic Gothic. So when it came to Sultry Night which was published in 1938, we're looking at a print that in many ways continues what we've been talking about. This idea of revisiting subject matter and themes that he clearly been interested in in his painting. We see contemporary reference here. We see a lot of biographical reference. And you also, and I'll walk you through it when we get there, you can also see his love of serial imagery within a single image. And I'll explain what I mean by that in just a moment. So in this image we're seeing a far bathing under a cascading tub of water put from horse trough in a very lonely, deserted landscape. This is clearly not like all of the other prints in a lot of ways. And it really stunned audiences when it was first produced. The naturalism of the nude figure took many a back. The fact that it was a very sort of unapologetic frontal nude was a bit of a shock. And as one predicts said about this, wood has failed to shadow and shrink the male parts and traditionally fliers. So we wanted some kind of artistic fig leaf to sort of shield our eyes. The fact that he has kind of a farmer's can makes him even look more nude than he would normally look. Because we really get the sense that we're looking at a real body and his eyes are closed so he's unaware of us seeing his body. So there's a lot here that made people very uncomfortable. Wood explained himself that seeing from his childhood that inspired this. He said in my boyhood no forms had tile and chromium bathrooms. And after a long day in the dust of the fields after the chores were done, we used to go down to the horse tank with a pale. The sun took the chill off the top of their water and we would dip up the pails full and drench ourselves. This is the memory of a 9-10 year old boy. Not someone who would normally come across a farmhand at midnight, you know, bathing. So there's a disconnect in some ways between wood's memory and the scene that he's sort of creating here. So the controversy that it inspired led the U.S. post office to ban the distribution of this image in the U.S. mail. It was deemed an example of pornography. And it couldn't be included in the Associated American Artists' catalogs although, of course, female nudes were fine. But this was trouble. And Associated American Artists themselves cut the print run from 250 down to 1,000. And so these were, it was a drastically reduced print run and really one of the most kind of unsettling controversies that Grant Wood had to undergo during the Associated American Artists' period. He said very little about it, but as you'll see in a moment he took it, you know, his reaction to it was almost a violent one. Before I get to that, let me just say that as a theme, male artists can make out through how wood's work early on and throughout this period. Here we're looking at Newt Bader from 1920. This is a figure that's on Indian Creek. There's actually a painting of Indian Creek in the show called The Crick I think from 1924. So when you see that, it's the same creek. This is in Cedar Rapids. This is one of his illustrations from Farm on the Hill in a Children's Book. So this notion of, you know, a male bathing figure, we can see multiple examples of in his work. There was a planned painting that Wood wanted to create beginning in 1935. He started planning for it called The Bath 1880. And everything got really decolonary sketching for it as far as we know. But this was to be a painting showing a farmer in old fashion red flannel underwear and in his kitchen on a Saturday night. He began his kind of research for the painting by advertising in newspapers for authentic flannels from the 1890s. This was going to be sort of the start of his process. And that's about as far as he got because newspapers who, you know, gossip colonists and journalists often wrote about Wood in this very tongue-in-cheek way about, you know, how Gatchburg the unmarried Grant Wood. There were always sort of little digs about his kind of natural status. And this they couldn't even they could not like a fact that he was advertising for London's Underwear in the newspaper. The Kansas City star characterized the artist's search as, quote, the fulfillment of an old desire. Whereas the Minneapolis Tribune claimed Wood is drawing into his quest a good deal of flaming art. So there were these little digs about, you know, sort of clearly sort of making sort of coded references to his rumored sexuality. And he dropped the project. He'd gotten the flannels and was able to use, sort of recycle them, at least the idea of them in a much different image in his print series, The Midnight Alarm in which we can see a model wearing the long sword after long times that got used for this. But the Bat 1880 was never, never to be. So if the Bat 1880 caused a bit of controversies playful or maybe a little bit hurtful teasing for Wood, the drawing that he completed in 1937 seems to really kind of court controversy. This was in the year right before he does Sultry Night. Saturday Night Bath, as far as we know, was never intended for public display. We now know who did. I'll explain that a little bit later on. It's a large scale drawing. It's about 1 over 2 feet high. And it's the closest predecessor we have to his working