Wood, Grant (1892-1942), American Stone City, Iowa, 1930, oil on wood panel, 30 1/4 x 40 in.; 76.835 x 101.6 cm. Gift of the Art Institute of Omaha

One of three leading American Regionalist painters of the 1930s and -40s, along with Missourian Thomas Hart Benton and Kansan John Steuart Curry, Iowa artist Grant Wood was regarded as the quiet philosopher-artist. His reassuring, representational paintings embodied the enduring American myth about the perfection of rural life. Intentionally aimed at an isolationist-minded, Depression-era audience, Wood's work found in the local scene a means of expressing nationalistic sentiment, sprinkled subversively with his own wry observations about country life. Stone City, Iowa, his first major landscape, epitomizes Wood's dialogue about change that was often threaded through his traditional subjects. A boom town gone bust, Stone City seems to have gone back to a purer purpose of grazing animals and growing crops.