July Fifteenth BY GRANT WOOD
UNDER A BLAZING SUN, caught in the very fullness of summer, this Iowa landscape projects the very essence of fertility. Trees at full foliage, seeming
to rock in an excess of honeyed burgeoning fields, an unmistakable, if
invisible, cloudless a building but swallowed up by the richness of
nature-lhese are portrait of America’s most valuable wealth. No dust
bowl here, no starved cattle or skulls bleaching on cracked surfaces.!
Hardly likely to give the most ardent devotee of photographic realism even a passing twinge,
Mr. Wood’s portrait of Iowa in rich blossom is, in reality, a highly unrealistic picture.
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Not only are all forms simplified beyond the usual way o[ unaided nature,
but the laws of gravity and perspective are flouted in the interest of the decorative scheme.
It would, one can hardly doubt, have been possible to anyone so wishing to give a more accurate likeness of the
scene Mr. Wood had in mind. But there can be no that his perfectly
legitimate artistic liberties with actuality are the agents that have
produced the quality-the essence of summer at the crest-at which he was aiming, and which he has so perfectly achieved.
