Episode 54: Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930)

I think there’s something fundamental to our human nature where we really enjoy messing with our own senses.  We love it when something becomes something else entirely, like that image of the vase morphing into two profiles, or, god help me, that white and gold slash blue and black dress.  Point is, our brains are complicated, as are our eyes, the gateways to our equally complicated souls.  And what’s frightening about this human phenomenon, especially lately, it seems, although maybe it’s always been this way, is how quickly it goes off the rails.  Our complicated brains and eyes and souls turn to simple, binary answers.  Maybe this is also fundamental to our human nature, this aggressive turn from “and” into “or.”  It’s not both, or, you know, maybe context or life experience-dependent, it’s one or the other.  And I think that’s why this seemingly anodyne painting by Grant Wood of his sister and his dentist and a pretty window and a pitchfork is so incredibly famous.  People have really, really strong feelings about it.  It’s been endlessly mocked and spoofed, it’s been lionized and loved, it’s been analyzed to death.  Because it is both something and something else entirely.  It’s a grim satire of the American dream and a wistful celebration of a disappearing way of American life.  It’s a flimsy Iowa house and it’s a Gothic cathedral.  It’s an icon and it’s propaganda.  It’s dislocation and it’s dignity.

It’s also, unequivocally, the painting that made Grant Wood’s artistic career.  Wood was born in Iowa in 1891 and died of pancreatic cancer in 1941, the day before his 51st birthday.  And in the time between, he took several trips to Paris; he found inspiration in the landscapes of Flemish altarpieces, Medieval portrait sculptures, and French Impressionism; he taught art for a spell at the University of Iowa; and he produced a series of paintings that run the gamut of style, genre, and some might even say quality and taste – one of his lesser-known works is actually a chandelier made of corn cobs that was commissioned by a Cedar Rapids hotel that sounds, if you’ll forgive me, corny as hell.

But I digress.  The 1920s and 30s was a competitive time to be an artist trying to tell the story of America, and so often this story was one of ambivalence and ambiguity – think about Edward Hopper’s alienated figures and the grime of the ash cans on the sidewalk, like the one we looked at in episode 13, or the hardened, weathered subjects of FSA photographers, and Ansel Adams’ subsequent escape into the wilderness, like we looked at in episode 37.  There’s a lot to America.  The speed and pace and soot and alienation of the city was a complicated thing, and it was becoming clearer that the rural life wasn’t much easier.  But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a whole, thriving, competitive subgenre of art that wasn’t still trying to, in spite of the magnetic pull of the city, capture rural America with romance and nostalgia.  And this, in a nutshell, was Wood’s goal.  “American Gothic,” which was submitted to a painting competition at the Art Institute of Chicago soon after its completion, and took both bronze and the $300 cash prize that accompanied it, was, at Grant’s insistence, not a caricature of, but an affection for its subjects.  There was a particular stateliness to the European portraiture that had captured his eye on his many sojourns to Paris, a dignity that he wanted to impart onto the men and women he had grown up around.  In sum, he wrote, “I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa.”

And I think it’s the simultaneous earnestness and absurdity of this statement that makes this painting such a paradox.  And this is where “American Gothic”’s ambivalence and ambiguity, and even mystery, comes into play, even when the subject matter is seemingly so straightforward.  It’s hard to know whether or not to take the sincerity of Wood’s words seriously.  It’s hard to swallow the idea that Paris, the capital of 19th and early 20th century modernism and culture, has anything in common with Eldon, Iowa, where this house was built and still sits, and which has a population 783 according to the 2020 census.  But if you’re from Eldon, and if you admire its steadfast people and breathe deeply its plains, and if you see America reflected in those weathered overalls, then it’s not so crazy to imagine that Paris has enough dignity to spare when it comes to elevating the pioneer spirit of a tiny Iowa town.

Moreover, there’s the practical fact that the house, and that Gothic window that was directly influenced by the Medieval French cathedrals, came first.  And this was what inspired Wood’s imagination.  The story of the house, in fact, brings us into the story of how this painting came to be, before it came to be infamous.  Wood passed the small white house, now called the Dibble House after its first owner, Charles Dibble, and was taken by its architectural style, called Carpenter Gothic.  The style is uniquely North American, borrowing characteristics like pointed arches and steep gables somewhat loosely from the Medieval Gothic style, and then adding decorative motifs like gingerbread trim and jig-sawn details, thanks to the recent invention of the steam-powered scroll saw.  The takeaway of all this, for our purposes, is that this style was one of a number of architectural revival styles in the 19th century, especially in the United States, where architects enjoyed a kind of cafeteria-pick of honed historical European styles, which were then gently bastardized and often metaphorically deployed: the kind of architecture you chose to populate this new frontier had larger implications for the story of yourself you wanted to tell.  The Carpenter Gothic style tended to be a stand-in for charm and quaintness, and also its opposite: a chance to add classy European ornamentation, and with it maybe some affectation, to an otherwise straightforward flimsy frame house.

