At the Whitney, a champion of American art

Although official statistics on the matter are scarce, it’s very likely one of the longest current runs in the field at a single institution. Haskell has been on the job longer than the Whitney’s chief curator, Scott Rothkopf, has been alive.

Haskell is perhaps best known as a champion of American art of the first half of the 20th century, having organized monographs of Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth and Georgia O’Keeffe, among others. Her latest deep dive in that vein is “Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables,” on view until June 10.

As the title suggests, if Wood had done nothing else, he would be immortal for “American Gothic” (1930), for which the overused term “icon” is actually suitable: the dour and pitchfork-wielding duo that somehow epitomizes both the upside and downside of being American. It’s easily among the most recognized artworks ever created.

But that is only one of some 120 works in the show, the largest survey of Wood’s work to date, including not only famous paintings like “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” (1931) but also early work and some drawings to boot.

“I think it’s the only one that really covers the whole range of his career,” said Haskell, 71. “It will be a surprise for people who think they know Grant Wood.”

Haskell, who is married to Leon Botstein, the longtime president of Bard College, has surprises of her own. Although associated with the earliest artists of the Whitney’s purview, she has also co-curated two biennials, the museum’s survey of cutting-edge contemporary work, and organized shows on minimalists like Donald Judd and Agnes Martin.

Whatever the era, she’s been at it so long that her scholarship has deeply shaped her field. “It’s hard to imagine American art without her,” said the Whitney’s director, Adam D. Weinberg. “Her métier is these great monograph shows.”

And she has shaped generations of curators. Among them was Thelma Golden, now the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Golden recalled seeing Haskell’s Milton Avery show in 1982, when Golden was a junior at a high school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

“I was going to the Whitney once a week, but that show stood out for me as a signal moment,” Golden said. “It has to do with my sense of what transformative exhibition-making could be.” She added, “I came out of it with a sense of who Avery was but wanting to know more.”

Just a few years later, Golden became Haskell’s Whitney colleague, eventually rising to curator there.

“Most of my career has been with living artists, but she taught me a sense of reverence for the past,” Golden said.

Like many successful people, Haskell was in the right place at the right time early on in her career. A native of San Diego, she attended UCLA and then started working as a registrar at the Pasadena Art Museum; she stayed at the institution for five years.

At one point a curator was fired, and there were few others to fill in. “It was a tiny staff, and I just started doing shows,” said Haskell, who was an assistant curator by then. Her first show was Claes Oldenburg, “Object Into Monument,” in 1971.

Oldenburg, who has been the subject of many exhibitions since, said in an email that the collaboration with Haskell remained close to his heart. “I still keep the book available in my studio and look it at frequently,” he added. “It’s one of my favorites.”

Haskell organized a subsequent exhibition of Arthur Dove’s work, which eventually moved to the Whitney. The incoming director of the Whitney, Thomas N. Armstrong III, stopped by the Pasadena museum when he was in town.

“We had a wonderful time — we had lunch, and we went down to the storage, pulling out racks and talking about the work,” Haskell said.“It wasn’t until he left that I realized I had been interviewed.”

She moved to New York to work for Armstrong, the first of four Whitney directors under whom she would curate.

Haskell said that Wood, who died in 1942, left behind a trove of work that still resonates. Iowa born and bred, he began life on a farm near Anamosa in 1891 and moved to Cedar Rapids at age 10 after his father died. He achieved recognition after “American Gothic” was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago and won a $300 prize in 1930.

Most contemporary scholars agree that Wood suffered an unhappy marriage because he was a closeted gay man, although no such words were uttered in Depression-era America.

“There was this disquiet,” Haskell said. “One understands that he was a young artist in the Midwest and had to keep that part of himself secret.”

Wood’s undeniable status as an outsider comes across in his paintings, which have a fractured fairy tale quality — placid but menacing, with a dollop of wit, especially when they take on explicitly American themes, as they often do.

Two indelible examples are the wizened tea-sipping ladies of “Daughters of Revolution” (1932) and the cartoonish retelling of George Washington and the cherry tree, presented as a diorama-like scene-within-a-scene, in “Parson Weems’ Fable” (1939).

“Even the portraits, there’s something very judgmental and menacing,” Haskell said. “The landscapes are very silent. The surfaces are so shellacked, there’s a distance between the viewer and the piece.”

And inside Wood’s disquiet, Haskell sees a connection to the present day.

“Wood lived at a time when there was an urban-rural divide, and the populist attack on elitism,” she said. “And a question: ‘What is the American nation, what are our national values?’ It’s a very similar time to now.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.