out the composition for Sultry Night. In some ways it is far more, you know, eroticized than Sultry Night. In fact, there are two figures here. And one is actively disrobing. It's an entirely thinner sketch. It's not clear where he was going to go in terms of maybe doing a painted version of it. But if you look at the two together, you can see that, you know, it's gone from two figures to one. The barn and the horses are gone. The focus has really become shifted onto just the solitary figure which both makes it less eroticized and in some ways more really confronting with his body in a way that he enlarged in Saturday Night Bath. Largely because it is a frontal nude. And he also changes the title in a way that I think courted, you know, over the controversy itself. Saturday Night Bath sounds harmless enough. Sultry Night evokes, you know, all sorts of things. Heat, desire. And the fact that it is sort of semi voyeuristic scene in the middle of the night. All of these things are wild. It looks doubtless. I think deemed it to be too hot to nail. And critics of Wood's work who really wanted to support him and protect him from this controversy, both in 1938 and much later, through the 1970s and 1980s, defended this image as a metaphor saying that Wood really isn't showing us an individual farmer. He's showing us an American ally. This is a sort of glassesized notion of a farm. Others have said that it is the American ally. This is all a matter of a notion going back to the purity of the farm. I partly buy the idea that this is a metaphor. But I have argued in my analysis of this that he is tapping into something much more mobile to Iowa culture. And that is the figure of King Corn. The South had King Cotton and Iowa had King Corn, complete with the palace. There were many corn palaces, but this was the first corn palace in Sioux City, Iowa, in which a god would be crowned King Corn in his Concert Demeter with old courts. There was this popular imagery around the notion of a man kind of embodying the corn, the most stable crop of Iowa and as well. That association between the male body and corn was something that was just a part of Wood's upbringing. So here you can see the adjacent corn festival carnival of these young boys are dressed as corn stock. And if you look at John Stuart Curry's portrait of Chris Christensen he was headed by the agriculture department in University of Wisconsin. He places him in a cornfield, partly because of Foy's teaching, that all of the men in the cornfield with their flutter and ties are named to sort of look like living monuments of the corn stalks that they're passing through. In fact, Curry does something much more explicit in that conflation of male form and the corn stalk with his Kansas cornfield in 1936. And Wood and Curry knew one another at this point and Wood certainly knew his painting. When Curry described this painting he said, it is a self-portrait in vegetal guise. Even it's a self-portrait, it is also a new self-portrait. There is a single ear of corn that up way up that has a very sort of strange fleshy pink color. This isn't just the slaw. And this notion of the sort of phallic nature of corn again is, you know, coped into the metaphors about the potency of this crop and power of the land. That's why I said that Wood often talked about the landing in really masculine terms. Wood himself, and I'm so glad to see this in the show for his autobiography when he was figuring out sort of illustrations for Return to Rulemia, includes this also a very powerful and potent looking ear of corn that is in many ways connected again to his feelings about corn and masculine power. Seeing, you know, fully aligned with some of his other illustrations of this as well, where we often see these sort of party men carrying giant baskets of corn, you know, it's as if a male potency of games would kind of knock over the head with it a little bit in terms of thinking about corn in this way. It was also part of the language of Wood's upbringing. So the whole idea of calling someone corn fed, or husky, a young boy who's growing up sometimes is called you would describe him as tasseling out, which is what a mature corn plant does. So all of this sort of imagery and sort of local sense of male bodies and corn are what we are partly seeing in Sultry Night. I feel as, you know, when I look at these work they were beginning to see a moment in Sultry Night where that flesh, any kind of sensual landscape style for which it becomes so well known, in this kind of pygmalion moment sort of the land becomes flesh in this really arresting image. And I think I said there are a couple of other things I really got into corn. I have a few other things about sort of the way that the farmer is depicted here that really, especially for an Iowa audience, would have evoked an idea of King Corn. The farmer's knobby and awkward joints, the spray that appears above his head and his nested genitals below, all mimic the essential features of the mature corn stalk. So all of that kind of elegance and the sort of bushy character of the corn silks. Beyond these more recognizable elements, Sultry Night's figure also exhibits corn-like qualities that we've been familiar only to a foreign audience. There was a widespread folk