Grant Wood's 'American Gothic' | Mental Floss Grant Wood's 'American Gothic' Getty Images Like us on Facebook No American artwork has been parodied more than American Gothic. Zombies, dogs, Beavis and Butt-Head, the Muppets, Lego figures, and even Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton have taken a turn with the pitchfork. But the painting itself is no joke—American Gothic is as recognizable as the Mona Lisa and The Scream. During the Great Depression, the masterpiece gave hope to a desperate nation, and it helped shape the notion of the Midwest as a land of hard work and honest values. Today, the painting is firmly embedded in our cultural vocabulary. Yet, for all its fame, few people know the story of Grant Wood and how the piece also unraveled his life. That Quirky Wood Kid In 1929, Grant Wood was a 38-year-old unknown. The artist was living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the attic of a funeral-home carriage house. Though the location may seem morbid, Wood spruced up his home with whimsical decorations.

He replaced the front door with a repurposed coffin lid and outfitted the entrance with a dial that indicated if he was in, out, asleep, painting, or having a party. Wood wasn’t the only one stuffed into this loft space: He shared the studio with his mother and sister, all three sleeping side by side on pull-out beds. Oddly enough, none of this shocked the neighbors. As a closeted gay man, Wood avoided what his sister, Nan, called “any earmarks of the artist.” He dressed exclusively in overalls, a signifier that the painting he did was gritty—man’s work. And he benefited from being a local. People in Cedar Rapids found Wood’s eccentricities charming. Friends shook their heads and smiled when he forgot to pay his bills. They even ignored his flimsy excuses for avoiding marriage. Wood was a lovable bachelor who wanted to take care of his widowed mother, that’s all. Painting was just another of Wood’s harmless quirks—at least now that he’d given up living in Europe. The artist had spent good chunks of the 1920s in Paris and Munich, but announced upon his 1928 return that he was back for good.

The freewheeling and permissive nature of the European art scene had fascinated him. But when a solo show in Paris was met with critical indifference, it put a damper on the continent’s shine. Still, Wood’s style benefited from his experiences abroad. His previously atmospheric, Impressionistic painting took on a hard-edged, Old Master quality. He drew inspiration from the work of the Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who recast biblical narratives as scenes from his own time. And he took composition cues from 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck. After three stints in Europe, Wood was ready for home. As the artist told the Chicago Tribune, “I spent 20 years wandering around the world hunting ‘arty’ subjects to paint. I came back ... and the first thing I noticed was the cross-stitched embroidery of my mother’s kitchen apron.” That moment changed him. Armed with new technique, and a new appreciation for the mundane, Wood no longer needed to travel. What he needed was right there, in Iowa. Going Goth In August 1930, Wood spotted an unusual farmhouse on a drive through the tiny town of Eldon, Iowa.

The house had a strange and compelling feature: a high, arched window in the Carpenter Gothic style. The artist was immediately transfixed by the structure. He needed to know what sort of people resided there. But instead of simply knocking on the door, Wood decided to capture the farmhouse in paint and tease out the story for himself. Piece by piece, he sorted through the puzzle. Wood started by asking his dentist, 62-year-old Byron McKeeby, to serve as the male model. Throughout his life, Wood had suffered from an incurable sweet tooth—he took half a cup of sugar with his coffee, and even poured sugar on his lettuce. Over the years, he spent plenty of time in McKeeby’s chair studying and admiring the dentist’s grim, oval face. Now seemed like the perfect time to paint it. For the farmer’s companion, Wood intended to use his mother, Hattie, as a model. But when he realized that posing would be too exhausting for her, he asked his 32-year-old sister, Nan, to don Hattie’s rickrack-trimmed apron and cameo pin. While the cast was familiar, the composition was something completely new.

The couple stands posed before their simple farmhouse, its only flourish an arched window purchased from Sears. The man stares almost directly at the viewer while clutching his pitchfork; his thin lips and arched eyebrows give him a stern, slightly quizzical look. The woman looks off to the side as if unwilling to meet the viewer’s gaze, a single curled tendril of hair escaping from her bun. Both have unnaturally long faces and thin necks, as if to emphasize their uprightness. They are hardworking and humorless, dignified and honest. Wood submitted American Gothic—the name a nod to the house’s architectural style—to a 1930 competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Overnight, the painting became a hit. American Gothic won a bronze medal and a $300 prize, was acquired by the museum, and was reproduced in newspapers around the country. Something about it resonated with audiences, and in that mysterious process by which paintings become famous, it quickly achieved near-universal recognition. Not everyone saw the same thing. Some perceived the work as a scathing parody of the Midwest—one outraged farm wife even threatened to bite off Wood’s ear.

Meanwhile, Gertrude Stein and other critics praised the painting as a cutting small-town satire, the visual equivalent of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. Still others saw the painting as honoring the Midwest and its strong values. As the Great Depression bore down on the country, Americans yearned for positive depictions of themselves, and Wood’s work provided the nation with a pair of ready-made secular saints of the American heartland. Perhaps the strangest reaction, however, was from an audience focused on the age disparity between the husband and wife in the picture. Protests poured in. Nan, too, became increasingly concerned—she didn’t want to be memorialized as “married” to a much older man. So Wood altered his initial stance to claim that the painting depicted a father and daughter. In fact, Wood frequently rewrote the artwork’s history. When the painting was hailed as a satire, he went along; when it was declared an homage to the Midwest, he agreed with that, too. Finally, he came out with a bold statement that clarified nothing: “There is satire in it, but only as there is satire in any realistic statement. These are types of people I have known all my life.

