Of the many attempts that have lately been made to revive the defunct reputations of provincial American talents and restore them to their former position as revered national classics, none has proved to be more forthright in its intention or more lugubrious in its realization than the Grant Wood exhibition which opened this summer at the Whitney Museum in New York.¹ Organized by Wanda M. Corn for the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and accompanied by a catalogue/monograph published by the Yale University Press,² “Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision” is clearly the kind of exhibition that is designed to strike a blow on behalf of a cause. What it sets out to achieve is nothing less than a major revision in the historiography of twentieth-century American art. This, indeed, is not only the most interesting thing about the exhibition; it is almost the only interesting thing about it. The art itself is pretty feeble stuff where it is not simply ludicrous.

For some time now the pressure has been building, both in academic circles and in the art market, for the readmission of certain “regional” painters to the canon of accepted masterworks—the canon upon which the study as well as the exhibition of American art is based—and this exhibition obviously owes its origin to this impulse. It would therefore be a mistake to regard it as just another undirected episode in the waxing and waning of individual reputations. Something else seems to be involved here—something that goes