The Whitney Museum of American Art is organizing a major retrospective of the art of Grant Wood (1891-1942) scheduled for March 2 - June 10, 2018. It will present a revisionist and more complete idea of Wood's achievement, one that takes him out of the confining limits of the problematic term "Regionalism" with which he is ceaselessly associated. Wood was an innovative and sophisticated painter whose work deserves to be understood in a much broader context. The persistently narrow categorizing of the artist has generally kept him out of dialogues on innovative, modernist painting. Though deeply tied to his native state, Wood traveled widely, spent extended periods of time in Europe, and interacted with some of the leading figures of his era. Iowa provided a rich, locally-specific inspiration for his subjects, but Wood also distilled from diverse aesthetic sources, such as Renaissance painting and nineteenth-century photography. While he remained a representational artist, he created highly artificial worlds that reveal his deep understanding of abstract design. Wood worked primarily in two of the most traditional genres, portraiture and landscape, yet he infused them with a tension and a sense of anxiety that profoundly reflect the epistemological and social upheavals of his era. His work has important parallels to Surrealism, Magic Realism, "Neue Sachlichkeit", Precisionism, and Art Deco design, which this exhibition will emphasize for the public in both the presentation of his work and the accompanying catalogue. Grant Wood's American Gothic—the double portrait of a pitchfork-wielding farmer and a woman commonly presumed to be his wife—is perhaps the most recognizable painting in 20th century American art, an indelible icon of Americana, and certainly Wood's most famous art work. But Wood's career consists of far more than one single painting. Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables brings together the full range of his art, from his early Arts and Crafts decorative objects and Impressionist oils through his mature paintings, murals, and book illustrations. What the exhibition reveals is a complex, sophisticated artist whose image as a farmer-painter was as mythical as the fables he depicted in his art. Wood sought pictorially to fashion a world of harmony and prosperity that would answer America's need for reassurance at a time of economic and social upheaval occasioned by the Depression. Yet underneath its bucolic exterior, his art reflects the anxiety of being an artist and a closeted gay man in the Midwest in the 1930s. By depicting his subconscious anxieties through populist images of rural America, Wood crafted images that speak both to American identity and to the estrangement and isolation of modern life. This exhibition is organized by Barbara Haskell, curator, Whitney Museum of American Art.