AMERICAN GOTHIC: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting
by Steven Biel
EVERYBODY RECOGNISES the picture: that solemn couple in front of a white-painted, A-frame house with a Gothic-style window. Hardly anyone can name the artist: Grant Wood, born in 1891, who drove past that very house in Eldon, Iowa, in the summer of 1930 and stopped to draw it. Later he sketched in the long, thin pair he fancied might live there: she wore a Puritan collar and cameo brooch, he wore a workshirt and carried a pitchfork. Wood called the picture American Gothic.
How does a painting’s mass appeal come to outstrip its artistic reputation? Charles Addams parodied American Gothic in a cartoon in which the two figures step down from the picture and walk gravely out of the museum. It is when images — the Mona Lisa, the Rev Robert Walker Skating on Duddin, Whistler’s Mother — get translated out of museums and on to biscuit tins and postage stamps that they achieve a mysterious, iconic status.
Steven Biel, a teacher of literature and history at Harvard, first saw American Gothic used in a cornflakes advertisement in 1963. He decided to ask the pertinent question: why that one? How did it become the best-known American painting? When Grant Wood submitted it for the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual exhibition in 1930 it was initially rejected. But one juror salvaged it, and the Friends of American Art bought it for £300. Within months it appeared in newspapers from Boston to Kansas City by the new rotogravure process. Four years on it was the second most popular attraction at the World’s Fair. (The first was Whistler’s Mother, alias Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1 — but American Gothic sold more prints.)
Its composition was a visual cliché: reminiscent of Old West pioneers posing in front of their frame homesteads. As models, Wood chose his sister Nan (whose face was too round “but I can stretch it out long,” he told her) and the Wood family’s dentist, Dr Byron McKeeby. Nan posed at their home, in mother’s cameo brooch; Dr McKeeby posed, reluctantly, at his surgery. The painting (30in by 25in, on beaverboard) took Wood three months to finish.
Wood was a diligent and resourceful young man. His father (who wouldn’t have Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the house because “we Quakers can read only true things”), had died when Grant was 10. He worked his way through college, delivering water, milking cows, making jewellery. When his mother’s mortgage was foreclosed, he built a cabin where he, mother Hattie and sister Nan lived for seven years.
During the First World War he designed camouflage for cannons. He studied art in Paris, and came back to paint society portraits in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Pink, plump, cherubic-faced, he did marry, but only briefly, returning home to mother. His attic, crammed with quaint objets trouvés, became a meeting place for the Cedar Rapids bohemian set.
The house that inspired American Gothic, Biel found, stands intact, with a sign outside: “You are standing in front of the ‘American Gothic’ house that Grant Wood used as the backdrop for his world-famous portrait of the stern figures. Now it’s your turn to pose for your own photograph!”
By the 1970s its plaster was crumbling and a woodpecker had pecked a hole in the porch. In 1987 it was let to a weedcutter’s family for $50 a week. Briefly, Roseanne Barr and her husband Tom Arnold threatened to bring glitz to the site by building a mansion next door. They posed outside, with apron and pitchfork; but then they split up. In 1991 the house was designated an historic site by the State of Iowa. Trouble is, “a lot of people just can’t find it”, as Iowa’s Senator Don Gettings said. They don’t get that many tourists in Iowa.
Critics have delved for subliminal significance in those eloquently silent figures. Nan Wood always insisted that she had posed as the man’s daughter, not wife: a daughter who was clearly “one of those terribly nice and proper girls who get their chief joy in life out of going to Christian Endeavour”.
But why was her gaze oblique? Might there be an incestuous relationship here? Was the pitchfork symbolic, satanic? Some were affronted by Nan’s expression which “would sour milk”. Iowa farmers’ wives believed themselves caricatured: the painting must be a satire on repressed, Bible-bashing provincialism. Gertrude Stein declared that every artist should be afraid of Wood, “for his devastating satire”. But Wood protested that he had never intended to ridicule this good, solid couple. One critic called the painting a balanced portrayal of good and bad American traits: integrity and tenacity mixed with a cramping religiosity and anti-creativity. And by 1997 the art critic Robert Hughes decided that Wood had been a “deeply closeted homosexual” whose painting was “an exercise in sly camp”.
The painting’s reputation rose and dipped: in the Depression years it seemed backward-looking, sentimental. It was swept back into fashion by the 1930s lust to preserve the American past in folk culture and oral history — just when Woody Guthrie was collecting the Dust Bowl ballads. Then, American Gothic acquired real conviction: it was representative of an American way of life, like Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt.
By the time Wood died in 1942 the Gothic couple had become positive national stereotypes, suitable for a wartime propaganda poster. Since then, the iconic image has been lumped with other images of folksy, nostalgic mass culture, and Wood has been accused of that great crime of the intellectual art world — pandering to middlebrow expectations, not challenging them.
But cartoonists and parodists adore and exploit American Gothic. Barbie and Ken posed with pitchfork on a greetings card. Presidential candidates Clinton, Carter, Johnson and Reagan became American Gothic lampoons whenever they made “just folks” claims. Most poignantly the image was used, post 9/11, by The New Yorker in a cartoon of the couple wearing “I [heart] NY” T-shirts. The message was: even stern Iowans now felt a solidarity with Manhattanites.
Today, visitors to Gallery 247 at the Art Institute of Chicago give a start of recognition as they see the real thing. “That’s a very famous painting,” parents tell their children — unable to explain why. Nobody can view it “unmediated by familiarity”, as Biel says.
And it still has the power to disturb. Biel concludes by pointing out the stray lock of the woman’s hair — coiled, snake-like; a hidden depth I’d never noticed before.
W. W. Norton, £13.99; 160pp
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