Making a Masterpiece: the stories behind iconic artworks by Debra N. Mancoff

Author:Debra N. Mancoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

American Gothic

Grant Wood

All that I attempted to do was to paint a picture of a Gothic house and to depict the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.

Grant Wood, December, 1930

Driving through Eldon, Iowa, on an August day in 1930, Grant Wood caught sight of a white, board-and-batten house with a steeply pitched roof. He stopped the car to get a closer look, and then, using the oil paints and the back of a paperboard he had carried with him, he made a quick sketch. Wood’s impressionistic image captured the hazy light, the wind stirring the leaves on the trees, and the tumble of plants in the yard, as well as the architectural details of the modest, weathered building, including a canopied porch on the ground floor and a double lancet window piercing the second storey gable. He then asked a friend to return to the house to take a photograph for future reference. But it was more than the house that intrigued him, as seen in a small pencil sketch that he subsequently made on the back of an envelope. Later explaining that he wanted to ‘depict the kind of people I fancied should live in that house’, Wood placed two front-facing figures in the foreground: a prim woman in a print dress trimmed with a white collar and a cameo and a stern man in overalls and a jacket holding a rake.1 He surrounded the composition with a roughly rendered frame and inscribed the words ‘American Gothic’ on the lower moulding.

Just two months later, Wood submitted his finished painting to the prestigious 43rd Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was hardly a novice; he had pursued formal training at home and abroad, carried out significant local commissions and even exhibited a portrait of his mother in the previous year’s exhibition. But American Gothic made Grant Wood an overnight sensation. The work received the Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal for painting, and the Friends of American Art purchased it for the museum’s collection.2 More importantly, American Gothic ignited a lively conversation about representing national ethos at a time when the nation was facing crises of economy and identity. Did these two flinty figures, posing in front of their unpretentious house incarnate a true image of the essential American spirit, or was Wood satirizing stereotypical assumptions about Midwestern rural life? Whatever his intentions, Wood’s image appealed to an unprecedentedly wide audience – popular and critical alike – as an authentic representation of salt-of-the-earth, American character. Since its debut, American Gothic has remained in the forefront of American imagery in the form of reproduction, recreation and parody. In making his masterpiece, Wood forged an idea of ‘American’ that remains potent today.

In a 1936 interview, Grant Wood explained the pull of his home state on his imagination. Over a decade earlier, during an extended sojourn in Paris, he ‘realized that all the good ideas I’d ever had came to me while milking a cow.

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