TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

This episode of “Tracing the Path” explores the Arts and Crafts movement, tracing its origins in 19th-century England as a reaction against the Industrial Revolution’s perceived dehumanization of labor and mass production.

While European artists lamented the loss of craftsmanship, American artists embraced technology to enhance design, leading to the establishment of various Arts and Crafts societies and influential publications like The Craftsman magazine, which popularized the distinctive “Craftsman style” home.

The narrative then shifts to the life of American artist Grant Wood, highlighting his Quaker upbringing, early artistic development, and significant contributions to the movement, including his iconic painting “American Gothic.” The episode concludes by detailing the enduring legacy of “American Gothic” and the wider impact of the Arts and Crafts movement on American art and culture, often touching on how art was made accessible during the Great Depression.

The Origin of the Arts and Crafts Movement

While the industrial revolution helped farmers vastly improve the amount of land they could farm, it also led to the rise of arts and crafts. Not the kind you do in kindergarten, but the kind you find at the Louvre.

The industrial revolution was based in part on the concept of division of labor. It was the time the world began putting down the pitchforks and picking up machines.

The division of labor is the foundation of factory work.

Instead of one person knowing how to do everything, individual skills could be taught to various people. For the most part, however, the industrial revolution was an exciting time to be alive. Labor-saving machines were popping up daily, and eventually innovations like the assembly line, the sewing machine, the light bulb, and the car would change the world forever.

There is another perspective, though. Some felt this division of labor robbed the workers of the pleasure of seeing their work through from conception to completion. Value and beauty were being replaced by economy and profit.

A young architect named August Pugin publicly rallied against this new society that was seemingly turning its back on the simple pleasures of craftsmanship and artistry. His philosophy struck a chord with Oxford professor John Ruskin, who began a campaign to return England to a simpler way of life, in tune with nature.

He also held the idea that work should be joyous, an ideal lost on the growing multitude of factory workers.

It is here at Oxford that the arts and crafts movement began in the 1860s.

Fellow Oxford professor William Morris was so moved by Ruskin, he made his life’s work, the Reformation of Society through art.

Morris turned his philosophy into a physical object when he built his red house in 1859. He built a home that was furnished with custom ceafted furniture specifically designed to fit inside the home. True attention to detail.

Other artists joined the movement as well, creating objects that conveyed craftsmanship and simplicity. French impressionists focused on painting outside away from anything man-made, capturing the vitality of everyday people and places.

From 1870 to 1900 the movement flourished and expanded around the globe catching the attention of bigger names like Oscar Wilde, who championed the movement’s ideals in Europe and America.

The Arts & Crafts Movement in America

In 1876, America hosted the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. While America celebrated a 100 years of independence, it still lacked a national identity when it came to arts, crafts, and design. Most everything was still largely of European influence. Colonial and Shaker being America’s only native practices. 

Unlike Europe, America didn’t have centuries of art and design history to hearken back to as part of the movement. Instead, it was eager to see every step of progress and innovation.

The arts and crafts movement wasn’t a return to the past. It was a race to the future. Where European artists had demonized machines, American artists embraced them. looking for any way to use them in design.

The scroll saw was one of them.

While it wasn’t everywhere until the 1920s, those who could find one could cut intricate designs that was never an option prior, making even homebuilders attuned to the movement. America embraced technological advances.

It was 1895 that America’s first arts and crafts society began in Minneapolis called the Chalk and Chisel Club. Their periodical called House Beautiful became the quintessential arts and crafts magazine, showcasing even the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright, among others.

A couple years later, arts and crafts societies were founded in Rochester, New York, Boston, and Chicago. In 1898, furniture designer Gustaf Stickley created a monthly 100 page long magazine called The Craftsman. It would truly define the arts and crafts movement in America.

Craftsman magazine did more than influence art. It influenced the public at large. Each issue featured furniture, homes, architectural plans, stories, and philosophies. The homes that were featured in the magazine actually got built by carpenters around the country and were labeled as craftsman style.

The homes were often no more than a few spacious rooms whose beauty was found in the natural woodwork and an abundance of windows to let natural light in.

In addition to carpenter built craftsman homes, the industrial revolution provided mass-produced homes that could actually be ordered in the Sears and Roebuck catalog. Craftsman magazine only existed until 1916, but by then the arts and crafts movement had waned.

