American Gothic – the long-faced couple standing sentry before their wooden house in apron and overalls, pitchfork in hand – is the most famous painting in American art. It is instantly recognisable to millions of people from Oregon to Osaka who hardly know its name, still less that of the painter.
In its comparatively short life (it was made in 1930), Grant Wood’s masterpiece has become one of those rare paintings that are constantly quoted in spoofs, advertisements, movies and cartoons, so familiar they can be readily invoked in a quick sketch or even just by one detail, such as the arched window. Even if we do not know its title, American Gothic is by now as proverbial as the Mona Lisa, The Starry Night and The Scream, a point not lost on parodists who have Photoshopped Van Gogh’s stars into the Iowan skies above that pointed roof, introduced Leonardo’s Lisa into the family romance and even married Grant Wood with Edvard Munch. A Gothic Scream flipbook is available – two for the price of one – that morphs the stern midwestern farmer into the Norwegian screecher.
But is he in fact a farmer, this man from whose powerful hand the pitchfork grows like a tree? It would be an understatement to say that opinions have differed over the years. For this stupendous image – apparently as plain and direct as the small-town Iowans it portrays, apparently as simple as the summer setting – turns out to be uniquely controversial and mysterious. Is it a celebration of these hardworking folk, upright in their moral values, steadfast against the terrible deprivations of the Great Depression, as so many Americans have believed; or is it slyly satirical? Is Wood painting a hymn of praise to his neighbours in Cedar Rapids, or sending up their strict narrow-mindedness? When the painting flies into this country, centrepiece of America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s at the Royal Academy, many British viewers will have their first chance to decide. For American Gothic lives mainly in reproduction, intensely memorable even to those who have never seen it in person. Its staying power is exceptional in every respect, for the painting has never before left the United States.
It is the clarity of the image that strikes first: neat as a pin, well made as the wooden house, pristine as the woman’s ironed pinny. Everything fits and everything is in perfect order. Flat, graphic, meticulously detailed, as rigidly frontal as a Renaissance portrait, each part so crisp and distinct, it is no wonder Wood’s painting lends itself so well to reproduction (and jigsaw).
Here is an American Eden of blue skies and plump trees, peopled by a pinched Eve and a work-hardened Adam, their labours rewarded by sheer survival, their virtue enshrined in the church-like facade behind them. It appears to be almost a primer of rural life. But some see the man as a hellfire preacher rather than a farmer, his pitchfork the prop for some pitiless sermon; others view him as a small-town clerk, home from work and out in his denims to hay the cows in the barn.
The woman is his supportive wife, stiff as her pioneer husband; or perhaps she is his maiden daughter, whose honour he is defending with that pitchfork (Robert Hughes’s goatish opinion). Perhaps, with her antique brooch and outmoded braid, she really believes in old-fashioned values; or maybe she is about to bolt from this prison, the telltale curl of hair escaping like a sign of the future.
They are a sanctimonious pair, probably unforgiving Republicans, straitlaced as their clothes, with no music in their life; or they are the opposite: American heroes, prairie puritans carrying on the spirit of the founding fathers, living the hard life but never giving up – even during the disastrous drought of 1930, when there was practically no hay to pitch.
Every opposing interpretation has spawned a spoof, and even the spoofs have their imitations. American Gothic has become arguably the most parodied painting in history. Lyndon and Lady Bird, Ronald and Nancy, Bill and Hill, Barack and Michelle, Barbie and Ken, Homer and Marge, Kermit and Miss Piggy (the cameo brooch now showing a porker) have all stood in front of that facade, as Donald and Melania surely will if they haven’t already. The building is almost as famous as that other White House; the painting cannot resist partisan politics. And every time these spoofs appear, proposing the dour duo as representative Americans of one stripe or another, they communicate the beautiful lucidity of the painting, with its dovetailed composition, and yet the mystery of it too.
About its origins, and the painter, a great deal is known. Grant Wood was born in Anamosa, Iowa, in 1891. He was only 10 when his father died and his mother moved her small family to Cedar Rapids. Here he went to boarding school, laboured for dimes in a metal shop, and eventually managed to get himself into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1913. His early paintings of the rolling Iowan landscape are appealing, if anonymous, but in the 1920s he made four trips to Europe and was stunned by the northern European painters he saw there, particularly in Munich. He admired Dürer, Van Eyck and Hans Memling; his paintings learn from their stark frontality, intense precision and simplicity of form. He was even dubbed the Iowa Memling by the New York art writer Lincoln Kirstein.
Where other painters returned from Europe dreaming of a new avant garde art for the States – urban, jazzy, post-cubist, even abstract, as the Royal Academy exhibition will show – Wood had entirely different ideas. In Paris he told the journalist William Shirer that he was going home “to paint those damn cows and barns and barnyards and cornfields and little red schoolhouses… and the women in their aprons and the men in their overalls and store suits… Isn’t that what Sinclair Lewis has done in his writing… Damn it, you can do it in painting too!”