I tried to characterize them truthfully—to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life.” A Mixed Legacy With the success of American Gothic, Wood finally received the validation of his talent that he’d been seeking all his life. He was declared the founder of a new school of art, called Regionalism, and he was quick to embrace the narrative. “All the good ideas I’ve ever had came to me while I was milking a cow,” Wood famously told the press. In truth, he hated life on the farm, and was repulsed by cow udders and freshly laid chicken eggs. For Wood, the trade-off for fame was steep, and the artist was ill-equipped to deal with the scrutiny. He and his family lost all of their privacy. Strange fans began showing up at his apartment, ignoring the dial on the door and walking right inside. People started asking pointed questions about his bachelor status. A blackmailer even confronted Wood, threatening to reveal lurid secrets from his past. And as a nation looked to Wood as the embodiment of the Midwestern man, Wood found it harder and harder to negotiate his double life. By 1935, he was desperate. He married an older divorcée and fled Cedar Rapids.

While the marriage was one of convenience, the strains of the arrangement left him both financially and creatively bankrupt. Meanwhile, Wood’s tricks had finally worn thin. People were tiring of Regionalism, and Wood found it increasingly difficult to conceal his sexuality. He spent more and more time drawing the male figure, and in 1937, he produced Sultry Night. The piece showed a naked man standing next to a trough pouring a bucket of water over his body. When questioned, Wood defended the work as depicting the ordinary bathing habits of hired men on farms. The explanation fooled no one. Things got worse: When Wood submitted the painting to a national juried show, he was asked to withdraw it. Then, the piece was barred from being sent through the mail after the Post Office deemed it “pornographic.” Wood was mortified. He sawed the canvas in half, burned the nude portion of the painting, and didn’t paint another picture for more than a year. The artist’s life was complicated by a divorce. And when Time magazine launched an investigation into the truth about his sexuality, Wood was forced to abandon a coveted teaching position at the University of Iowa. Wood might have pulled through all these challenges, but he never got the chance.

In 1941, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died on February 12, 1942, one day before his 51st birthday and not quite 12 years after the completion of American Gothic. As for his masterpiece, its fame continued to grow after Wood’s death. Easily parodied, it’s been reimagined in movies, TV shows, marketing campaigns, even pornography. And audiences seem unable to put away the painting—to assign it a single, easy interpretation and just let it be. American Gothic remains inscrutable: satire and homage, highbrow and lowbrow, honest and creepy all at the same time. In the end, what makes the painting so successful is that it begs you to look closer and ask questions—the very thing Wood never wanted for himself. American Gothic 101 Truly Gothic Wood was inspired by the Old Masters of Northern Europe, and elements of the painting make it a modern version of Late Gothic art: the clear blue sky like those typically painted above Christ or the Virgin Mary; the woman’s elongated face like that of a Madonna; and the flat, finished surface, an effect Wood created by painstakingly smoothing the surface of the canvas with a razor blade.

* Windows of the Soul? Viewers often come away from American Gothic with a sense of disquiet, unable to stop thinking about the most disturbing element—the closed and curtained window. Biographer R. Tripp Evans called the window “a vanishing point in more than one sense,” adding, “Family secrets, dead bodies, incest, and murder all haunt this work, and they enter the painting here.” * Making a Cameo The pin on the woman’s dress had been a gift from Grant Wood to his mother, Hattie. Some read the painting as a one-step-removed portrait of Wood’s parents, the stern, humorless father being a stand-in for his own dad. * On One Hand Critics have noted that the farmer’s clenched fist anchors the painting (without it, the pitchfork fades into the background). Wood was enamored with his dentist’s hand, once gripping it tight and remarking, “This is a marvelous hand. This has strength. This has character.” * Fever Pitch When Iowans complained that pitchforks typically have four tines, not three, Wood defended his depiction. He claimed the tool he drew was the kind used for pitching hay. But the argument misses the point.

The verticals of the three tines are echoed throughout the painting: in the pocket, windows, the man’s shirt and face, and the roof of the barn. This article first appeared in mental_floss magazine, available wherever brilliant/lots of magazines are sold. Get a risk-free issue here! The Painting « American Gothic House Center – Eldon, IA The Painting American Gothic, 1930 by Grant Wood. All rights reserved Wood Graham Beneficiaries/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. When viewing the painting, it is important to realize the extent to which Wood designed and conceptualized American Gothic. At first look, many believe American Gothic is a realistic painting, and in a sense this is true. Looking at the painting and then at the actual house, which was the model for the painting, it is clear Wood rendered a realistic version of the house. Similarly, Wood’s two models, his sister Nan and his dentist Dr. B.H. McKeeby, are realistically recreated, although when viewing a photograph of Nan, it can be seen his sister’s face is somewhat elongated.

Wood’s free use of “reality” can also be seen by the addition of a barn and by creating a scene—a man and woman posed in front of the house—which never occurred. The models for the artwork never posed together when they were drawn prior to, or during the painting of American Gothic. The House Although Wood had intended for some time to do a “portrait” of Midwestern “types,” it is known that the house in Eldon, Iowa inspired the painting Wood called American Gothic, because only the house is shown in surviving preliminary sketches for the painting. Another early sketch places a man and woman in front of the house, very similar to the final composition. Wood’s selection of this arrangement may have been based on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century practice of traveling photographers posing subjects in front of their homes. The choice by either the homeowner or photographer as to where the people stood, testifies to the association Americans have with their homes as extensions of themselves. In rural America, a home not only signified family but also the mutual hard work of its members, and as the family’s greatest financial possession. Wood, who rarely explained his work, did not clarify his choice of this house.

