Nude man standing at water trough pouring water on face from bucket held overhead. Tree at right behind trough, flat back- ground with one small tree in far background.
Grant Wood unknowingly created a controversy with this 1939 lithograph of a farmhand cooling himself at a water trough. Sultry Night, controversial because of its blatant, realistic depiction of the male nude was deemed so shocking that the United States Postal Service refused to mail the prints to customers of Wood’s New York publisher Association of American Artists (AAA). As a result, only 100 of the intended 260 impressions of Sultry Night were produced and sold “over the counter” at AAA.
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