Even Frank Lloyd Wright had created his own prairie design aesthetic, and artists began migrating to modernism.

Shaker design was the only constant. Shaker was actually the natural design of the Quakers.

Despite the industrial revolution, Quaker life remained simple. It was actually King Charles II in 1681 who was responsible for the Quaker migration to America. He had owed a large debt to William Penn and paid it off by giving him a tract of land in America, which would later become Pennsylvania.

Knowledge that a Quaker owned land in America led to the arrival of others. Which brings us to the hero of our story.

The Origin of Crayola

Born to Quaker parents near Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1891, little Grant grew up a bigger fan of doodling than he did of farming. His family’s first realization that art was in his future was when he was sent to the cellar as punishment for something that he did.

Once his punishment was over, Grant’s mom found out that he had used his time to draw gangly roosters and other natural things he saw out the windows in the yard.

Grant’s father sadly passed away when Grant was nine. His mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids, where there were more job opportunities. When Grant was 14, he got a confidence boost as it came to his art.

He won a prize in an art contest.

The art contest had been run by a company called Benny and Smith, which had started in 1885. Ed Benny and his cousin C. Harold Smith took over the ownership of the Peak Skill Chemical Company, which made carbon black pigment used in car tires, printers ink, and shoe polish. And they also made the red pigment used in painting barns.

In 1900, Benny and Smith bought a grist mill and used it in a nearby quarries to make pencils students would use on slate boards. Having gotten into the education business with the slate pencils, they learned there was an acute need for dustless chalk as classrooms were filled with dust after writing on the chalkboard.

So they created one.

It worked so well actually they entered it into the 1902 World’s Fair and got a gold medal.

They were so proud of the gold medal that they incorporated into their packaging. And there was another product teachers wanted, better wax sticks and more colors.

So Benny and Smith did it again.

They made better wax sticks. And since they were in the red and black dye business already, they came up with a stunning 32 colors. They put the gold metal design on the box and gave them a fancy name.

In fact, Ed Benny’s wife actually came up with it.

She liked the word a which meant chalk in French and she liked the suffix ola which meant oily.

Plus ola was a popular suffix at the time:

• Granola had been invented in 1886
• the Pianola in 1901 
• and then Shinola and Mazola. 

So the box of crayons for 5 cents a box with the green and yellow packaging and the gold medal would be named Crayola as a way to market their plate pencils, dustless chalk, and Crayola crayons.

They advertised an art contest in magazines, magazines like Craftsman.

When Grant saw the ad, he immediately applied with the drawing of an oak leaf. And surprising himself, he came in third place. Crayola Crayons went on to revolutionize the entire crayon industry.

So much so, even today, no one has an alternate brand on their minds.

The Life an Times of Grant Wood

In high school, Grant did pen and ink drawings for the high school newspaper, and he helped build and design sets for the school theater department. He also got a job in metal shop after school and at the Cedar Rapids Art Association unpacking and repacking the art for exhibitions. Before high school was over, he applied for a scholarship to an art school in Minnesota.

His favorite articles in Craftsman magazine were by Ernest Bachelder, who taught at the school. The day he graduated high school is the day he headed north to Minnesota to go to the school that had awarded him a scholarship.

There he studied copper work and making homemade jewelry. He also spent time at the handicraft guild in Minneapolis. The handicraft guild had started 8 years earlier by 11 women who felt there needed to be a place where teachers could learn arts and crafts.

He did so well there he started his own jewelry and copper shop and he used the money from that to fund himself, moving to Chicago to then study at the Chicago Academy of Design.

But it wasn’t just the students at the academy with a pension for art. The government was also interested.

In 1906, Wayan Vaugh, the secretary of the National Society of Fine Arts, along with artist and writer Francis Millet and historic Ian Francis and Levi met to discuss the need for a national body whose goal was the advancement of art.

For the next 3 years, they lobbied their case to anyone who’d listen until finally Teddy Roosevelt supported it and appointed someone to be in charge of it.

The new agency would be called the American Federation of the Arts. It was the Carnegies who helped finance the AFA so it could achieve its stated goals. One of the AFA’s goals was to get fine art into places that didn’t have access.