Was he mocking the inclusion of this window as a homeowner’s choice to make an ordinary house look grander than it was? Or was he honoring the effort the homeowners took (and the additional expense they incurred), to make an artistic statement that was not otherwise needed? No one knows for sure. But it is true that the choice was not made by chance. Wood used his compositional elements with such care that some importance is attached to his choice of the house. The Window Important compositional elements of the painting are based upon the window. It has two equal arches, capped by the oddly shaped pane that joins them together from the top. Looking at the painting in its entirety, the window is duplicated with the two halves of the window repeated by the two human figures standing side by side The roof of the house visually joins the man and woman in the same way that the oddly shaped top pane of glass joins the two arches of the window. The Hayfork In a surviving pre-painting sketch, the male figure holds a rake rather than the three tined hayfork of the painting. Again, this cannot have been an idle choice. Scholars, knowing Wood’s antic sense of humor, speculate endlessly on the significance of the hayfork.

Is it an allusion to a devil’s pitchfork or something less sinister? If Wood was making such a statement, he kept it to himself. One thing that is clear is that he regarded the shape important enough to reinforce it by repeating it in the stitching on the male figure’s bib overalls (continuing into the pattern of his shirt). It also functions compositionally, as it mirrors (upside down) the shape of the panes in the upstairs window. This kind of repetitive pattern enlivens the composition and gives it rhythm. The Plants The plants were not on the porch of the house when Wood created his sketches. Why include a geranium and a mother-in-law’s tongue (Sansevieria)? Wood did not disclose the reason for his choices, but plants often have symbolic meanings. Geraniums are sometimes used to signify melancholy and sometimes, among other things, ineptitude. Wanda Corn, a leading scholar on Wood and author of Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision, has speculated that the hardiness of Sansevieria made it popular with pioneer women and his use of the plant may be no more than an allusion to the hardiness of those women.

Whatever the plants may symbolize they do contribute to the composition: the geraniums echo the shape of the trees behind the house, the three leaves of the mother-in-law’s tongue repeat once again, on a smaller scale, the pattern of the window, the hay fork, and the stitching on the bib overalls. Moreover, the same plants appear in the portrait Wood painted of his mother in 1929. In Woman with Plants, his mother sits in front of a geranium (and a begonia) that, as in American Gothic, echo the tree shapes in the background, and she holds a potted mother-in-law’s tongue in front of her. Reusing elements from one painting to the next is common in Wood’s work and if the plants had symbolic meaning in addition to their compositional importance, that too carried from painting to painting. The Patterns The continuity of other patterns also ties the composition together. Most notable is the pattern on the curtains in the upstairs window and the similar pattern on the woman’s apron. It is worth noting that these are pure pattern, both the curtain and apron lack the distortion that would realistically occur from folds in fabric.

It is worth noting the rickrack edging on the apron of American Gothic’s female figure is found on his mother’s apron in Woman with Plants, and both women wear a cameo brooch. The Expressions Described as dour, even ill-humored, which seems at first to contradict Wood’s claim that he was painting an “affectionate portrait” of Midwestern types. The man and woman (in one rare explanation Wood claimed they were father and daughter) seem to be “no nonsense” characters. An explanation for the stoic expressions may come from early photographs. Photographers discouraged models from smiling because of the film’s need for long exposure times. Therefore, borrowing from that photographic practice would result in unsmiling faces. Adding a human touch softens the sternness of the subjects. An errant curl that hangs down behind her right ear softens the severity of the woman’s hairdo. The man’s gold collar button is a bit on the showy side for someone we otherwise take to be a sober, conservative man. Do we really know how Wood feels about his creations? It seems unlikely that he is holding them up for ridicule; it seems more likely that Wood had mixed feelings about the people he sought to portray.

Sister Wendy's American Collection | Selected Works | American Gothic 29 1/4 x 24 5/8 in. (74.3 x 62.4 cm) Friends of American Art Collection Acquired in 1930 Grant Wood, American, 1891-1942, American Gothic, 1930, oil on beaverboard, 74.3 x 62.4 cm, Friends of American Art Collection, All rights reserved by the Art Institute of Chicago and VAGA, New York, NY, 1930.934, digital file © The Art Institute of Chicago. All Rights Reserved. Regionalism in American painting developed at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. Exclusively Midwestern in origin, Regionalism portrayed American life as simple and rural, in direct contrast to the urban-based Realist paintings that had dominated the American art scene since the turn of the century. Unlike Realism, Regionalism left no room for social criticism. So went the theory. In reality, this may not have always been so.

Since first shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930, Grant Wood's American Gothic has been fodder for speculation. In one camp were those who believed the painting was a celebration of "American" values; in the other were those who saw it as a satiric critique of the selfsame thing. The pair's dour expressions led many outside the Midwest to believe that Wood, a self-proclaimed Regionalist, was poking fun at rural life. Wood himself denied this in some interviews, but in others hinted that there were indeed some satiric elements present. (He wouldn't say which elements those were.) Wood's subjects spurred much of the debate. Was the pair a farmer husband and wife, or a father and daughter? Many Iowa farmers' wives objected to what they perceived as a negative portrayal, writing letters of complaint to the artist. Wood later revealed that the models were his 30-year-old sister and their 62-year-old family dentist. The subjects' motivations, even when considered as father and daughter, are unclear: The man may be a farmer holding a pitchfork, nothing more than a piece of farming equipment.