belief in wood's childhood that held that corn grew primarily at night and only came alive under the cover of the moonlight. Another feature that Westerns would associate with this plant is its reputation for a prodigious sweating in hot weather. In the hottest days of July corn plants could transpire up to 19 pounds of water a single day. So wood's figure embodies all of these traits. The corn stalk's awkward strain toward the moon, its unslapable thirst, and even its sweaty pungency. He's a fantasy of King Corn, stripped of his robes. So there's a metaphorical element that you can't escape. And that notion of the landscape becoming man, I find fascinating. I can't take credit for this, but I wanted someone to point it out to me once and I'll show you this sort of graph in a minute, that this tree in the distance becomes almost part of a serial imagery in which you see the tree far off the tree here, and then suddenly the standing figure of the man, almost as if his natural element, the landscape, has moved into our field of vision and become human. In fact, remember this would have been reversed for him. I think it works even better, thinking of it moving dynamically this way so that this is kind of the final metamorphosis. And that metamorphosis happens, and it's pictorially so beautiful how he does it, with that impact of the water. So the water hits the chest, and these lines actually follow perfectly along the crop's cyclones in this print. So the water hits him in sort of this magical moment, and it's also, you know, it's a lot of size, it's a metaphor about, you know, the power of this barland, and something that I think we know would be very crowded before having put together. Given the controversy that it inspired would follow the next year with an image that in many ways cleans up any controversial elements about fertility or potency of Iowa farmland, with his fertility from 1939. But even here, we're seeing the Italian, once again, one-eared corn, one-eared corn stalks going off the back, and then, of course, still the very masculine and potent form of that silo rising up out of the field. If you look at Saturday Night Back and Sultry Night, you can see the real DNA for this print. The barn has been sort of transposed over here, and the silo figure in many ways retakes the place of the farmer at Sultry Night. American Gothic is not far behind. It's the American Gothic house in the background, so again, it's a self-reference here. So, if Wood intended Sultry Night in this, I think what he often considered the best of his prints, certainly, his origins of his work often points to it as the best that he accomplished in his series, it is also, in its immediacy, very clearly a real person. And Wood always used models for his work. Even Bird really sort of abstracted his ideas for years. So, for me, as a biophonist looking at this, I was interested in sort of a metaphorical dimension, but I thought it's got to be someone he knew. It has to have been someone who was modeling for him in the 1930s. And the theory that I think bears the strongest evidence for the model, given the timing of this, is Eric Knight, who's later the author of Lassie's kind of poem. He came to Iowa in 1937. He met Grant Wood through Norman Forster, who we saw on our degree. Knight was at the Iowa Writers Workshop and he lived with Wood in the summers. Sarah Wood's wife, at this point, had moved on. Their marriage had been at a fall apart in the late 30s. And Eric Knight moved in as they aired his summers. So, the timing is right. Eric Knight was himself a kind of amateur artist. And we know that Nolan Forster, who introduced him, was also serving as a model for Wood. If you look at certain images of Eric Knight, the very dark hair, who's a friendly, likely, he has very long hands and there's, if you look at those fingers in Sultry Knight, I've seen pictures of Eric Knight playing. He's got that same sort of knobby appearance with his hands. So I think in terms of the physical resemblance, I think there's a little case to be made here, also the fact that he was a summer roommate of Wood's. Summer tenant of his speaks to the theme of a hot summer night that you see here. But for me, the most irresistible connection is the pun that Wood would have adored. Sultry Knight would have came. It's exactly the kind of thing that Wood loved doing. He loved visual puns. He loved punning in his titles. And this would have been the ultimate inside joke of Sultry Knight. I'm sticking with it. That's my thing about who this is. Now beyond the question of metaphor and the identity of the model, this still leaves the question, and for me the question unfinished when my book came out of whatever happened to the painted version. There was a painted version of this work that was intended to be Wood's comeback. Let me just read to you about his unveiling of this. So Wood, as he did with January, which we saw before, and working on Sultry Knight and working on a major oil painting, he really believed he was going to revive his reputation as a painter. Wood's first biographer in the 1940s Brant invited more than 50 people to his house. This is an Irish city, for the unveiling of the painting. This was really kind of unusual for him. This wasn't standard