(From Wikipedia-edited for length)
American Gothic is a 1930
painting by Grant Wood in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood
was inspired to paint what is now known as the American Gothic House in Eldon,
Iowa, along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that
house". It depicts a farmer standing beside his daughter – often
mistakenly assumed to be his wife.
The figures were modeled by
Wood's sister Nan Wood Graham and their dentist Dr. Byron McKeeby. The woman is
dressed in a colonial print apron evoking 20th-century rural Americana, and the
man is holding a pitchfork. The plants on the porch of the house are
mother-in-law's tongue and beefsteak begonia, which are the same as the plants
in Wood's 1929 portrait of his mother Woman with Plants.
American Gothic is one of the
most familiar images in 20th-century American art and has been widely parodied
in American popular culture. In 2016–17, the painting was displayed in Paris at
the Musée de l'Orangerie and in London at the Royal Academy of Arts in its
first showings outside the United States.
In August 1930, Grant Wood, an
American painter with European training, was driven around Eldon, Iowa, by a
young painter from Eldon, John Sharp. Looking for inspiration, Wood noticed the
Dibble House, a small white house built in the Carpenter Gothic architectural
style.
Sharp's brother suggested in 1973 that it was
on this drive that Wood first sketched the house on the back of an envelope.
Wood's earliest biographer, Darrell Garwood, noted that Wood "thought it a
form of borrowed pretentiousness, a structural absurdity, to put a Gothic-style
window in such a flimsy frame house".
At the time, Wood classified it as one of the
"cardboardy frame houses on Iowa farms" and considered it "very
paintable". After obtaining permission from the Jones family, the house's
owners, Wood made a sketch the next day in oil on paperboard from the house's
front yard. This sketch displayed a steeper roof and a longer window with a
more pronounced ogive than on the actual house, features which eventually
adorned the final work.
Wood decided to paint the house
along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house".
He recruited his sister Nan (1899–1990) to be the model for the daughter,
dressing her in a colonial print apron mimicking 20th-century rural Americana.
The model for the father was the Wood family dentist,[11] Dr. Byron McKeeby
(1867–1950) from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Nan told people that her brother had envisioned
the couple as father and daughter, not husband and wife, which Wood himself
confirmed ("The prim lady with him is his grown-up daughter") in his
letter to a Mrs. Nellie Sudduth in 1941.
Elements of the painting stress
the vertical that is associated with Gothic architecture. The three-pronged
pitchfork is echoed in the stitching of the man's overalls, the Gothic window
of the house, and the structure of the man's face. However, Wood did not add
figures to his sketch until he returned to his studio in Cedar Rapids. He would
not return to Eldon again before his death in 1942, although he did request a
photograph of the home to complete his painting.
Wood entered the painting in a
competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. One judge deemed it a "comic
valentine", but a museum patron persuaded the jury to award the painting
the bronze medal and $300 cash prize.
The patron also persuaded the Art Institute to
buy the painting, and it remains part of the museum's collection. The image
soon began to be reproduced in newspapers, first by the Chicago Evening Post
and then in New York, Boston, Kansas City, and Indianapolis. However, Wood
received a backlash when the image finally appeared in the Cedar Rapids
Gazette. Iowans were furious at their depiction as "pinched, grim-faced,
puritanical Bible-thumpers". Wood protested that he had not painted a
caricature of Iowans but a depiction of his appreciation, stating "I had
to go to France to appreciate Iowa."
Art critics who had favorable
opinions about the painting, such as Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley,
also assumed the painting was meant to be a satire of rural small-town life. It
was thus seen as part of the trend toward increasingly critical depictions of
rural America, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson's 1919 Winesburg, Ohio,
Sinclair Lewis's 1920 Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's 1924 The Tattooed
Countess in literature.
However, with the onset of the
Great Depression, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast
American pioneer spirit. Wood assisted this transition by renouncing his
Bohemian youth in Paris and grouping himself with populist Midwestern painters,
such as John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, who revolted against the
dominance of East Coast art circles. Wood was quoted in this period as stating,
"All the good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a
cow."
In 2010, art historian R. Tripp
Evans of Wheaton College interpreted it as an "old-fashioned mourning
portrait ... Tellingly, the curtains hanging in the windows of the house, both
upstairs and down, are pulled closed in the middle of the day, a mourning
custom in Victorian America. The woman wears a black dress beneath her apron,
and glances away as if holding back tears. One imagines she is grieving for the
man beside her". Wood had been only 10 when his father had died and later
had lived for a decade "above a garage reserved for hearses", so
death was on his mind.
The sister of artist Grant Wood,
she was the model for the woman in his classic painting "American
Gothic" (1930). Nan was born in Anamosa, Iowa, and married real estate
investor Edward Graham. Always supportive of her brother's career, she had no
qualms about posing for "Gothic" even though she knew ahead of time
it would not be very flattering. Wood used considerable creative license in
this double portrait of a old farmer and his unmarried daughter, elongating
Nan's face and neck to emphasize her stern expression. After the painting
became famous she received a note from one viewer who said that her face
"would sour milk". To make it up to her Wood painted a formal
portrait of Nan (1933) showing her as a chic-looking modern woman. Not that she
harbored any resentment. "Grant made a personality out of me", she
once said. "I would have had a very drab life without it". After
Wood's death in 1942, Nan inherited his estate and devoted the rest of her life
to maintaining and promoting his legacy. She wrote a posthumously published
memoir, "My Brother, Grant Wood" (1993).
Bio by: Bobb Edwards