Fort Worth was first, followed by New Orleans, St. Paul, and New, Minnesota.

The first tour included 38 oil paintings by American artists, which were viewed by over 6,000 visitors. By 1910, the AFA had 1,000 individual members and 90 member institutions. One of them was Grant’s Academy of Design in Chicago.

When Grant’s time in Chicago was about over, he moved back to Cedar Rapids in hopes that this would become his future home. But World War I would cut that time down.

Grant ended up joining the military and becoming part of the 57th Regiment of US Army Engineers. The military didn’t hamper his art, however. As a side gig, he made money by sketching soldiers. And when he got sick with an appendendicitis, he spent the rest of the war making fake cannons and painting the real ones camouflage.

When he returned home to Cedar Rapids, he returned back to teaching school as his new career.

And while the teaching job provided the income, the art scene in Cedar Rapids filled his passion.

Cedar Rapids wasn’t New York, per se. It wasn’t known for art, design, or architecture. Most of the homes and barns were of typical carpenter design.

In Iowa, there weren’t really many examples of the Victorian or Gothic styles you might see in bigger cities. Out east, for example, in Baltimore, architect Alexander Jackson Davis built the first Gothic style home, bringing a bit of European style to America.

He did so after visiting Scotland and seeing Sir Walter Scott’s Gothic Castle.

So many of America’s influences came from Europe that Grant began to think he needed to study in Europe to become a better artist. So in 1923 he organized a sbatical from his teaching job to Paris to learn new techniques in the name of becoming a better teacher.

He had to sell some of his personal art to help pay for the trip, but it did get him to the Academie Jiulianne in Paris. He actually did that again in 1926 in southern France and upon his return used his skills to paint murals all over Iowa.

Soon he had painted so many he was becoming a regional celebrity.

That reputation led to him winning a $9,000 contract to design and build a 24 ft stained glass window for the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. Despite having zero knowledge or zero experience with stained glass 20 4 ft x 20 ft was an enormous area.

He would need a very large space just for the first part of drawing it in actual size. He needed a space to lay out and plan the project.

So he reached out to a friend, Alfred Poe. Alfred Poe was the plant manager of the local Quaker Oats factory. He’d grown up a football star in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And in college, he’d been named college football player of the year. And and had been inducted into the college football hall of fame.

And then it was after college that he got a job with Quaker and was transferred to Cedar Rapids.

Despite being a sports guy, he understood Grant’s passion for art. He himself had a famous author in his family, his cousin, Edgar Allan Poe.

So he was eager to help Grant and had just the room he could use.

The next thing Grant needed was a ticket to Germany to study. They had the best stained glass makers in Germany. While the focus of his trip there was stained glass, he took plenty of time to visit museums and study other paintings.

His painting career was pretty much impressionist style. But the level of detail he saw in some of the German painters very much appealed to him.

The arts and crafts movement put an emphasis on drawing your eyes to the craftsmanship that went into everything. Like the rick rack braids of aprons or the calico patterns on lace curtains.

The trip forever changed Grant’s style.

When he returned, he was eager to try all that he had learned, which culminated in a painting called Women with Plants that earned some local acclaim. It took two years and several trips to Germany to finish the stained glass wall.                                                                                

It had over 10,000 pieces, some of which had to be fabricated in Germany and shipped over. The design for the stained glass window featured a robed woman floating surrounded by clouds. She would be holding the palm branch of peace in one hand and the laurel wreath of victory in the other.

At the base she was flanked by soldiers from each of the six wars the US had fought in. The Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Spanishame War, and World War I.

Sadly, when it was completed in March of 1929, there would be no public unveiling, no grand ceremony to display the magnificent window. Three ladies of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and someone from the Veterans of Foreign Wars publicly denounced and protested the window.

They protested it because some of the pieces Grant needed had been fabricated in Germany, America’s enemy in War I. The Veterans Memorial Building was afraid of more backlash. They decided to pay Grant and quietly move forward.

6 months later, the economy would crash, plunging the world into the Great Depression, a much bigger enemy than Germany.

Elden’s American Gothic

The crash was devastating to the economy. and the psyche of the American people. Banks were failing, the country was sinking, and a real sense of nostalgia for the way things were for simpler days had emerged.