Or he may not be a farmer at all, but a preacher, perhaps, jealously guarding his daughter from male suitors. Critics who interpret the woman as his daughter have often assumed that she was a spinster -- but just what kind of spinster is left to the imagination. Some see the stray curl at the nape of her neck as related to the snake plant in the background, each one symbolizing a sharp-tongued "old maid." Sister Wendy sees in the curl, however, a sign that she is not as repressed as her buttoned-up exterior might indicate. Grant Wood's American Gothic has been part of the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art since he debuted it there in 1930. The AIC's modern art collection is considered one of the best and most comprehensive in the world. American Gothic | The Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories Exhibition History Art Institute of Chicago, The Forty-third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, October 30-December 14, 1930, cat. 207, ill. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, February 1931.

Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, Twenty-Fifth Annual Exhibition of Selected Paintings by American Artists, April 26-June 22, 1931, cat. 139, ill. p. 26. San Diego Fine Art Gallery, Show of Contemporary Eastern Painting [probably], c. June 1932, no cat.; traveled to Santa Barbara, Calif., Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery, c. August 1932. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Paintings and Prints by Chicago Artists, February 28-March 30, 1933, cat. 37, ill. frontispiece. Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Progress Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, June 1-November 1, 1933, cat. 666, pl. 92. Washington, DC., Phillips Collection, November 1933-February 1934. Philadelphia, Pa., Pennsylvania Mus of Art, March 31-April 10, 1934.

Art Institute of Chicago, A Century of Progress Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture, June 1-November 1, 1934, cat. 716. Chicago, Lakeside Press Galleries, Loan Exhibition of Drawings and Paintings by Grant Wood, February-March 1935, cat. 33, ill. p. 23. New York, Ferargil Galleries, An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Grant Wood, March-April 1935, cat. 15. Kansas City, Mo., William R. Nelson Gallery, October 2-November 8, 1935. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, The Centennial Exposition, June 6-November 29, 1936, cat. 15, ill. p. 64. Chicago, Ill., Chicago Woman's Club, Jan 20, 1937. Bloomington, Ill., Central Illinois Art Exposition, March 19-April 8, 1939, cat. 106, ill. p. 29.

Iowa City, Fine Arts Festival, Iowa Union Lounge, University of Iowa, Exhibition of Paintings by Grant Wood and Marvin D. Cone, July 16-23, 1939, cat. 23. Art Institute of Chicago, Half a Century of American Art, November 16, 1939-January 7, 1940, cat. 178, pl. 46. Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Cranbrook Academy of Art, May 17-June 6, 1940. Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art, American Art: Aspects of American Painting, 1900-1940, June 12-22, 1940, cat. 33. Worcester, Mass., Worcester Art Museum, A Decade of American Painting 1930-1940, February 18-March 22, 1942, ill. p. 23. Cedar Rapids Art Association, Grant Wood Memorial Exhibition, September 1-October 1, 1942, no cat.

See Cedar Rapids Gazette, 9/6/1942. Art Institute of Chicago, Memorial Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Grant Wood, included in the Fifty-third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, October 29-December 12, 1942, cat. 2, color ill. frontispiece. New York, Museum of Modern Art, 20th Century Portraits, December 8, 1942-January 24, 1943, p. 145, ill. p. 99. Baltimore, Md., February 12-March 7, 1943. Worcester Art Museum, March 17-April 19, 1943. Boston, The Institute of Modern Art, Ten Americans, October 20-November 21, 1943, cat. 29, ill. Saginaw, Mich., Saginaw Museum of Art, An Exhibition of American Painting from Colonial Times until Today, January 10-February 15, 1948, cat. 71, pl. 13.

Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Famous American Paintings, October 9-31, 1948, n.pag., ill. Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Milestones of American Painting in Our Century, c. January 2-c. March 3, 1949, cat. 21. Montreal, Canada, March 18-April 20, 1949. Canadian National Exhibition Art Exhibit, August 26-September 10, 1949. Beloit, Wisc., Beloit College, October 11-November 11, 1949. Dayton, Ohio, Dayton Art Institute, The Artist and His Family, March 3-April 1950, cat. 40. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Coe College, Centennial Exhibition, May 15-June 9, 1952, cat. 24. New York, Wildenstein, Landmarks in American Art, 1670-1950, Feb 26-Mar 28, 1953, cat. 50, ill.

Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, 125 Years of American Art, September 15-October 11, 1953, cat. 59, ill. p. 18. Dubuque, Iowa, Dubuque Art Association, Thirty Years of Grant Wood, Feb 15-Feb 23, 1955, cat. 9. Des Moines, Iowa, Des Moines Art Center, Communicating Art from Midwest Collections: American and European Paintings and Sculpture, 1835-1955, October 13-November 6, 1955, cat. 20, ill. Davenport, Iowa, Davenport Municipal Art Gallery, Grant Wood and the American Scene, February 3-24, 1957, cat. 5, ill. p. 5. Lake Forest, Ill., Durand Art Institute, Lake Forest College, A Century Of American Painting: Masterpieces Loaned by The Art Institute of Chicago, June 10-16, 1957, cat. 24.

