Spring Turning

Wood painted Spring Turning in 1936 at the height of his mature powers, two years after completing his landmark mural Breaking the Prairie studies and deep into the decade that defined American Regionalism as a conscious cultural project. Like his contemporaries Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, Wood believed that an authentically American art had to be rooted in the land and labor of the interior rather than in European avant-garde fashion. Yet Wood's Regionalism is distinguished from theirs by its extreme formal control: the rolling hills in this picture owe as much to his careful study of Flemish Renaissance landscape conventions as they do to actual Iowa topography. The painting belongs to a sustained series of overhead, panoramic farm views that Wood developed through the mid-1930s, including Young Corn (1931) and Fall Plowing (1931), in which the cultivation of land becomes a kind of monumental, rhythmically ordered event. Spring Turning was completed the year Wood joined the faculty at the University of Iowa, where he would spend the rest of his career, and it reflects his enduring conviction that the Midwestern agricultural landscape carried an intrinsic dignity equal to any European subject. The work entered the Reynolda House Museum of American Art collection and has been widely reproduced as an emblem of Depression-era optimism: the plowed earth not as hardship but as renewal.