For the artist community in Cedar Rapids, Teddy Roosevelt’s American Federation of Artists had already made inroads and was ready to help. Edward Rowan, an art enthusiast and Harvard graduate, had been living in DC and was part of the AFA when it started. In its mission of bringing art to all of America. He was asked in 1928 to move to Cedar Rapids and open a gallery to which rotating pieces of art could be shown.

So along with a $50,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation, he opened the Little Gallery in Cedar Rapids.

He quickly got to know the area’s most prominent local artists, including Grant. The Little Gallery provided talks, watercolor classes for kids, and music appreciation for teens. all at no cost.

One of Ed Rowan’s goals with the little gallery was to conduct an experiment in an even more rural location. He wanted to show that fine art could be appreciated anywhere in places far removed from the art world.

He decided to stage a one-month pop-up gallery. The town he would do it in would be Elden, Iowa.

Elden only existed because the Keokuk DeMoines Railroad and the Rock Island Railroad converged there. Otherwise, it was literally at the end of the paved road in Iowa.

Rowan rented a house in Elden and turned it into a makeshift gallery with art changing every week. Grant’s art would be featured in week three. Grant and a friend went to Elden to see the gallery and to give a presentation on his art. They planned to stay at the house of one of his friend’s relatives.

The town was very small.

It took took a little time to drive around Elden and see everything, but they did make one stop.

Grant spotted the house that caught his attention. He had learned in Germany that everything around him was paintable. Everything could be art. This house was a normal gable roofed house of carpenter construction, but it had one difference.

The window above the front door near the apex of the roof wasn’t rectangular. It rounded on the way up to a pointy top like you’d see at the ends of a church. It was a gothic feature in the middle of America. He thought it looked a little pretentious for such a small normal house and instantly wanted to paint a portrait of who he thought would probably be living there.

So he sketched the house on a napkin to capture all the details he needed and never returned.

At home he finished sketching out what he was going to paint. He had a man in overalls looking serious about his work with a small red barn in the distance over his right shoulder.

On his left he was holding the pitchfork and he had sketched a woman in traditional garb next to him with some plants and flowers in the distance over her shoulder.

They were standing in front of the Elden house with the Gothic window front and center.

He would call it American Gothic. 

He liked it enough that he submitted it to the third annual exhibition of American paintings at his old Chicago Academy of Design. And surprising himself, just like the Crayola contest, he came in third place.

Third place got him $300.

And the friends of the Chicago Academy of Design bought his painting for another $300. A pretty successful entry.

But this might be the one time in history that the first place winner has been forgotten, yet no one has forgotten the third place winner. The painting American Gothic by Grant Wood.

American Gothic struck a chord with Americans who were hurting from the depression. The painting did harken back to the old days of traditional work, the days before machines took the place of pitchforks.

But it did create controversy. Iowa farmers wrote and complained that they didn’t look like that.

They weren’t frumpy and happy and east coast critics said it resembled the backward country folk of rural America.

But some of the notoriety is from Grant himself. He understood that controversy was good, mystery was good, and he should do everything possible to keep it going.

Therefore, when asked if the female was the farmer’s daughter because she was so much younger, he agreed that was likely the case. And when he was asked if the farmer and his wife were happy, He also agreed that they looked happy working together. When it was suggested that the art was a comment on what was wrong with the industrial revolution, he chimed in on the other ways the industrial revolution had hurt society.

He became whoever he needed to be in order to get a good story written.

Beyond art, he dedicated the rest of his life to roles that helped and benefited artists.

One of his more interesting endeavors was started in 1935 by an art dealer, Reeves Leuenthal, who saw most of America couldn’t afford fine art any longer. So, Luenthal created the AAA, Associated American Artists. Its mission was to make fine art affordable to everyone.

He proposed paying artists $200 to create a piece on a stone or a plate, and then he’d create 250 images of it and sell the prints for $5 each. He got the pieces into cataloges and large department stores and sold out. The venture was wildly successful.

Time magazine wrote it was likely a $500,000 business.

Grant Wood provided four pieces per year, coming closer and closer to becoming a household name. Keep in mind this was 50 years before Colombia House offered eight CDs for a penny and 50 years before Thomas Kinkaid had a store in every mall.