Brooklyn, NY, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Face of America: The History of Portraiture in the United States, November 13, 1957-January 26, 1958, cat. 92, fig. 41. Washington, DC, Corcoran Gallery of Art, The American Muse: Parallel Trends in Literature and Art, April 4-May 17, 1959, cat. 130. Art Institute of Chicago, Art in Illinois, In Honor of the Illinois Sesquicentennial, June 15-September 8, 1968, p. 10. Art Institute of Chicago, 100 Artists, 100 Years: Alumni of the SAIC, Centennial Exhibition, November 23, 1979-January 20, 1980, cat. 112, ill. p. 35. New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision, June 16-September 4, 1983, cat. 25, pl.

32, traveled to Minneapolis Institute of Arts, September 25, 1983-January 1, 1984, Art Institute of Chicago, January 21-April 15, 1984; San Francisco, M. H. DeYoung Memorial Museum, May 12-August 12, 1984. Omaha, Neb., Joslyn Art Museum, Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed, December 10, 1995-February 25, 1996, cat. 14, pl. 16, traveled to Davenport, Iowa, Davenport Museum of Art, March 23-September 8, 1996; Worcester, Mass., Worcester Art Museum, October 6-December 31, 1996. New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The American Century: Art and Culture, 1900-1950, April 23-August 22, 1999, cat. 435, color ill. p. 225.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Grant Wood at 5 Turner Alley, September 10-December 4, 2005. Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Grant Wood's Studio: Birthplace of "American Gothic," March 10-June 11, 2006. Des Moines Art Center, After Many Springs: Art in the Midwest in the 1930s, January 30-March 30, 2009. Art Institute of Chicago, "America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s," June 5-September 18, 2016; travels to Paris, Musee de l'Orangerie, October 15, 2016-January 30, 2017; London, Royal Academy, February 25-June 4, 2017, cat. 47. Publication History Anita Brenner, "Is There An American Art?," The New York Times Magazine (November 23, 1941), ill. p. 13. Frederick S.

Wight, Milestones of American Painting in Our Century, introduction by Lloyd Goodrich (Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art with Chanticleer Press, New York, 1949), pp. 30, 74, ill. pl. 21, p. 75. Henri Dorra, The American Muse (Viking Press, 1961), p. 124, ill. p. 156. Matthew Baigell, The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930's (Praeger Publishers, 1974), pp. 18, 109, 110, 111, ill. 1, p. 12. Wanda Corn, "The painting that became a symbol of a nation's spirit," Smithsonian 11, 8 (November 1980), pp. 84-96, ill. p. 85. Wanda M. Corn, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision, exh. cat. (Minneapolis Institute of Arts/Yale University Press, 1982), pp.

3, 25-26, 33, 35, 60, 128-142, pl. 32. Wanda M. Corn, "The Birth of a National Icon: Grant Wood's American Gothic," The Art Institute of Chicago Centennial Lectures, Museum Studies 10 (Art Institute of Chicago/Contemporary Books, Inc., 1983), pp. 253-275, fig. 1. Davenport Museum of Art, Iowa, Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed (Davenport Museum of Art/Pomegranate Books, 1995), pp. 24, 69-73, 96-98, cat. 16, pl. 16. Art Institute of Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago: Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture, selected by James N. Wood and Teri J. Edelstein (Art Institute of Chicago, 1996), p. 67, ill. James M.

Dennis, Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry (University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), pp. 14, 19-20, 100-02, fig. 7. Lea Rosson DeLong, Grant Wood's Main Street: Art, Literature and the American Midwest, exh. cat. (Ames, Iowa: Brunnier Art Museum, University Museums, 2004), pp. 17-18, 24, 27-29, 39, 97, 104, 106, 159, 203, 205, 207, fig. 12. Thomas Hoving, American Gothic: The Biography of Grant Wood's American Masterpiece (Chamberlain Bros., 2005). Stephen Biel, American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting (W.W. Norton & Co., 2005).

Sue Taylor, "Grant Wood's Family Album," American Art 19, 2 (Summer 2005): 48-67. Judith A. Barter et al., "American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955," (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2009), cat. 79. Laura Hoptman, "Wyeth: Christina's World," One on One (The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), p. 4 (ill.). Duane Preble Emeritus et al., Prebles' Artforms (Pearson, 2013), 11th ed., p. 428. (ill.). Chantal Georgel, "Millet," (Citadelles et Mazenod, 2014), (ill.). Ownership History The artist; sold to the Art Institute, November 1930. Add this item to: Essay about Analysis of American Gothic - 936 Words Analysis of american gothic Essay ...﻿ American Gothic – writing assignment I Description: In the painting we see two people.

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In fact, the latter was marked by its use of fantastic, externalized and metaphysical elements as opposed to the boundaries of American Gothic fiction in which were expressed by historical, internalized,... 1779 Words | 5 Pages Latin American Geography Analysis Essay ...everyone to agree on a single definition that can be used as the identity of this region. Like Vargas Llosa stated, “every attempt to fix a unique identity for Latin America requires discriminatory surgery that excludes and abolishes millions of Latin Americans”. I think this is completely true. Every time someone tries to define Latin America they leave some race, culture, or belief out of its overall identity. Latin America cannot just be summarized with Spanish, Portuguese,... 670 Words | 2 Pages American Gothic Essay ...” The man in the painting is a town dentist from Wood’s hometown and the woman is Wood’s sister, Nan. Many characteristics about this painting are unique and questionable. This painting will allow viewers to expand their imagination. The American Gothic painted by Grant Wood in August of 1930 demonstrates expressionism used in the man and woman’s face, the house shown in the background, and the way of life they portray. When looking at this painting, we see...