practice. It stood high on a rack over the side of the ward, and both his dining room and his living room were full of men and women that night. Strange to say, it was the men rather than the women who were embarrassed. There was a palpable silence that mapped this painting that I think was probably more humiliating for even a post-office painter. This was really meant to be his comeback painting. Clearly the painting was finished at this point, so as an Irish historian I've always been curious, and how I've been curious, what happened to this painting. Nan tells this, and this much I did know, Nan tells us the painting suffered a rude fate, whether as a result of the postal office ban, I do not know. Brant was bothered by the thought of a contractor, and I try to create evil where there was none. He saw it off the portion that portrayed the new farmhand, and burned it. More than half the painting remained. Wood never restored his work. I mean, this is an extraordinary act of violence. I mean, I think it says everything, in Nan's words at least, about just how much this controversy could really get home for him. So, when I was finishing the book, I wondered where on earth this saw it off remainder of the painting could be, if it still existed at all. Because all I knew was that the painting had been purchased by somebody called Wellwood Nesbitt. Now, Nesbitt is important as a patron in Wood's career. You're the friend collector. It turns out he also owns Saturday Night Ave. We were all going to show you earlier. So, we actually had that as well. He was an exact contemporary of Wood's, and he knew Wood through his wife. So, Genevieve Rumpel, later of Nesbitt, was in his tiny graduating class of Washington High School, like in Temes, who was a great handsome teenager in the center. So, Genevieve marries Wellwood Nesbitt in 1918, and they start collecting decorative arts made by Grant Wood. A lot of his Impressionist paintings. And in fact, they even ended up creating a house based on Wood's paintings. So, this is one of Wood's Impressionist paintings from the 20s that Nesbitt's owned. And then for their house in Maple Blossom, Wisconsin, they actually had a re-produced project of painting. So, they were pretty serious about their commitment to Wood. But the painting fragmented that we know only from Wood's first biographer that went to Nesbitt, had never been illustrated. He had been mentioned by scholars, but they really seemed to have any idea whether it still existed. You know, how long the Nesbitt family had come to it. At one point, I was told point blank that it was lost. That it was to, you know, to stop looking for it. So, in the spring of 2012, imagine my surprise when I was sent an auction catalog from Jackson's Auctions in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with a letter that still passed me up, because it was written to me personally as Wood's biographer, saying we really believe that this would be an important addition to your collection. So, we are willing to offer you a Sultry Night Account for a cool $500,000. Obviously, I was out of the market for this, but I could not be more stumped. I needed to call about three or four, which I was at a news that can't believe it. It's resurfaced. How did this come about? And the story as it unfolded goes back to the Nesbitt family. So, here, as Nesbitt found their daughters, Martha circled here, the youngest of them. She inherited the painting when her father died in 1953. So, it became her own painting. When Jim Dennis was writing the first monograph on Grandville, he became very close to many people in Grandville's world, including Nandle and Gretchen. And Jim Dennis and Martha developed a very close friendship, and it becomes a little unclear whether this painting for Grandville was given to Jim Dennis as a gift, or whether he was keeping it for, say, keeping it at any rate. Jim Dennis had this painting for many, many years. Jim Dennis was the one who told me it was not trackable. And he was the seller of the painting at auction. So, I have to say, I won't get too much into the battle of the suit with Martha and Jim. It's back in Martha's hands now. But I will say that Sue Taylor is a wonderful Grandville scholar who was just as Florida's idol was. She flew in from Portland, Oregon. I flew in from Providence, Rhode Island. We met in a little country on this pilgrimage. We have to see Sultry Night with cattle, a name that they practice up as well. But it was really just such a lovely surprise to see. There were many things about it that for us were as I said, a surprise. And there were also elements that led to a new Mr. Eight note. So, it's a lovely silvery landscape. As far as I know, it's one of the only nighttime scenes that Grant Wood completed. The whole painting must have been extraordinary. The strange shape that you see here shows the violence that was done to the painting. It was intended to have an arched top, just like Saturday Night. Also, we've had this lovely arched top, almost like an alter piece. This particular shape was very important to Grant Wood. He only used it for paintings that had a deep personal connection with him. So, he used it for a painting called Victorian Survival in 1931 which was based on a tin type of his