The allusion to Lewis is a signal because his masterpiece, Main Street, indubitably satirises the strict conservatism of small-town life. The novel’s heroine, Carol Milford, is desperate to get away, and eventually makes it to Washington (only to return, defeated). But if there is a trace of Carol in the woman’s suppressed expression in American Gothic, it is not with human nature, curiously, that the painting began.
Grant Wood is the patron saint of Cedar Rapids, his home and studio a museum, his one-room schoolhouse depicted on the Iowa state quarter. His painting of the carpenter gothic house, with its sharp arches and pitched roof, translating medieval stonework into pine planks, made this quaint style familiar the world over. And this is where the picture has its origins. For although the house tends to dissolve in the mind’s eye in comparison to its owners, it was the structure, not the people, that inspired a visual triangle so compelling it brought instant fame to the unknown painter. Wood saw the house in August 1930 while teaching an art class in the Iowa town of Eldon. Struck by the oddity of a small frame house with a large gothic window (the owners are said to have bought it from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue) he stopped to make an oil sketch. Back home, he elongated the window and considered adding some homeowners. “I imagined American gothic people with their faces stretched out long,” he said in an interview, “to go with the gothic house.” Three months later the painting won a bronze prize at the Art Institute of Chicago, which immediately bought the work. It has hung there, welcoming the crowds, ever since.
People pose for a selfie and inevitably fit right in, like figures inserted in a seaside cutout board: upright surrogates for the upstanding couple. And the secular trinity of the home and its owners is echoed in other verticals all through the painting: the three prongs of the fork rhyme with the bib of the overalls, the stripes of the shirt, the window frames, even the witty cactus on the porch. The sloped roof unites the two heads, the farmer’s gold collar stud is repeated in the lightning rod on the roof, the peaks of the rickrack braid imitate the shape of the window in miniature. Even the pattern of the apron repeats the dotted blind in that famous window – a window that Wood confessed he found privately absurd.
Was he sincere? Was he having it both ways? Certainly Wood was not portraying real citizens of Eldon in their local surroundings: the whole scene is made up. The woman is his sister Nan, then aged 31; the man is his dentist, Dr Byron McKeeby, who treated the painter for gum disease. Wood dressed them like “tintypes from my old family album”, sending away for “a prim, colonial print” apron and overalls from a mail order firm in Chicago. Nan later recalled that her brother asked for “a trim that was out of style. I ripped some off mother’s old dresses, and after the painting made its debut, rickrack made a comeback.” What was to become the quintessential image of America’s rural heartland was a kind of history painting, therefore, and a fabrication from the start.
The two models never posed together for the painting, only for a photograph taken alongside it in 1942. This shot shows the dentist in a natty tweed suit and Nan with a stylish Marcel wave; it also reveals Wood’s exceptional gift for a likeness. Compare his self-portrait, watchful behind little gold-rimmed spectacles, the same tight group of features centred in the long oval face, with his sister’s portrait in American Gothic and you see the true family resemblance. Keeper of her brother’s flame long after his premature death from cancer at the age of 51, Nan Wood Graham sued when Playboy inevitably got in on the spoofing in the late 1960s, showing the couple without their shirts.
But by then the parodies were in full flow. As far back as 1941, a photographer had posed a black couple in front of Wood’s painting to emphasise its “white values”. And in 1957, in Meredith Willson’s droll musical The Music Man, the main character lands up in a pseudo-Eldon where he encounters laconically chippy Iowans, among them the characters from American Gothic, already so popular as to raise a smile, stepping straight from the picture frame. In the first number, the Iowans sing of their terrible stubbornness: “We can stand touchin’ noses for a week at a time, and never see eye to eye.”
If you search online for parodies, there are hundreds of results. Some of the satires are purely political – Obama skewering Hillary on his pitchfork in the 2008 primaries; Hillary wearing the trousers; or trying too hard to be folksy in the 2015 campaign. Sometimes they’re about gender – two women, commemorating Iowa’s first gay marriage – or about race: Mexican Gothic, and so on. Hollywood ghouls play the gothic roles; the man becomes a Klansman; the woman is Lynndie England with a yardful of Abu Ghraib bodies.
Dressed in 80s clothes, the couple appear on the cover of Family Weekly, illustrating the feature “Why Marriages Fail”. For Time magazine, now accessorised with inline skates, mobile phones and tattoos, they are the tediously conventional look of cool. The fork becomes cutlery, emblem of obese America. The couple are in gas masks protesting against pollution. The house is up for sale – repeatedly – after the 2008 crash.
Photograph: Joel Sartore/Getty Images/National Geographic
They are all-Americans, raised to a happier life in ads for ribs, beer and Paul Newman’s organic cookies; or they are poor Americans, plagued by healthcare, big pharma and graft. Sometimes the painting is construed simply as an American icon, like Liberty or the flag; sometimes it is a jab at cookie-cutter lives and the gun lobby.
