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Grant Wood’s 1930 painting, American Gothic, is one of the most recognizable pieces of art that exists today. But why? We can look at a piece like Picasso’s Guernica and acknowledge its historical importance and protest against the Spanish Civil War. We can look at Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night and comment on how its ethereal style represents the artist’s hallucinations and descent into insanity. But what about American Gothic makes it so special? It’s a picture of two people, a house, and the sky behind them. Why should people from all over the world flock to see this “masterpiece” and why should it be worth millions of dollars?
Well, as with many famous works of art, it’s all about context. No, it wasn’t the most beautiful or impressive painting ever composed. No, the artist didn’t paint it while jumping out of a burning plane or something. It was the societal context in which it was produced that brought American Gothic into the limelight and allowed it to seep into the subconscious of nearly every citizen of the United States.
Today, there are countless parodies of the painting out there. It’s been done on magazine covers, in television and movies, in comic strips, and pretty much every other medium you can think of. This author even has a t-shirt that depicts the two figures from the American Gothic painting in the buff with the words “Let’s Get Naked” underneath. Let’s take a look at how Grant Wood was inspired to paint this iconic scene and how it became so ubiquitous in American culture.
American Gothic Background
When Grant Wood finished American Gothic in 1930, he wasn’t a big-name artist by any means. Wood was born in rural Iowa in 1891 in a town east of Anamosa. After his father died in 1901, his mother moved the family to the big city of Cedar Rapids when Wood began apprenticing at a metal shop. After finishing high school, Wood enrolled at The Handcraft Guild, an art school in Minneapolis that was run entirely by women. Afterward, in 1913, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked as a silversmith, drawing from his previous experience in Cedar Rapids.
From 1922 to 1928, Wood made four separate trips to Europe to study painting, particularly the Impressionist and post-Impressionist styles that were popular in Europe at the time. Wood said that 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck was a particular inspiration to him.
In 1930, the year that Wood completed American Gothic, he was still living with his mother in the loft of a carriage house (which was essentially a garage meant to house horse-drawn carriages). The idea to paint American Gothic came when Wood was visiting the small town of Eldon, Iowa and he came across a house built in the Carpenter Gothic style and combined the traditionally European architectural style with an American character. When asked about this particular house, Grant Wood said, “I imagined American Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with this American Gothic house.”
The models used for the painting were Grant Wood’s dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, and his sister, Nan Wood Graham. Wood promised to elongate his sister’s face so that no one would recognize her in the painting, which is part of the reason for the long, flat faces in the painting. The polished and highly detailed style of the two main subjects of the painting was inspired by Flemish Renaissance artists like Jan van Eyck and others. The result was something that, much like Wood himself, was partially European and partially American.
American Gothic Context and Reception
Grant Wood first brought American Gothic to the world at a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago (where the painting still remains today). The painting took the bronze medal and the Institute bought the painting from Wood for a sum of $300. So, how could a painting that only won a bronze medal and was bought for $300 rise to the position of arguably the most famous American painting ever made?
Well, after the competition, the painting was reproduced in the Chicago Evening Post, and then in newspapers in New York City, Kansas City, Boston, and Indianapolis. At that point, a heated debate began to take hold over whether the painting was meant to be a satire mocking the lifestyles of rural Americans or whether it was supposed to be honoring that very same lifestyle. When the painting was finally printed in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Iowans became outraged, saying that the painting characterized them as “pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers.”
You see, in the year 1930 in the United States, a divide had formed among Americans between rural and urban. For the past several decades, more and more people were moving from the countryside to the city and agriculture was declining in popularity as a profession. As a result, the “city slickers” started looking down upon their rural counterparts, a sentiment that was reflected in pieces of literature from the time such as Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Carl Van Vechten’s The Tattooed Countess, which both parodied what they saw as the “uneducated country folk.”
When American Gothic took the national stage, no one was really sure whether it was meant to mock the lifestyle that it was portraying or honor it, and so many people just interpreted it how they wanted. The hifalutin city folk claimed it as a satire of antiquated country life and the country folk saw it as a memorialization of pastoral life. While the debate raged on over what American Gothic was really meant to represent, the painting became more and more well-known, which explains its universality today.
What Did Grant Wood Actually Mean?
When it comes to what Grant Wood actually meant to convey through his painting, it would seem that he was not, in fact, trying to mock the pastoral Iowan lifestyle but rather trying to show his appreciation for it. In response to some of the angry accusations hurled at him by his fellow Iowans, Wood responded, “I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa.” This indicates that despite his experiences in what was considered “high society,” Wood remained loyal to Iowa and sought to accentuate its beauty through American Gothic.
Grant Wood also fervently identified himself as a populist Midwestern painter and sought to draw attention to the fact that good art could exist outside of east coast elite society. He was once quoted saying, “All the good ideas I’ve ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.” It seems that Wood was trying to highlight the fearless, pioneer spirit of the American Midwest through American Gothic and many of his other paintings.
Technical Merit of American Gothic
Beyond being such an important painting in the context of the United States in the year 1930, American Gothic was also a very technically sound painting as well. Indeed, the rich complexities in the faces of the two subjects showcase Wood’s mastery of the medium and make for a wonderful aesthetic experience.
There are also impressive structural elements of the painting such as the fact that the parallel lines of the pitchfork are mimicked by the parallel lines on the house and on the man’s shirt. The pattern behind the top window of the house also compliments the pattern on the woman’s shirt wonderfully.
Of course, American Gothic could not have risen to the level of fame that it enjoys today if it were a poorly composed painting. However, among a sea of technically impressive paintings, American Gothic grew to such prominence because it sat at the heart of a controversy that represented a divisive turning point in the history of the United States.
