Although Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has some renown as the hometown of Grant Wood, the city’s artistic identity is arguably most closely allied with another of its native sons, Marvin D. Cone. Cone’s imprint is felt throughout Cedar Rapids. At Coe College, his alma mater, there is a Marvin D. Cone Professor of Art, and a memorial plaque honoring Cone rests alongside a similar one to Wood in Daniels Park in the northeast side of the city. Fittingly, the most comprehensive collection of his work anywhere is at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, which features nearly 300 works by the artist, a Marvin Cone Gallery, and another gallery named after his widow, Winifred Swift Cone. Fifty-six additional works are at Coe College.
Cone earned the appreciation of Cedar Rapids for his lifelong commitment to his hometown. He was very active in the local art community and was a popular figure in the city. After working at Coe College for many years, he founded its art department in 1934 and then served as an art teacher there for over 40 years. With his lifelong friend, Grant Wood, he founded the Stone City, Iowa, art colony in 1932. He was also active in producing set designs for Cedar Rapids theater companies and supplied illustrations for local newspapers. Most of all, Cone was respected for his gentle demeanor and the fact that he was never tempted to leave Cedar Rapids in order to see his art on a larger stage.
Cone was the only child in a middle-class Cedar Rapids family. He first met Grant Wood in 1906, when the two were students at Washington High School. The two young men got their start in the local art community at an early age, when, while still in high school, they began working together as packers and security guards for the Cedar Rapids Art Association. While Wood left town in pursuit of an art education immediately after high school, Cone remained in Cedar Rapids. He went to Coe College, was graduated in 1914, and then left Cedar Rapids for Chicago, where he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago School. After three years at the Art Institute, in 1917 Cone enlisted in the Army. Because of his knowledge of French, Cone was given a job as an interpreter for his regiment’s commanding general. When Cone’s unit finally went to France, the war was nearly over, and, fortunately for him, he never saw combat. Cone took advantage of his time in France when, in 1919, the Army sponsored a three-month period of study at the School of Fine Arts in Montpellier in Southern France. He returned to Cedar Rapids later that year and took a job teaching French at Coe College.
Cone reunited with Wood in 1920, and, with the impressions of his recent experiences in France still fresh in his mind, he and Wood left for Europe for travel and inspiration. They spent most of their time in Paris. Cone’s canvases executed during his European sojourn demonstrate his assimilation of French styles, as most of them are Parisian scenes painted in a sunny Impressionist manner. Cone returned to America with a new vigor. He soon expanded his role at Coe College, where he began to teach art, which began a lifelong relationship with the College in that capacity. He also made great strides in his art, as he began to translate his newfound, Europe-inspired style to American subjects.
Throughout the 1920s, Cone was almost entirely preoccupied with painting the landscape, in a style that moved increasingly away from his earlier, impressionistic manner, and toward a more integrated and direct style characterized by strong order and design. The best and most admired of these is his series of “cloud pictures,” poetic representations of Iowa landscapes with monumental cloud formations towering over them. These works are remarkable not only for their aesthetic qualities, but also for the way in which Cone chose to depict the Iowa countryside. In contrast to Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton, the three major American artists mostly closely identified as “Regionalists,” Cone aimed not for overt sentiment or nostalgia for life in the Midwest but instead used modernist painting strategies to portray the landscape itself in a timeless, idealized manner. Cone never subscribed to the Regionalist agenda of promoting and celebrating subjects taken from America’s heartland. His work does not attempt to document a time or place; it is more personal, more introspective, and therefore, in some sense, more modern.
From August 1938 to May 1939, Cone enjoyed what he called “a year of freedom,” a leave of absence from Coe College so that he could paint full-time. His time away from Coe College was made possible by the generosity of thirty Cedar Rapids residents, who paid for his year off in exchange for works to be completed. Cone benefited greatly from the time allowed with his art (it was the only period in his entire career in which the demands of teaching were lifted), and he experimented with new subjects and styles. He executed a short series of pictures of Iowa barns and buildings that are, in spirit, the most closely allied with the tenets of Regionalism of any of his works, and he painted introspective, somewhat surrealistic pictures of empty interiors and open doors. He continued to paint interior subjects throughout the 1950s, by which time he began to incorporate some of the innovations of the Abstract Expressionists into his own work. This is not altogether surprising, for at no point in his career would Cone have considered himself a realist. He had always been concerned first and foremost with design, and a move toward abstraction was a logical step in the evolution of his career. Cone retired from Coe College in 1960 but was immediately appointed as the college’s artist-in-residence for his life’s commitment to the institution. The artist died in 1965.