And so back to Wood letting his imagination run wild.  He apparently sketched the house on the back of an envelope to keep it fresh in his memory, and then described being curious about the kind of people who would live in a house like that, and what a window like that would mean to them.  Then he recruited two people in his life that would stand in for them: his sister, Nan, and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, both of whom, with their long faces, an added pitchfork, and even the stripes and stitching in the denim overalls that mirror the pitchfork, reinforce Gothic verticality at every turn.  Whether or not Wood envisioned them as husband and wife or father and daughter is actually a source of debate: he has letters describing both, and most likely settling on father and daughter due to some harsh external criticism – which he was notoriously thin-skinned about – about the unseemly age difference between the two.  Nan, for her part, was more than happy to push the father/daughter thing, hoping, maybe, that it would change the way she looked in the eyes of the viewers – she never appreciated how stiff and matronly her brother made her look.

And you can kind of see her point.  Regardless of the relationship status of these two figures, there is no question that they are wedded by the fact that they look completely dour and miserable.  When the image was reproduced following its placing in the Art Institute competition, Iowans were reportedly furious at being represented as “pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers.”  But not looking directly into these uninviting faces does give us the opportunity to appreciate the details that surround them, and maybe help explain them: the cameo brooch at her collar, the little escaping lock of hair at the nape of her neck, both of which give her a kind of elegance and femininity that her pursed mouth denies her.  There’s a world beyond this tight-framed stoicism, the brooch seems to be saying; there’s some fun to this old girl yet, says the lock of hair.  Meanwhile, there’s enormous strength and visual structure to the man’s hand as it grips the pitchfork – Thomas Hoving, former director of the Met and a biographer of the painting, suggests that you hold your hand over his to see how quickly the rest of the painting collapses without its grounding presence.  In fact, he details an anecdote where Grant Wood, having been plagued with gum problems that led him to spend many trusting and affectionate hours in his dentist’s chair, looking into this long, bespectacled face, once grabbed McKeeby’s hand and praised its strength and character.  Again, the Wood’s own letters tell us that he was painting from a place of deep respect, gathering pieces of a larger whole – faces and houses and windows – to tell a larger story of a larger idea of pioneer spirit, resilience, and nostalgia.  He even dressed his models, hand-picking their clothing to turn them into, in his words, as “tintypes from my old family album”: the woman is even more old-fashioned than even the rural fashion of the day would be, and the man has the added smartness of an overcoat to his weathered overalls.  “There is satire in it,” Wood concedes, “but only as there is satire in any realistic statement.  I tried to characterize them truthfully – to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life.” 

This is interesting, this idea of making the real realer through idealization.  It makes sense that Wood, so fascinated by European iconography, would intentionally reference it in this painting by tightening the frame closely around the front-facing figures and creating an idealized icon of his own.  This convention was used in Byzantine and Christian art, where you see any number of idealized religious figures that are created explicitly for personal use: individuals would use the close relationship they developed with these idealized images as a kind of portal to spiritual transcendence.  The objects, like “American Gothic” has now, became immediate and relatable conduits to whatever world they represented.

So with this in mind, let’s look again at their faces, which are so ripe for viewers, and critics especially, to project their own representations and fantasies on.  As the New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl remarks, they are icons who don’t actually reveal what exactly is being iconized.  And so, like with a good horoscope, everyone sees something different, and usually something that confirms their own prior biases, especially depending on the extraordinarily topical subject of what rural America means to them.  Thomas Hoving, for example, insists that these figures are on the verge of welcoming laughter; Schjeldahl writes that they look like they’re on the verge of tears.  The spoofing of this painting began as early as 1957, with the opening tableau of the musical The Music Man and goes all the way to the photo my parents had on their mantle from a Canadian fair – all you need, really, is a man, a woman, and a pitchfork, and you have an instantly recognizable icon.  And this incessant spoofery has naturally led to protectionism, to prominent scholars like Hoving defending the painting on NPR as perhaps the greatest American portrait, which leads to others basically telling him in not so many words that, hmm, not quite, and so on and so forth into our moment, when polarization about rural America seems to have reached a fever pitch.  No one really seems to care what Wood’s original intentions were.  They see in this painting a conduit to the world they want to see.

