Nevertheless, as Wood himself noted, the "tools" of the modern movement could not be ignored. The composition of Wood's many landscapes employ these tools freely. Trees, hills, and even people are distinctly streamlined, and the streamlining is employed to the same effect that it was on everything from architecture to automobiles in the nineteen twenties and thirties: it creates a sense of vast and easy movement, only in this case it is through an open landscape rather than contained in a piece of machinery. Further, modernist compositions from Sheeler's American Landscape to the houses of the International Style relied heavily on sharp and linear geometry. Wood also employed this kind of geometry in his paintings, not only in the arrangement of the scene, but in the actual execution itself. The sharply retreating lines of crops or trees, interrupted by an angular farmhouse in Near Sundown or Fall Plowing are indicative of Wood's interest in this, as well as the carefully rectangular layout of such paintings as Spring Turning. The regularity found in many of these compositions is a similarly modernist tool.

Art Deco appears to have been Grant Wood's modernist niche. Art Deco in America can be traced back along pathways to the Arts & Crafts movement earlier in the century. Grant Wood, trained in the idioms of Arts & Crafts, adopted the Art Deco style more readily than any other offshoot of modernism. Wanda Corn writes that "he had no inclination to become an abstract or cubist artist, but he did want to design his canvases in a modern style. In evolving a style of artificial geometries, clean surfaces and relentless patterns, he was like the Art Deco decorators of his day" (74). Wood was accused of producing photographic pictures--a strange contention, as most of the landscapes in particular are highly stylized with a modern sensibility. Although he surely would not have admitted it readily, the unlikely pairing of modernism and the regionalist Grant Wood bore unexpected fruit.