Endless variations reflect endless interpretations. When she first saw it, Gertrude Stein wrote “We should fear Grant Wood. Every artist and every school of artists should be afraid of him, for his devastating satire.” And an Iowan farm wife, seeing the picture in the papers in 1930, telephoned Wood to express popular local opinion. According to the artist, she wished “to come over and smash my head” for depicting her countrymen as grim Bible-thumpers. Wood protested that this was not a caricature but the proof of his appreciation. “I had to go to France,” he said, “to appreciate Iowa.”
But Wood himself exacerbates the controversy. He played to the painting, dressing in rugged overalls ever after and telling the press “All the good ideas I’ve ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.” Yet he was no farmer, was apparently repelled by livestock and his statements about the picture were bafflingly contradictory. “There is satire in it,” he said, “but only as there is satire in any realistic statement” – a confusing, if not meaningless remark. Later, Wood countered that he “did not intend this painting as satire. It seems to me that they are basically solid and good people. But I don’t feel that one gets at this fact better by denying their faults.”
Sarah Oehler, Chicago curator of America After the Fall, believes the mystery of the painting “lies in the blank expressions. The figures are expressionless, and that opens the door to one’s personal connection to the painting and, more importantly, projection on to it.” But is the woman with the faraway eyes really so expressionless? And what about the way she is painted? Many people have seen dalliance in that loose curl, and perhaps in the woman’s gaze wandering out of this scene.
For although the composition is as frontal as a religious icon, a vision of rectitude underpinned by geometry, the symmetry is subtly askew. The woman stands just behind, rather than alongside the man, turning her head away. Wood said he wanted her to appear just as self-righteous as the man, but surely the painting goes against this. She is detached from him, has other views in mind, an inner life of her own.
The magnitude of response to American Gothic shows how profoundly it speaks to Americans, yet what does it say? When it appears at the Royal Academy alongside other 1930s regionalist paintings praising the soil of the land, its meaning may be clearer. If Wood seemed practically a city slicker to some backwood Iowans, he was catnip to urban citizens, who saw in his rolling hills and sweeping cornfields, his idolisations of farm workers in solo paintings and the starring part he gave to the gothic couple – poor people taking the place of the aristocrats in Renaissance art – an answer to the Great Depression. Not for nothing, one feels, is the painting signed and dated on the denim overalls – signifying the labour that made America great.
Some of Wood’s painter friends thought his adoption of overalls more of a guise than a gimmick, however – a way of covering up his possible homosexuality. Adrian Locke, the show’s London curator, believes that Wood was making a new art where ordinary folk like his neighbours took centre stage, and that he was both fond of and terribly constrained by them. “As a gay man unable to live the life he wanted because of the repressive moral values of the day, he must have been suffocated by this environment. If these are the moral guardians, he seems to be asking, then have we placed our trust in the right people? Are they the face of the future or that of the past?”
The picture shows a way of life fading away even as Wood painted it, for many rural Iowans were already leaving for the city by 1930. Yet it touched people so deeply that canny newspapers kept printing reproductions that readers could tack to the wall through the 30s; and rickrack braid made its comeback. For the image represents a common shared history, a rock-solid past upon which the present is still and forever based, a toughness and probity that builds houses like this, that protects the land, that keeps America upright. The couple may be Democrats, advocates of social and economic equality, ready to open that barn to the whole farming community. Or they may be Trumpers, refusing to be ignored any more, determined to see the Washington elite overturned. But they still live in the same land of the free. A church spire rises in the distance beyond the green trees. God Bless America!
That spire is of course part of Wood’s emblematic design. Shape is everything in his composition. The long narrow faces make a quartet with the long narrow windows. Indeed, the whole painting is constructed as neatly as the house itself – people bonded with home. He has carpentered his work flawlessly, has the aptly named Wood; the picture is even painted on beaverwood.
As for Stein’s suggestion of devastating satire, consult another painting altogether. Daughters of the Revolution shows a trio of “Tory gals”, as Wood called them, long-necked, deeply complacent old dames raising a dainty cup to the spirit of 1776. Behind them, by mordant contrast, is Emanuel Leutze’s deathless painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Was it for this that his soldiers died?
American Gothic holds its own; it can admit every kind of interpretation because its structure is so sound. And it contains two of America’s greatest portraits in the faces of McKeeby and Nan, from his beetle brows and sunken cheeks with their vertical grooves to her prematurely etched frown. They appear extraordinarily particular, not to say familiar – you can summon them to mind as readily as the Mona Lisa – and yet they also represent the common people, are both themselves, yet recognisable types. That is the exceptional balancing act the artist achieves. You would know them anywhere, and yet these folks are like all of us – outwardly open, infinitely complex inside. Wood transformed these anonymous locals into American archetypes in what was always designed to be a Daughters of the Revolution painting or, in today’s parlance, an icon.
America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s is at the Royal Academy, London, 25 February-4 June
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