artillery and also for a sort of veiled self-portrait called Pine Lessons, if you can pretty much imagine in 1941. Those are the only three examples of him using this very special kind of shape. It does make for an odd shape in the final version. Now, the cattle that are blinking out of us from back here, obviously this is a posthumous title that was put on this, are obviously not center stage but they're an intriguing sort of knowledge to one of Wood's favorite painters, Edward Kix. The great folk painter who often included these little sort of sweet, naive images of cows. And in fact, Wood had used this before. This was a book jacket that he did for an awful intragic life from 1934 in which he included those little cows at the top. This is one of the most surrealist compositions Wood ever did. This is a something of age story. A young farm boy who was struggling with his sexuality, Wood took the commission and created this sort of floating surrealist image of vitals and sort of American Gothic-like people and the floating cows which show up in Sultry Night with cattle. Now, once the painting was recovered and was put back on the loan at the University of Wisconsin, they had a tiny but very potent little show of the print, the painting and a very important document that Martha had saved along with painting that, again, was kind of a goldmine for Grandwood scholars. It is a letter from July 1938 that Wood wrote to John O'Connor. He was head of the Carterley National The Jury Exhibition. Scholars have always known that Sultry Night was not, the print was banned, but there was also a rumor that the painting had been sent to a major jury show and had been sent back. It had been refused by the jury. We've never been able to figure out if that story was true or not, but in hearing that you can imagine someone at Wood's power or some of his popularity and fame being refused from a jury show this letter approves it. It is sent to John O'Connor from the Carterley International and we know that it was not in the Carterley International's show through 1938 and we found out from someone else that it had been absolutely refused partly because of its subject matter. The letter also explains that someone named Stanley Razor was lined up to buy the complete painting and he realized that the rejection of the first patron who didn't want the cut down version and the rejection of the jury show must have been a sort of double blow to Wood. When Sue Taylor and I were out tracking down the painting, Sue and I have to give her full credit for this, Sue found Wood's still living framer at 100 years old. This is Willis Guthrie in a picture taken on that trip in 2012. He was a painter as well. This is one of his paintings. You can see that Grant Wood kind of influenced this is his painting Oasis of 1941. We sat down and talked with Willis Guthrie because he knew that he was starting to work for Wood as a framer and as a sort of airing person in the studio right by the time that Sultry Night the oil went out and he confirmed for us a totally lucid and hungry. He said my first job for Mr. Wood was to unpack the crate from Sultry Night after he'd been rejected. And he said I told Mr. Wood, I told Mr. Wood all he had to do was paint more water in it. Just put it all in water and it just sent it back with a really pastated water which cracked us up. But he said that it really kind of undid Wood. And it was Willis Willis who also made that arched frame for Willis Nesbitt who stepped in to buy it. So the final mystery I'll touch on this briefly. The final mystery to mean that it really got to a new thinking when we were out there is the very odd way in which the oil painting was cropped. Now if we look at the print as a kind of standing for the painting because it does appear that there was kind of a one-to-one correspondence between the print and the painting. This is where you would cut a painting to save the composition right? You would be able to sort of bring it over a little bit you certainly could have painted over any kind of a figure. But if you look back at the oil painting you can see it sort of cuts right through the water tank. So rather than this sort of more logical place to cut it, this is where it was cut. And there is a world of difference between this kind of a fragment and this kind of a fragment. The fragment on the left is a fragment that you cut off, you know, at a fury and burn. This is something that is very carefully centered and very preserved. And if you look at the back too, this sort of notion of kind of sawing away at the center of fury is aligned by the surgical edge that you see on it. That's the fragment right here. Absolutely professionally done on the back. And there is also the question of underpainting right? So if the figure, as we cut out, see what those little red lines are, you would have seen some form of underpainting on the figure or the bucket. And if you look at the edge of the painting, it's as clean as a whistle. There's no real added. It's going to get right in the line of underpainting of any figure that's going to have cut out. So all of this to me points to the belief that at least in Wood's own life that this was a carefully saved fragment. We know that Wood saved even arbitrary fragments from