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RY 14, 1942
Page 3

Grant Wood

In the passing of Grant Wood Iowa State has lost a good neighbor, and those of us who knew him a good companion. Now that his career, which had given such rich promise of great production in the future, has been cut short in mid-passage, we can congratulate ourselves that our campus is one of the few places where his art may be seen in its most powerful period.

As the years swell his reputation, the murals in the library will lend increasing distinction and enduring satisfaction to the whole community.

There is a larger significance to Grant Wood's work which will not end with his death. He it was who first expressed on canvas the beauties, the satisfactions and the important esthetic values of rural living in Iowa.

As so many of our speakers at Farm and Home Week have pointed out, these values are being challenged, some of them being undermined, by the changes the war is making. Throughout this period of crisis, and even more earnestly in the period of demobilization that follow, it will be the task of agricultural leadership to refresh, to renew and to preserve the serenity, the privacy, the earthiness and wholesomeness of the rural home. This difficult task will require the insight Grant Wood had and the appreciation his warm canvasses so eloquently expressed.

For he understood what was happening to the Iowa farmer in a machine age. On these problems, to paraphrase a remark of Sir Joshua Reynolds, "he qualified our minds to think justly."