Sultry Night

This painting is a fragment of the original Sultry Night painted by Grant Wood in the summer of 1938. Despite the public outcry against the lithograph of the same subject published the previous year, the artist revisited the controversial composition and produced an oil painting that he was planning to submit to the 1938 International Exhibition of Paintings at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. A letter drafted by Wood on July 8, 1938, provides a wealth of information and insight into the artist’s creative process. At the same time, it raises a number of yet unanswered questions. Why did Wood choose to paint the frontal male nude for the most important national exhibition of contemporary art? What happened between the time he drafted the letter and the decision to cut off the left portion of the panel bearing the “offending” male nude? Was this Wood’s ultimate act of self-censorship in a social and familial climate that did not allow for the open admission of his homosexuality? This was a difficult period in the artist’s personal life and career. His tumultuous and short-lived marriage was dissolving, he had not produced a major oil painting for a number of years, and his otherwise secure national fame and reputation were suffering considerably. Biographer Darrell Garwood (Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood, 1944) recounts that although the painting was not well received at its unveiling in the artist’s home in Iowa City, he shipped it to the exhibition, only to have it rejected. Wood exhibited instead Woman with Plants, a portrait of his mother painted in 1929. His sister Nan recollected the fate of the painting in her memoir My Brother, Grant Wood (1993): “The painting suffered a rude fate, whether as a result of the postal advice, I do not know. Grant was bothered by the thought that some detractor might try to create evil where there was none. He sawed off the portion that portrayed the nude farm hand and burned it. More than half the painting remained—oddly shaped because the painting had been arched on top. Grant had an odd-shaped mat made for it and framed it, selling it to Dr. Wellwood Nesbit of Madison, Wisconsin.”