Artist: Grant Wood Title: Victorian Survival Medium: Oil on composition board Date: 1931 Credit Line: Dubuque Museum of Art. On long-term loan from the Carnegie-Stout Public Library, acquired through the Lull Art Fund, LTL.99.09. Description: Painted in his wonder year of 1931, Victorian Survival is Wood’s satirical homage to the settled world in which he grew up, a world into which modernism had steadily intruded. The work is based on a tintype of Grant Wood’s great aunt, Matilda Peet. From other Victorian images and from his own memory, Wood fashioned a stiff, compressed figure dressed soberly in black. Just as we are about to see the repressed woman as the embodiment of every Victorian cliche we notice the telephone poking into the picture. Even though it is quite different from telephones today, we recognize it as a modern intrusion into her quiet, folded-hands world. Placed on a table covered by a weaving in a typical 19th century pattern, the telephone is a reminder that the New infiltrates into even the most traditional of cultures.
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