Sultry Night

Associated American Artists was founded in 1934 by New York art dealers Reeves Lewenthal and Maurice Liederman to develop new markets for artists during the Depression and publish prints, in limited editions of two hundred and fifty, which were sold inexpensively ($5 each) through mail-order catalogues and department stores. In 1937, suffering a troubling fallow period, Grant Wood left his long-time representative in New York, the Ferargil Gallery, and signed on with AAA as the artist’s principal agent for whom he agreed to produce four lithograph designs each year. As Wood’s first foray into lithography, he produced five designs that first year, including Sultry Night. The depiction of a frontal male nude farmhand bathing himself at the end of a hard day’s work was deemed pornographic and was censored by the U. S. Postal Service. AAA was barred from illustrating the print in the company’s catalogue and distributing it through the mail. A reduced edition of one hundred impressions was printed and sold only at the gallery in New York. Grant Wood faced public scrutiny of his personal life and moral character and was forced to defend his choice of imagery. He cited childhood reminiscences of life on the farm as his innocent and thoroughly patriotic source—in essence, a glorification of rural American life. The model for Sultry Night is believed to be the English writer Eric Mowbray Knight (1897–1943), author of Lassie Come Home, and a close friend of Grant Wood (the title chosen by Wood may well be a pun on his friend’s name). Knight spent summers in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a guest in Wood’s home in Iowa City, or in summer rentals.