Unloading Cattle

Artist / Maker Daniel Rhodes (American, 1911 - 1989)

Date1930-1939

MediumOil on board, framed

ClassificationsPaintings

Credit LinePainting from the Randy Hoshaw Collection, acquired using a gift from Peter Orazem and Patricia Cotter. In the permanent collection, Brunnier Art Museum, University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa.

Object numberUM2015.175

Status

Not on view

Collections

CultureAmerican

Label TextDaniel Rhodes was a versatile artist, distinguished as a painter, but also a major figure in American ceramics as well. He attended classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and earned an art history degree at the University of Chicago. Rhodes spent the summers of 1932 and 1933 at Grant Wood’s Stone City Art Colony where he was influenced by Wood’s Regionalist idea that artists ought to depict their own distinctive surroundings. Along with other Iowa artists of the time, he journeyed to Mexico City to see the murals of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros to study their expression of the lives of ordinary people. Rhodes produced a stream of murals and easel paintings, including Unloading Cattle, from his Fort Dodge studio, many of which reflected the Social Realism of the Depression decade. He depicted labor, including rural labor, as grim and gritty, with little of the pastoral or picturesque. In 1937, he and Howard Johnson completed a monumental mural that ran the length (110 ft.) of the Agriculture Building at the Iowa State Fair depicting the history of agriculture in the state. The secretary of the State Fair Board, an opponent of the New Deal and its art programs declared that the mural “wasn’t art; it was WPA,” and in 1946 ordered it destroyed. Other New Deal murals by Rhodes, however, have endured and are treasured by their Iowa communities, including those at Storm Lake and Marion. In 1940, Rhodes left Iowa and began to work in pottery. He became world-renowned as a ceramic artist and a teacher, notably at Alfred University in New York, and for his many books, several of which are standards in the field of ceramics. -Lea Rosson DeLong from Artists in Iowa, University Museums, 2019

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