815 Words | 3 Pages An Art Analysis of the Gothic Church Essay ... Chris Dawson Lee Bailey Humanities: Byzantine-Enlightenment July 17, 2014 An Art Analysis of the Gothic Church There are many Gothic churches/cathedrals around Europe. When you think of a church in Paris you think of Notre Dame but there are others. The church I chose to talk about is “The Abbey Church of Saint Denis, known as the first Gothic structure and was developed in the 12th century by Abbot Suger. The Abbey Church of... 1949 Words | 3 Pages 1000+ images about Artist - Grant Wood on Pinterest | Grant wood, American gothic and Grant wood paintings Forward Models for Grant Wood's painting, "American Gothic" (1930). "American Gothic"Art Institute of Chicago. Wood's inspiration came from a cottage designed in the Gothic Revival style with a distinctive upper window and a decision to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." The painting shows a farmer standing beside his spinster daughter (not his wife, as so many parodies and references assume).

The figures were modeled by the artist's dentist and… See More American Gothic by Grant Wood – Facts & History about the Painting 29.25 in × 24.25 in 74.3 cm × 62.4 cm American Gothic is a painting by American artist Grant Wood in 1930. Shown is a farmer and his spinster daughter in front of their house. The models on the painting were Wood’s sister, Nan, wearing a colonial print apron mimicking 19th century Americana, and Wood’s dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby from Iowa. Wood painted the house along with the people he imagined might live there. The house actually exists in Eldon, Iowa. It was built in the American Gothic style. The models never sat in front of the house, and each element was painted separately. The painting measures 29.25 inches by 24.5 inches, which is equivalent to 74.3 cm by 62.4 cm. The Artist: Grant Wood Grant Wood was born on February 13, 1892 in Iowa.

After the death of his father in 1901, his family moved to Cedar Rapids where he began as an apprentice at a metal shop. He enrolled at an art school in 1910 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1913, he attended the Art Institute of Chicago where he worked as a silversmith. From 1934 to 1941, he taught painting at the University of Iowa’s School of Art. A day after celebrating his 51st birthday in 1942, Wood died of liver cancer at the university’s hospital. Wood had been influenced by the works of 15th century Flemish artist Jan Van Eyck. Other famous paintings by Grant Wood include: The Little Chapel Chancelade (1926), Woman with Plants (1929) And John B. Turner, Pioneer (1929). Painting Inspirations Wood saw the house while travelling through the Iowa landscape in the summer of 1930, he was inspired. Some people thought that Grant Wood was making fun of small town folk. The house had an unusual window. The design is based on Gothic architecture which originates from Europe, as opposed to an American farmhouse.

The contrast caught the artist’s attention that led to the painting of American Gothic. Reception of the Painting Wood entered American Gothic at a competition sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago. Initially, the judges viewed it as a comic valentine. However, a patron convinced them to award it a bronze medal and a cash prize of $300. The Art Institute bought the painting where it remains to this day. Soon after, the painting began to appear in newspapers. When the image finally appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Iowans became furious. A woman threatened to bite Wood’s ear off. However, Grant explained that his intention was not to misrepresent Iowans, but to portray America as a whole. The arrival of the Great Depression was upon the country, the painting was seen as a portrayal of the steadfast American pioneer spirit. Artistic Features The painting is obviously fictional in many ways. First, it has a 19th century theme painted in the 20th century. Second, the title itself refers to the architecture of the house, with the artist taking liberty to add the type of people he believed who may live there.

The house’s medieval style window looks like one you may find at a church, in fact the potted plants on the porch and the decorative blind distinguishes the wooden house from a church. 2 responses to “American Gothic” Dusk Ok, first of, you guys have a lot of grammer-related mistakes on here. It makes you seem rather un-proffesional, viewer-edited database or not. Third, thanks for trying! ery helpful otherwise. americanwiki / "American Gothic" American Gothic is perhaps one of the most recognized paintings in American Art. This work was painted and created by the regionalist artist, Grant Wood from Iowa. This painting is often referred to as an American icon in our country. Grant Wood painted this work in the year of 1930, just as the depression was beginning to take over America and it was discovered at an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting won a bronze medal and a three hundred dollar prize (Stokstad 1101). This has often been a controversial painting in America because we are not sure if the man and the woman in the painting are supposed to be husband and wife, father and daughter, or perhaps sister and brother (Heritage 1).

Many have found that in an interview with Wood in a 1933 article wood wrote that he “envisioned the pair as husband and wife. As a matter of Wood’s sister, Nan, posed as the woman in this particular painting (1). When the painting was unveiled in Iowa the natives of that state thought that Wood was mocking their culture. They thought that he was meaning to depict every Iowan as this rural type farmer and they became infuriated (2). Also, the clear age difference of the two subjects began to cause their own outburst among Wood’s Iowa hometown. So Wood decides to change his story on the pair and the two subjects became a small-town Iowa businessman and his daughter (3). We can also notice that the painting’s title is “American Gothic” and the reason being is that there is a distinct Gothic Window in the background of the painting so that was the reasoning for his title to this work. Wood got the inspiration for that window when he was traveling to Eldon, Iowa and when he saw the house he immediately sketched it on the back of an envelope (1). I believe that Wood was not trying to poke fun at the culture; he was simply just depicting the world that was going on around him.