paintings that he cropped. He would give these fragments to friends or to people who worked in his studio. So the last piece of evidence that I'll present and wrap up with is another painting, another mail that Wood created, the Count of Asia in Paris, 1924, was one of his most prying possessions. And I think that it gives us evidence in terms of thinking about how and why he wanted to save this fragment from Sultry Night. The Spotted Man, this is another one of his work items. It's spotted because it's a pointless technique, but it's also spotted because we're looking at him. He's making a joke about the Spotted Man. So this was one of only three paintings that Wood refused to sell during his lifetime. His portrait of Nan, his self-portrait, and this painting were the three of them most important paintings too. He kept this painting in his studio, kept it on display in his studio, wherever he was, clear light, Iowa City, see what happens. And this too caused a problem for Nan, later on, who wanted to defend her brother. So Nan says, oh, everyone says, you know, he wanted to present it, and he always had it displayed in the studio. He never displayed it in the studio. He was a little ashamed of this. I mean, we always knew that he kept it in the dresser that he kept it in the studio. There's the dresser. The dresser still exists. Here's the problem. 32 by 20, 32 by 14, doesn't even fit. And there's no way it would fit in. But Nan is insistent that he kept hidden away from view this male nude in the dresser. Guess what Wood fit in the dresser? That's about the size of the fragment. And, you know, it's clearly, you know, something that I think would have cherished. It certainly would have been a much more accomplished workman than Spotted Man. And I always tell my students, this is how I figured out how big it was. I'm looking at the thing right now that, never say art historians don't need to know. So this is why I squirreled down at the chase and thinking, like, how big is this thing? We have to know exactly how big it is. So it probably looks a little bit like this, a little bit of an arched top. And I said at the chase end, you know, how lovely it would be one day, and at the Hillstrum as well, to have, you know, an exhibition that brings together Wood's prints, the story of this, you know, painting and its fragment, I'm still looking for it. I have some theories about it in my book. But today, you know, I feel like this one print, as a case study, gives us a sense of the value of this new medium for Wood, the way in which, you know, it crossed all kinds of lines for him, both in terms of his reputation and in terms of his medium, and really illustrates this extraordinary chapter he was working like, because do I think so many of his prints, and for an art historian and a biographer, there's nothing better. So thank you all very much, and I've got a little bit of a time left. I'm not going to take any questions, but I don't know where it is. That's one of the theories. I don't, we don't have anything written that he had anything else to store that we knew. We do know that Nan destroyed the awful lot of his letters, and it is quite possible that she could have destroyed something like that. The reason why I believe that, you know, the sort of argument against that is that Nan was more aware than anyone of the monetary value of his work. She was the executive of this estate, and she lived off of his work, basically, the rest of her life. So for her to destroy something so accomplished, I would be reluctant to believe that she would do that. Whether it may have gone, you know, my strongest possible of these that I think that has been done and they're just, you know, being able to type it out I'm still working on that. Can you take? Where do you think it is, Mark? Where can it be? We would be so happy to help you. Especially because that person denied the existence of this part. Welcome to Wood Scholarship. It's sometimes boring, you know. I mean, it's, people get, you know, territorial. And it was born in a way that it wasn't an outbreak. It was, it was, I was thrown off the trail. It was not an outbreak. Or is he involved in CCC? You know, dad, I used to go around the company and do all kinds of painting and... Do you know about CCC? Do you know about CCC? What is, what did they initial state for you? What do you mean? What do you mean by CCC? Oh, okay. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. He was head of the IOLA provision of WPA for a time. Yeah, he was very much connected to it. So, what was the prize for you? I just wanted to comment. I think your arguments are very persuasive. I don't think that's me. Also, I think I make sense about the orange. Well, that's, that's, that's an example where you have to sort of get back to the mindset of who was looking at this and how we would follow down the line. Okay. Do you have a theory of all life that looks like a barren field behind the man? You know... For me, I think it allows him to stand in metaphorically by sort of not identifying what the problem is. There is something in that theory. It's planted. It's just, it's so abstract. You can't really get a sense of what it is. But I feel like it won't work if you saw a corn buying it as a property as