Feb 16, 2023 - Sale 2626

Sale 2626 - Lot 209

Price Realized: $ 4,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500

GRANT WOOD (1891-1942)


December Afternoon.
Lithograph. 228x302 mm; 9x11 7/8 inches, full margins. Edition of 250. Signed in pencil, lower right. Published by Associated American Artists, New York. 1941.

A very good impression. Cole 16.

The artist's first lithograph. Wood was urged to make lithographs by the New York art dealer Reeves Lowenthal (founder of Associated American Artists) in 1934. Three years later, Wood created Tree Planting Group and subsequently, in several years following, the remaining 18 lithographs which comprise his entire printed oeuvre.

Wood was one of the most well-known muralists of the WPA, having rose to celebrity status after his painting American Gothic won a bronze medal at the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood had always wished to re-create the midwest as an arts center and helped to found an artist colony in his native Cedar Rapids in 1932. In the Iowa University Parks Library in Ames, Iowa, Wood produced a series of murals in his archetypal American regionalist style (a first set for the Public Works of Art Project in 1934, a second in 1936 under the WPA). Wood also was also involved in the production of another Iowan mural project at the Callanan Middle School in Des Moines for the Federal Arts Project.