The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art proves that a museum that’s small in size isn’t necessarily small in concept or interest—the opposite in fact.
Some small museums try to have a bit of everything, but you don’t learn much by looking at one or two pictures from each painter or period. Case in point: Iowa’s own Grant Wood, known for American Gothic, but actually a much more versatile artist.
But this museum limits itself, it seems, to what it can show a significant show of, and its collections in general relate to each other. Galleries devoted each to Wood and to Marvin Cone (whose work I’d never seen); they were friends and contemporaries, and influenced each other’s work until Wood’s death. And there are insights into the life of each, and how they connected to other people and institutions in the area.
Many of the other artists whose work is seen also connect to the local colleges as teachers and students; one large exhibit of printmaking by Mauricio Lasansky centers his work at the university; some of the artists represented elsewhere in the museum were his students.
The focus on American and specifically midwestern art of the last century is another unifying thread, even where it veers off with an exhibit of Mexican pottery assembled by a local collector.
Barn Storm
Two interesting exhibits—Men and Women at Work, and Barn Storm—use items from the collections, including the ‘star’ painters to create interesting connections on regional-interest themes.
Above and below six examples show the familiar and iconic, and usually red, building in different forms, styles and contexts.
Men and Women at Work
This exhibit, too, is primarily Midwest and rural in its sources, reflecting the Museum’s work at promoting the work of artists from or connected to the area, but the range is wider.
Not only farms and fields show up; these next three all take to the water.
And three more—two with a definitely industrial tone, and one with a uniquely rural theme, a farmer trying to separate two pigs fighting each other. Arnold Pyle, who painted Big Hook, was an eighth-grader in junior high art classes taught by Grant Wood.
Grant Wood
The Cedar Rapids Museum has one of the largest collections in one place of Grant Wood’s work, illustrating the breadth of his interest and talents; only a sample here, showing some of the styles he worked in before turning to full-on American Regionalism. I discussed that in more detail in an article here last month. But here are some samples…
Marvin Cone
For me, one of the highlights of my visit, aside from learning much more about Grant Wood and the circle of artists in the area, was meeting the work of Marvin Cone. Far less well-known than Wood, they were high-school classmates, shared an interest in art, and both took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago school. They traveled together to study and paint in France, and were close until Wood’s death in 1941. Cone taught art at Coe College in Cedar Rapids for over 40 years.
Like Wood, his early works were in the still-popular-in-America Impressionist style that they studied in France even as European artists were moving well away from it. The portrait of his wife, Winnifred, is from the same period.
Two of Cone’s pictures struck me particularly as the work of a keen observer. In Merry-Go-Round, from 1934, the carousel is the least of it; he has managed to capture so many different sets of emotions among the foreground characters, more than half a dozen miniature paintings of couples and groups in their own worlds.
In The Side Show, painted the following year, the whole story is in the lower foreground, as a crowd of overly-pale faces look up and ogle the three dark-skinned ‘carnival girls’ in their skimpy costumes, a bleak contrast to the supposed ‘good values’ of the well-dressed crowd. Cone once wrote “The purpose of art is not to reproduce life, but to present an editorial, a comment on life…. The artist does not set out to imitate nature. What would be the purpose of that? Let the camera with its clever mechanism imitate.”
And now a hat trick of Cone paintings that, taken together, made me smile, as if I were watching a scene dissolve in a film. First is Uncle Ben, named not for the rice but for the portrait lurking behind the door. That’s 1951. Then comes Split-Level Problem, from 1959 with the stairs metastasizing in unreal ways and finally in 1963 only the idea remains in Shapes on Shapes No. 4 (Version 1)
The museum itself is housed in two buildings connected by an atrium; most of the exhibits are in the newer wing, but possibly the nicest museum gift shop I have ever seen is in the older building, which was originally the Cedar Rapids Public Library, built in the early 1900s with Carnegie money. In it, a former cigarette vending machine dispenses small artistic gifts.