well. You know, it's sort of like, I think it abstracts that background and he's where it becomes the standard. It's a really, it's a very lonely look. I think that treating that background makes it even lonely here. Your comment about the design and style of his biography, the cross-hatching, and sibling, made me wonder, did he ever experiment with stretching or curating or do you associate those methods more? No, I don't know. You may have immersed in that stuff, but that's more than enough. I think he did a small amount of investigation of engraving that he really didn't pursue at all. And he hired other print makers to make sure that it's still in the city garden. So he certainly wasn't practicing it. I think you're right. I think he longingly, of those 250 prints that existed of all of those AAA prints that he made, do we have any idea where those are? Are they well documented that they're in museums? Are most of them in private hands? They show up with some regularity on the 18th Road Show. That was long to my grandfather. But I don't know that there's like an inventory. I don't think there's any way to identify where they all went. There are a number of collections that have them, but there's probably as many as 15 or 20 of any one that would be known where they're located, but the others is like all of them there. And a lot of them probably do not survive because some of them are sort of inexpensive and it's getting eclipsed. People kind of need to keep them in this storage of things. And museums do need to keep them, as long as... Sultry Night is obviously a rarest since there was a limited impression. And I'm very hard to get a hold of and I'm quite delighted. I attract one down for the weekend. We can now have one in a collection that had been deaccessioned by Brennau in the 1970s. When Wood's reputation was really, you know, fashion-bombing out. So... It's my all-in-one. I love Brennau. I'm not asking Brennau. No, they've got a great question. But to me that speaks to even, you know, really sort of committed institutions to collecting American art not, you know, maybe these prints are not available. I think they are sales. I know they're not. We have to wait until they work. We're gonna call those people. Was Mr. Night a swimmer? Because this man looks like he had swimsuit on. The old male swimsuit with the suit was tied. Because there is a tan line on his legs. So it's hard to tell. That's just like when the shadow starts again, but you're right. I don't know. I don't know if Night was a swimmer. I don't know if it was an enthusiast. It was a swimmer. And an enthusiast at Skinnekenburg. All these movies about antics. You know, growing up, antics is a grown man. It's almost like male, whole-fashioned male. One piece swimsuit. Yeah. And I'm sure they would, you know, associate American artists would love a freakin' brawler. So, what should that be? You have an idea. I have a two-part question. Yeah. Do you have an idea of the numerical output of this artist? I mean, was it a huge body of work? No. I mean, in terms of, I mean, there are these 19 prints. But in terms of what's paintings, up until like 1929, there's a pretty sizable output. He's doing impressionist studies and some very, you know, finished impressionist paintings. In fact, whenever paintings come on the market today, they're almost never late. These 1920s were impressionist paintings. From 1929 onward, it was such an excruciatingly slow process for him to create these paintings that, you know, in the early 30s, I don't have an exact number, but in the early 30s, you know, in his most prolific years, he's maybe creating maybe half a dozen paintings in like 31 and 32. And then there's, you know, his whole period of 38 and 31. Between 36 and 39, there's really only about four major paintings he does. It just, he said, you know, this is a process that it was like swaying to all things. Well, then, two questions then. Why did he do that? And second of all, are the records of other lost paintings? Are there, you know, if he lost this key painting, if there were others that were lost? No. I mean, we knew about this one. I don't know any other paintings from his matured period that we're still looking for. And we were having this conversation actually just before about the fact that, you know, inevitably there are impressionist paintings in case they come up, and people say, maybe it's his, maybe it's not his, we're not quite sure. Because it did so many in the 1920s. These works were so difficult to produce and were surrounded by so much hype, that Wood has a new painting out, that we've been able to keep track of it with this exception. What was it in his personality since you know this artist that would cause him to work in this fashion? First, he got extravagant for his work. This was the style that he hit upon. Everyone said, ah, he's our new American painter. So it was partly that. It was partly, I mean, he really hit on the style that was deeply satisfying. He changed the style, he got into it today, but he changed the style that I'm going to epiphany in Germany in studying some of the old masters in northern Renaissance painting. He's a novelist who's not protected in music. And there's this story again that Scales fell in his eyes and felt