Wood, who was born on a small-town Iowa farm in 1891, was a timid, pudgy, near-sighted boy who spent much of his time drawing under the kitchen table. It was “everything he imagined his Quaker father didn’t want him to be,” notes Haskell. Even after his father passed away and Wood’s mother moved the family to the larger city of Cedar Rapids, he remained a self-described outcast. His shyness was further exacerbated by a deeply closeted homosexuality.

He took refuge in art. As early as the 1920s, Wood began to carefully construct a self-image as a “farmer-painter,” posing for publicity shots in overalls and illustrating the rural life that surrounded him. But this façade belied his European art education (cumulatively, he spent several years in Paris during his thirties) and the emotional turmoil he felt as a lonely man struggling to come to terms with his sexuality.

Northern Renaissance Fusing his childhood memories from the farm, the sharp edges and saturated hues ofpainting, and his contemporary surroundings in Iowa, Wood constructed scenes that simultaneously honored the Midwest and alluded to the alienation he felt there.

“That conflict between his simultaneous desire to celebrate something and his distance from that thing he was trying to celebrate seeps into the work,” Haskell explains. “His paintings have an eerie sort of silence and a frozen, airless quality, as if they are chillingly make-believe.”