American Gothic

American Gothic

Grant Wood, 1930

Oil on beaverboard

74.3 × 62.4 cm, 29¼ × 24½ in

Art Institute of Chicago

American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood from 1930. Portraying a pitchfork-holding farmer and his daughter (though often mistaken to be his wife) in front of a house of Carpenter Gothic style, it is one of the most familiar images in 20th century American art.

Wood wanted to depict the traditional roles of men and women as the man is holding a pitchfork symbolizing hand labor. Wood referenced late 19th century photography and posed his sitters in a manner reminiscent of early American portraiture.

Creation

In 1930, Grant Wood, an American painter with European training, noticed a small white house built in "Carpenter Gothic" architecture in Eldon, Iowa. Wood decided to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house."^[1] He recruited his sister Nan to model the woman, dressing her in a colonial print apron mimicking 19th century Americana. The man is modeled on Wood's dentist, Byron McKeeby of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The three-pronged pitchfork was echoed in the stitching of the man's clothing, the windows of the house, and the structure of the man's face. Each element was painted separately; the models sat separately and never stood in front of the house.^[1]

Reception

Wood entered the painting in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. The judges deemed it a "comic valentine," but a museum patron convinced them to award the painting the third medal and $300 cash prize. The patron also convinced the Art Institute to buy the painting, where it remains today. The image soon began to be reproduced in newspapers, first by the Chicago Evening Post and then in New York, Boston, Kansas City, and Indianapolis. However, Wood received a backlash when the image finally appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Iowans were furious at their depiction as "pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers". One farmwife threatened to bite Wood's ear off. Wood protested that he had not painted a caricature of Iowans but a depiction of Americans. Nan, apparently embarrassed at being depicted as the wife of someone twice her age, began telling people that the painting was of a man and his daughter, a point on which Wood remained silent.^[1]

American Gothic (1942) by Gordon Parks was the first prominent parody of the painting.

Art critics who had favorable opinions about the painting, such as Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley, also assumed the painting was meant to be a satire of rural small-town life. It was thus seen as part of the trend towards increasingly critical depictions of rural America, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson's 1919 Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis' 1920 Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess in literature.^[1]

However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit. Wood assisted this transition by renouncing his Bohemian youth in Paris and grouping himself with populist Midwestern painters, such as John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, who revolted against the dominance of East Coast art circles. Wood was quoted in this period as stating, "All the good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow."^[1] This Depression-era understanding of the painting as a depiction of an authentically American scene prompted the first well-known parody, a 1942 photo by Gordon Parks of cleaning woman Ella Watson, shot in Washington, D.C.^[1]

A very Rare limited edition print of American Gothic has surfaced in Scottsboro, Alabama. This print with the Stone City Seal was originally given to the mayor of Huntsville, Al. by Miss Iowa World 1978.

Parodies

American Gothic is one of the few images to reach the status of cultural icon, along with Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch's The Scream.^[1] It is thus one of the most reproduced — and parodied — images ever. Many artists have replaced the two people with other known couples and replaced the house with well known houses. References and parodies of the image have been numerous for generations, appearing regularly in such media as postcards, magazines, animated cartoons, advertisements, comic books, and television shows.

• Postcards replacing the couple with sitting US Presidents and Presidential nominees (and their spouses) are often popular products, for instance Ronald and Nancy Reagan or Bill and Hillary Clinton.
• Paul Newman posed in the same way as the man on the labels of Newman's Own, his food product line.
• The movie Good Fences starring Whoopi Goldberg also has a parody of the painting on its cover.
• The movie Beauty and the Beast has a brief image of the clock Cogsworth and Mrs. Potts holding a broom during the song Human Again.
• In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, 'Riff-Raff' (Richard O'Brien) and 'Magenta' (Patricia Quinn) pose as the couple in front of the arched church doors during the song "Dammit Janet", after the wedding of Brad and Janet's friends Betty Monroe and Ralph Hapschatt. At the end, when they reveal their alien identities, the pitchfork has turned into a trident-shaped raygun.
• The cover of the book The Art of the Laugh.
• In the satirical on-line game Kingdom of Loathing, one monster in the Haunted Gallery is "a guy with a pitchfork, and his wife."
• As part of the long running "If Norman Rockwell depicted the 20th century" series, MAD printed a parody of the picture titled "American Gaythic", featuring two men.
• The picture is also parodied in the 1988 slasher film American Gothic (film) film poster starring Yvonne DeCarlo and Rod Steiger.
• In The Music Man, a musical by Meredith Willson, a brief visual reference is made during the "Iowa Stubborn" number as two men moving a very large picture frame stop in front of a man and woman, the man holding a pitchfork.
• In the town of Bulls, New Zealand, a mural featuring the couple with the head of a cow and a bull covers a garage door facing a main street. The town's mushroom-shaped water tank is in the background, transplanting the scene to Bulls.
• Lavender Magazine parodied the work for a special gardening issue (April 27, 2007), featuring drag queen Wanda Wisdom and podcast producer Bradley Traynor.
• During the first Men in Black (film) a spoof version of the painting can be glimpsed as a cover image on one of the supermarket tabloids K buys whilst investigating the disappearance of Edgar. The man's head is a skull with eyes.
• The traditional first panel of webcomic San Antonio Rock City by Mitch Clem.