But it would be a bit misplaced to bring our 2021 discourse to 1930 and draw any clean comparisons.  The rural versus urban divide was of course highly present, but it had its own flavor, largely because there just wasn’t as much contact between urban and rural populations, especially considering what we’re used to.  But one way of touching hands was, interestingly enough, through art.  A significant pushback against the perception of urban modernity, and explicitly, the French avant garde that came to define it, was the Midwestern art movement that came to be known as Regionalism.  Regionalist painting was largely focused on straightforward and direct images of cultivated landscapes, of small-town America, usually based in the Midwest.  It was largely a response to the Great Depression – and the polar opposite of the work produced by photographers, mostly from big cities, who captured the suffering and hardened faces like Walker Evans’ “Portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs.”  Regionalism was, on the other hand, meant to be reassuring, to reinforce a stable balance between the American abundance of farmland and resources and our ability to cultivate it through our home-grown technology, like we see in Thomas Hart Benton’s “Threshing Wheat” from the early 1940s.  There’s a peaceful coexistence between the fields and the machinery, the undulating hills and the exhaust. 

Nostalgia was Regionalism’s fundamental and formidable weapon in the war against modernism in art, particularly abstraction and, you know, all that other inaccessible avant garde crap coming in from Europe, and France in particular.  And it’s a war Regionalism was actually winning until, as it would happen, the end of the actual WWII, when the urban economy soared, and, in the art world, when a flux of European artists emigrated to New York, birthing the New York School; ironically, Benton’s most famous pupil was an upstart named Jackson Pollock.  But Regionalism, and its influence, didn’t decline entirely – its mantle was continued on by artists like Andrew Wyeth and Norman Rockwell, who possessed an even greater artistic talent than their predecessors for creating exceptional realism to capture an idealized America.

Of course, the irony also needs to be pointed out that a movement that so staunchly defined itself as anti-modernist, and particularly anti-French, should, as “American Gothic” does, revere French architecture so intensely.  Despite the threat posed by modern art to the rural sensibilities of the 1930s, there was still so clearly a desire on Wood’s part to dig into history and culture up to his elbows, to elevate and idealize and dignify this spirit and worldview, even as he represented a movement that foundationally rejected his methods to do so.  And so where does this leave us?  Kind of right back where we started.  This thing that’s also something else entirely.  We have a painting that is, even according to the artist, both earnest and satire.  It’s revered and it’s spoofed.  It’s anti-French and pro-French.  It’s on the verge of a smile and a sob.  No wonder it’s so famous: like I said at the top, it’s seemingly the most straightforward double portrait ever painted and yet determining its cultural value with any certainty is like nailing Jell-O to the wall.

And maybe this is what makes it so quintessentially American.  If the painting is a portal, then I get to use it as one too.  I said before that Wood’s original intentions get swept away in the clamor to make this painting a Rorschach test for how people feel about rural America, both in 1930 and today.  And I think that’s a mistake if we – and I say this as a Boston-born city-dweller – really want to understand how rural Americans feel about rural America, and how that’s shaped the America we all share.  The most famous artworks that capture the city from around the same time – again, the Hoppers, the Henris, the Robert Franks – treat cities as the complicated and dirty and glorious and oversized and alienating spaces there are.  So many of these artists, even in their reverence, are tinged with their own nostalgia for a simpler time and place.  And Wood’s paintings simply dwell in this nostalgia, capturing an unabashed respect and affection for his subjects, for his own home.  And despite the faint propagandistic whiff coming off these rolling hills, that fact remains that there was a communal moment in American culture that saw these paintings for the genuine optimism they conveyed.  Heck, the background set design all along the yellow brick road in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz is modeled after Grant Wood’s paintings – this was a view of America that everyone, for this particular moment, off of this particular depression, going into this particular war, was proud to share.

And we’re in a different moment now – a different depression, different domestic and cultural wars.  And the thing about polarization is that we put so much energy into vilifying the perceived other side, questioning how they could possibly love what they love, that it distracts us from any sense of our own optimism, why we love our own values, who we are, and why they just might love theirs, and who they are.  We see them as we want to see them; they see us the same way.  And sometimes the reality of it is a lot more straightforward than we think.  It’s incredibly hard to shame someone out of loving where they’re from.  It informs your childhood, your politics, your family, your memory.  Grant Wood understood this.  After all, nostalgia, is, in the words of Don Draper, a delicate and potent thing.  So maybe the way we inch ourselves back to one another, back towards an America that we can once again be proud to share, is to acknowledge this seemingly simple, fundamental reality that an awful lot of people in this big, complicated country, from all their defended corners of it, feel like there’s no place like home. And maybe that’s a start.

But, you know, sorry to be corny.