Date: 19-11-2000
Owning Institution: Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”      
Subject: 20th Century        

To mark Thanksgiving Day this week’s picture is American Gothic, by Grant Wood: the archteypal image of watchful Protestant farmers living the frontier life, which seems to become steadily more famous as the world which it describes becomes steadily more remote. It is the one picture by an American artist which every American knows, in reproduction if not in reality; and it is difficult to think of any other painting except the Mona Lisa to have generated more pastiches of itself. Robert Hughes’s book American Visions contains an amusing inventory of the myriad variations played on it by cartoonists and advertising agencies. The couple in front of the simple, wooden-frame house with the Gothic window in the gable have been reinvented as “preppies, yuppies, hippies, Weathermen, pot growers, Ku Kluxers, jocks, operagoers, the Johnsons, the Reagans, the Carters, the Fords, the Nixons, the Clintons, and George Wallace with an elderly black lady…” The list goes on.

Wood never imagined that a painting submitted more in hope than expectation to the juried annual open exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930 (winning the Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal and a prize of $300) would end up conferring on him a kind of immortality. He had not set out to create one of the most famous pictures in the world, but a painted equivalent of the tintype snapshots in his family album. During the late nineteenth century, frontiersmen often had themselves photographed in front of their homesteads. Harking back to such images, Wood was preserving the memory of the kind of people among whom he had spent his own childhood in Iowa in the 1890s. He wanted to resuscitate the past – his past – in living colour; and perhaps to have a little fun with it at the same time.

The inspiration for American Gothic came, the artist recalled, on a trip to the small town of Eldon:

“I saw a trim white cottage, with a trim white porch – a cottage built on sever Gothic lines. This gave me an idea. That idea was to find two people who by their severely straight-laced characters would fit into such a home. I looked about among the folks I knew around my home town, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but could find none among the farmers – for the cottage was to be a farmer’s home. I finally induced my own maiden sister to pose and had her comb her hair straight down her ears, with a severely plain part in the middle. The next job was to find a man to represent the husband. My quest finally narrowed down to the local dentist, who reluctantly consented to pose. I sent to a Chicago mail order house for the prim, colonial print apron my sister wears and for the trim, spotless overalls the dentist has on.”

A pioneer of what came to be known as the Regionalist movement, Wood himself self-consciously wore farmer’s overalls to the studio. But despite the hick accessories, he was hardly the all-American provincial homespun artist of his own myth. He travelled to Europe frequently in his youth and in the early 1920s he enrolled at the Academie Julien in Paris. A couple of years before painting American Gothic he visited Germany, where he was deeply impressed by the art of the fifteenth-century Flemish masters, above all Hans Memling. Wood’s earlier paintings had been done in a loosely impressionist manner but now he turned his back on such a style: “mere wrist-work”, he called it. He was determined to turn himself into a different kind of artist: the Hans Memling of Cedar Springs, Iowa. American Gothic completed the transition. It reflects the airless, almost claustrophobic quality that Wood admired in northern Renaissance portraiture, as well as its intense descriptive realism and disconcerting immediacy. If the painting is a window, the couple’s faces seem almost pressed to the glass.

When the Des Moines Register reproduced the picture with the caption “Iowa farmer and his wife”, the disgruntled wife of a real Iowa farmer complained that it would give people like her a bad name. “The painting should be hung in a cheese factory,” she wrote. “That woman’s face would positively sour milk.” In fact, there is some confusion about the relationship between the couple in American Gothic. In the interview quoted above, published three years after he completed the painting, Wood described them as man and wife. But he later insisted that they were a father and his spinster daughter. He may have been persuaded to alter their identities by the force of the characters he had himself created. There is something spinsterish about the farmer’s daughter, if daughter she is, with her stuffed dummy demeanour and involuntary half-scowl. The pinched meanness of her expression is accentuated by the cameo brooch at her buttoned-up neck, which shows by cruel contrast the profile of a young and beautiful goddess. She has the air of a woman perpetually on the look-out for someone else to disapprove of.

As in the Renaissance portraits which Wood admired, the man and woman have their attributes. Hers are the plants on the porch behind her, symbols of a woman’s traditional nurturing and horticultural roles. His is the pitchfork, Satan’s tool for tossing the damned in the fires of hell, but here turned against any devil with designs on his daughter or his property. Together they form a human wall. The body language is blunt: keep out. But the painter also insinuates that the elderly farmer is not quite the man he once was. The shape of the three-tined pitchfork is repeated in the seams of his overalls, but limp and faded with age.

American Gothic continues to intrigue because of its ambiguity. Was Wood celebrating the people who had dominated his youth, and who had done so much to shape his America? Or was he poking fun at them and their rigid, puritanical values of piety, sobriety and moral vigilance? The case has been argued with conviction on both sides. Wood himself allowed for a small element of mischief but came down in favour of the farmers. “These people had bad points,” he said of them, “and I did not paint them under, but to me they were basically solid and good people.” Somehow the picture itself seems less clearcut than that. I suspect it will always leave room for a nagging doubt or two, like those etched so plainly into the dour, lined faces of the farmers themselves.