This is a very important painting when looking at American Studies in general what was meant to be real eventually became part of the popular culture as you can see in the slide show below. This painting has been redone several times with America’s popular figures many times involved in the renditions. We can never truly know what will stick out in America to become popular but I do not believe as simple as Grant Wood was that he would have anticipated that his work is an American historical icon that is here to stay. Plugin error: That plugin is not available. "American Gothic" and Pop Culture in America “American Gothic” has become quite a popular icon for many Americans today. It is easily recognizable and it has been replicated into humorous cartoons among many other things. All these transitions are shown in the slideshow that is above this article. When watching the show notice that there are several renditions to this popular painting so many that perhaps we could call this Pop Art ? Many disagree since pop art seems to have stemmed from the early modernists art movements in the 1930s. Take the article, “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and its Audiences” by Lawrence Levine for an example to this question.

In the article Levine states, “Popular culture is seen as the antithesis of folk culture.” He also states that, “Popular culture should be used primarily to represent the consciousness of its producers, not its consumers.” (Levine 2). I have to agree with Levine on these factors of pop and folk culture. They are stems of one and another. I also believe that Grant Wood knew that what he was producing was going to become popular and also cause the controversy as it did. Remember bad press is still press. This work was getting recognized and many people knew that this painting depicted that rural life. As we all know not all Americans lived like this at the time but it was during the depression era that this type of rural life was prominent and very real to our culture. It becomes “popular” per say because it is what it is and there is no escaping it. As we can conclude, Grant Wood knew that he had made a true work of art that would stick with our American Culture. Maybe not to the extent that the paintings popularity has reached in this modern day, I don’t think any artist would anticipate Bevis and Butthead in a rendition to a great work of art.

This all goes to show the things that stand out among our culture and are truly a slice of American life. This painting is very important when reviewing American Studies. It tells a story of many of the common folk in America during the depression in our country and it also symbolizes the myth of the American through popular culture today. Analysis of American Gothic - WriteWork WriteWork Essays & Writing Guides for Students Worried about plagiarism? 0 Like 0 Tweet An analysis of the picture painted by Grant Wood American Gothic was painted by Grant Wood in 1930. When looking at the painting you can see two persons that obviously appear as how two persons would have looked like in the 1930s. They are simple living people, dependant on their routines and clearly living on the countryside. The man holds a pitchfork in his hand and wears typical farmer clothes and the woman wears characteristic housewife clothing. The painting does not really provide other information in addition to than the one's presented in the beginning. The painting offers a distinct description of the rural life with contrasting point of views which in whole signifies the typical life in America in early 20th century.

The two persons seen on the picture symbolizes the average American that ever so often lived on the country. There are obvious connections between the different compositions of the painting. United States United States Every detail is related to another that belongs in a long chain of associated details. Husband and wife or father and daughter? Nobody really knows what relationship the two persons on the painting have to each other, even though I think they are related more at a father-daughter level. I have made this conclusion because my interpretation of the male on the painting is that he is defensive, standing a bit in front of the female. He has a facial expression that is rather protective and he is simultaneously staring at us intently, even menacingly, as an animal watching over his children, showing how his true animal instincts take effect when the matter comes to protection of the family domain. Anyway, the woman and the man symbolize the importance of families. However, as seen on the picture, they were not that big of a family due to... Analysis of American Gothic. (2008, February 01). In WriteWork.com. Retrieved 06:31, January 14, 2017, from WriteWork contributors.

"Analysis of American Gothic" WriteWork.com. WriteWork.com, 01 February, 2008. Web. 14 Jan. 2017. WriteWork contributors, "Analysis of American Gothic," WriteWork.com, (accessed January 14, 2017) More The Other World and Worlds of David Wojnarowicz ... life that was troubled from the very onset on the fringes of American society. The first years of his life were marked by incredible abuse from his father with dog chains, two by fours, and ... expressive ... typically feared, its response was slow and ... 11 pages 206 Dec/1996 4.6 ... two paintings. Michelangelo's painting is also much more life-like than Cavallini's. All of the differences are quite understandable, considering that these two frescos were painted at completely separate times. (Croix, Tansey, and ... 7 pages 310 Jan/1997 4.9 ... and hoping for all his life. Jones expresses a climatic conclusion in this painting by combining the two weeping figures as one.

The fires burned deep within the man and woman presenting a utopia of love between the two ... 3 pages 207 Feb/1997 4.8 Segal's "Blue Woman in Black Chair" vs. Greek "Athena Lemnia" ... expression seems to be one of strength and power. This sculpture also conveys more of a sense of beauty that Segal's. With its sharply defined line and detailed features there is little abstractness to take away from its beauty. These two ... 3 pages 133 Dec/1996 4.5 June 8 2005 3:00 PM The Most Famous Farm Couple in the World Why American Gothic still fascinates. By Mia Fineman Of all the famous images in the history of art, only a handful have risen (or some might say sunk) to the status of cultural icons. At the top of this list are Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Edvard Munch's The Scream, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. These images have been relentlessly copied, parodied, and reproduced in every conceivable form—from posters to neckties to life-sized inflatable dolls.