Television

This image is a candidate for speedy deletion. It will be deleted after Thursday, 25 October 2007.

• After a resemblance was noted between Late Night with Conan O'Brien's host Conan O'Brien and Finland's President Tarja Halonen, occasional gags would pop-up comparing the two — one recurring one would be the two replacing the couple in American Gothic occasionally aired before cutting to a commercial, or as they return.
• Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie pose as the couple during the title and opening credits of their TV series The Simple Life.
• The painting in its original form is featured in the opening credits of Desperate Housewives. Posing the same style for a moment, the man then smiles to run off with some show girls, as the daughter scowls in disgust.
• The 1960s sitcom Green Acres also had the lead couple pose as the couple in the painting during their opening credits.
• Rocky & Bullwinkle also pose as the couple during certain skits in their TV show, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Also, one video of episodes of the series, released by Buena Vista, is called "Canadian Gothic," and the cover of the video has Dudley Do-Right and Nell Fenwick posing as the couple.
• Australian talk show Rove Live replaces the couple with Melissa Doyle and David Koch of Sunrise.
• On Courage the Cowardly Dog, Courage and his owners Muriel and Eustace visit The Louvre at night and all the works of art come to life. At the end of the show, Muriel sees the American Gothic painting and says, "That one reminds me of home." Then they all jump into the painting and end up back at their farm in Kansas.
• The Simpsons used the painting for a joke for the fifth season episode "Bart Gets an Elephant," in which, apparently, the family owns the original painting itself. While cleaning the living room, Bart absentmindedly begins to wipe the painting until he has rendered the entire canvas blank, revealing a message underneath that says, "If you can read this, you scrubbed too hard.–Grant Wood."
• A question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? read "Who did artist Grant Wood use as the model for the farmer in his classic painting American Gothic?" Nancy Christy knew it was his dentist, and it earned her $1,000,000.
• An episode of Doctor Who in the 2007 series, "Gridlock", features minor characters in the pre-credits sequence with identical clothing and appearance to the people in American Gothic.
• In a game of "Props" on the improvisational comedy show, Whose Line is it Anyway?, two of the performers - Drew Carey and Ryan Stiles - stand silently side by side, Ryan holding an orange, foam rubber object resembling a pitchfork. There is silence for a brief moment before the audience recognizes it as being reminiscent of American Gothic and promptly burst into laughter.
• The collectible miniatures game Dreamblade has the "infernal Gothic" figure, which resembles the farmer from American Gothic, only as a devil.
• In the classic Looney Tunes short "Louvre Come Back To Me!", Pepe LePew and Penelope Pussycat hide in the Louvre's air conditioning, his scent pervades into a gallery above, reaching American Gothic, and the figures' heads disappear into their costumes.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Artist Unknown," Squidward Tentacles is revealed to have made a version of the painting, with the two figures drawn in his likeness.
• Nickelodeon (TV Channel) reprises the painting using SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Star in a network promotional spot.
• It is used in a Showcase Showdown on a May 2007 episode of the game show The Price Is Right with a live-action model replacing the daughter and trying to excite the father with prizes that are in the showcase.
• In the HBO series Oz, Season 4, Episode 7, "A Town Without Pity", likenesses of the two prominent figures of the painting are featured in a narrative of how prisons in the US are mostly located in rural area of the country.
• In one episode of the PBS children's series Arthur, Arthur and Buster parody the two farmers in the painting in an episode that focused on famous artwork.

Also in an episode of boy meets world, Eric dresses as the farmer to try and ambush his brothers girlfriend

• In the first half of the nineteen-sixties, the iconic couple sang "they won't wilt when you pour on milk" as a brief part of a commercial for Kelloggs Corn Flakes featuring Homer and Jethro.

References

• Steven Biel (2005). American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-05912-X. 

Notes

External links

• About the painting, on the Art Institute's site
• The story of American Gothic
• Slate article about American Gothic
• American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting
• November 18, 2002, National Public Radio “Morning Edition” report about “American Gothic” by Melissa Gray that includes an interview with Art Institute of Chicago curator Daniel Schulman.
• June 6, 1991, National Public Radio “Morning Edition” report on Iowa's celebration of the centennial of Grant Wood's birth by Robin Feinsmith. Several portions of the report focus on “American Gothic”.
• February 13,1976, National Public Radio “All Things Considered” Cary Frumpkin interview with James Dennis, author of Grant Wood: A Study in American Art and Culture. The interview contains a discussion about "American Gothic".
• Clip of a 1960's cornflake commercial that parodies American Gothic

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