like a castle of pain. So as excruciating as it was for him, I think it was deeply satisfying for him as a craftsman and as a painter to sort of create these meticulously built up canvases. And I think it was also difficult for him psychologically to return to the 1890s, this period before his father's death, but he'd both wanted to revisit, but it was also not easy. I think that's part of what he means when he says, I'm sweating blood when I create these paintings. But like a lot of arts in America, you know, it's suffering basically. You know, I don't know if it's available online. No. Well, it's just a type script. It's sort of a file type script. There is a micro-themed copy of it in New York and it's a really weird art that Scales can create in the end. I think that's published in New York, Berkeley, for a long time. He published, yeah. He published his dad in a multi-catering and parts of returning were moving in by this. You know, it's available to scholars. But the thing that I really wanted to make available to scholars was my favorite Bob Schell discovery in his book, was I found Sarah Maxon's manuscript of her autobiography that nobody knew she'd even written such a novel. And when I was finishing the book, my editor said, do that blog and catch the reader about what happens there. Nobody ever mentions Sarah after their marriage or something. So I'm literally sort of just trolling the internet at one point to try to find genealogies or obituaries when she died. And I see some some civil warfare papers that belong to a state in Washington state. So I called up the bookstore and said, well, this is from Sarah Maxon's state. Do you have any idea why she died when she died in her counter-offensive? You should talk to Ed Marcon if he was her landlord. He's always wandering around town with Sarah's letters and Sarah's manuscripts and all of Sarah's reminiscences about her marriage to Wood. And nobody, you know, nobody wants to read this stuff. He's like, thanks, dear. And I got on the next route there as much faster than I got on the plane for Sultry Night. And it was, oh, man, this is some amazing stuff. What an interesting marriage it was. And what an interesting character she is. We're trying to get an orthology's daughter down to give them to their archives of American art because she was connected to Jerome Kerr and Globley and lots of really interesting figures. What was it that made her do this? She looked a lot older. She was, she claimed that they were childhood sweethearts. But she was almost a decade older. She looked a lot older than he because she had, you know, kind of white hair. And she was a grandmother at the time. People were really, we thought that he got teased for the underwear advertisement. All of these teasing headlines about his marriage, which were really, in some ways, kind of mean spirited, bachelor marries. Now they can laugh at us all. You know, that kind of thing when it came out, which was, I think, kind of awful for the both. But she was, she was just a good middleman. Is Grant Wood the most famous Isle artist? Yes. Yes. I would say, yeah, absolutely. In fact, he's on the back of the Iowa, the Iowa quarter. And Harvard is on the back. In fact, they include his name on the quarter. And he's the only American artist that I know of, or American currency. His name is actually an American currency. I mean, he is the Saint-Ixon of Iowa. Clearly, I think it is. One other thing that I think might be worth mentioning is to address one of these questions. Is that thing, in terms of the way he managed it, he wrote a fair amount of this all about early parties, especially barely gets beyond the childhood. So there's nothing, in which kind of extrapolate what he says about that time to his true period, and we all get ticked with Loseras and blah, blah, blah. None of that. Right. I should have mentioned that because it's very telling for that he goes swimmingly along to his father's death and then he goes for a dance. And I actually think in some ways it tells us all sorts of things that we need to know about the period that he's going back to because that period, the first 10 years of his life, becomes this endlessly, you know, little feel of subjects and of memories. In fact, the American Mothic is very much, you know, kind of a weird veil looking at his parents. Just an aside, you're mentioning favorite subjects, right? Okay, this is Carl C. Schar, just graduated this year. She's graduated of this college. Oh, really? How did you do that? Class of 1891. You know, Mrs. Did you mention this a couple of years ago? I must say that I'm sorry. There's a reason I didn't want to mention on the campus. Yeah. I didn't realize that. They were great bodies of course. I've been a sea shore enforcer. There's a nice document where there's an article in a Swedish newspaper that extols what he can't read as a sea shore of the Pancels. Now three sea shore of others came to Wasika, Minnesota, and they became architects and interior designers. So if you go to the town of Wasika, you see all of these. And they translated their names from show strand to sea shore. And I've written about them. So I should say the same family? I'm wondering. No idea. Are there any other questions? Thank you again. Thank you.