The variations are endless: In a museum shop not long ago I came across a little flip-book in which American Gothic gradually morphs into The Scream—two for the price of one! But how and why does an image become an icon? In his new book, American Gothic , published to coincide with the painting's 75th anniversary, Harvard historian Steven Biel traces the cultural history of Wood's famous portrait of a dour Iowa farmer and his stiff-necked wife (or daughter). Nearly everyone knows the image through copies and parodies, though few know much about the original painting. When Biel showed the picture to 59 Harvard sophomores, they all recognized it, but only 31 knew the title and only five could name the artist. Advertisement The story of American Gothic begins with a trim white cottage in Eldon, Iowa, that Wood, an Iowa-born artist with European training, spotted from a car window in August 1930.

* He decided to paint the house—built in the "carpenter Gothic" style, which applied the lofty architecture of European cathedrals to flimsy American frame houses—along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." He recruited his sister Nan as a model for the woman, dressing her in a prim, colonial-print apron trimmed with rickrack (already out of date in 1930). He based the man on his stern-looking Cedar Rapids dentist, Byron McKeeby, whom he posed in a black jacket, collarless shirt, and clean denim overalls. In one hand, McKeeby holds a three-pronged pitchfork, which is visually echoed in the stitching of his overalls and in the Gothic window in the gable. In fact, Wood modeled each element separately—Graham and McKeeby never actually stood together in front of the house. In the fall of 1930, Wood entered the painting in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. The judges dismissed it as a trifling "comic valentine," but a powerful museum patron urged them to reconsider, and they awarded Wood a third-place bronze medal and $300.

The patron also convinced the Art Institute to acquire the painting for its collection, where it remains today. The image quickly became famous through newspaper reproductions, first appearing in the Chicago Evening Post, and then in the rotogravure sections of newspapers in New York, Boston, Kansas City, and Indianapolis, often with the caption, An Iowa Farmer and His Wife. When the picture finally appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, real Iowa farmers and their wives were not amused. To them, the painting looked like a nasty caricature, portraying Midwestern farmers as pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers. One Iowa farmwife told Wood he should have his "head bashed in." Another threatened to bite off his ear. Stung by the criticism, Wood declared himself a "loyal Iowan" and insisted that the figures were not intended to be farmers but small-town folk, not Iowans but generic Americans. His sister Nan, perhaps embarrassed about being depicted as the wife of a man twice her age, started telling people that Wood had envisioned the couple as father and daughter, not husband and wife.

(Wood himself remained vague on this point.) The critics who admired the painting in the early '30s—including Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley—also assumed it was a satire about the rigidity of American rural or small-town life, lampooning the people H. L. Mencken called the "booboisie" of the "Bible Belt." As Biel explains, "American Gothic appeared to its first viewers as the visual equivalent of the revolt-against-the-provinces genre in 1910s and 1920s American literature"—a critique of provincialism akin to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess. Advertisement But a few years later, as the nation sank into the Great Depression, people started to see Wood's painting in a different light. American Gothic was no longer understood as satirical, but as a celebratory expression of populist nationalism. Critics extolled the farmer and his wife as steadfast embodiments of American virtue and the pioneer spirit.

"American democracy was built upon the labors of men and women of stout hearts and firm jaws, such people as those above," read one caption in 1935. Wood helped along this revisionist reading by repudiating the Paris-influenced bohemianism of his youth, refashioning himself as America's "artist-in-overalls." He allied himself with other regionalist painters like John Steuart Curry and the virulently jingoistic Thomas Hart Benton, who railed against the "control" of the East Coast art world by "precious fairies." Wood echoed Benton's anti-intellectual sentiments, announcing: "All the good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow." The Depression-era understanding of American Gothic as an image of authentic American identity gave rise to its first known parody: In 1942, the photographer Gordon Parks posed a black cleaning woman with an upright broom in front of a large American flag and called it American Gothic.

Since then, variants of Wood's image have appeared in Broadway shows (The Music Man), movies (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), marketing campaigns (Saks Fifth Avenue, Country Corn Flakes, and Newman's Own Organics, to name a few), television shows (Green Acres, The Simple Life), pornography (Playboy and Hustler), and in millions of jokey snapshots of two people facing front, one of them holding a vaguely pitchforklike object. So, what is it about American Gothic that it makes such an indelible impression? Biel stops short of drawing any real conclusions, explaining how American Gothic became an icon, but not why. Of course, part of the answer lies in the built-in ambiguity of the image. Is the painting a satire or a celebration of the American heartland? Even Grant Wood seemed uncertain about this. ("There is satire in it," he said, "but only as there is satire in any realistic statement. These are types of people I have known all my life.

I tried to characterize them truthfully—to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life.") But the key to this painting's enduring appeal is not its subject or its inherent ambiguity, but its form—specifically, the stark frontality of the figures. Think about the other iconic images from art history: the Mona Lisa, Munch's Scream, Warhol's Marilyn, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother. All of them depict human figures directly facing the viewer—just like the flatly frontal images of saints in medieval Christian icons. Rendering figures in this way imprints them on our memories and endows them with both authority and immediacy. Early Christians believed icons were like portals that allowed the viewer to communicate directly with the sacred figure represented. Modern secular icons like American Gothic still retain some vestige of sacredness, in the sense that they connect with something larger—not with the divine, but with the collective memory of our image-loving culture. Correction , June 9, 2005: The article originally and incorrectly explained that the original American Gothic house was in Elton, Iowa when in fact the name of the town is Eldon, Iowa. ( Return to the corrected sentence.)

Question: Depicting a father and daughter, who painted the picture American Gothic in 1930?
Answer: Grant Wood