Grant Wood and American Gothic

Artist Grant Wood was born in Iowa on February 13th in 1892. He attended the Chicago Art Institute and visited Paris. It was in Europe, where artists gathered to sip brandy and wait for inspiration, that Wood realized all his best ideas came to him while milking cows. He returned to Iowa where he became a cornerstone of the Regionalist Movement, in which artists adopted the style of American folkloric painting. Regionalists like Wood painted the people and places they knew best located within the American heartland.

Self Portrait by Grant Wood

Wood is perhaps best known for his painting American Gothic from 1930. In it, a man and a woman stand side-by-side in front of a farmhouse with a Gothic-style window, and the man holds a pitchfork. Wood used his sister and dentist as models. Though many viewed the painting as a satirical view of rural American life, Wood declared that it showed the resilience of two Midwesterners on the frontier. This idea took hold during the Great Depression, but when the Depression had ended and WW II was over American Gothic fell out of favor. Many Americans wanted to forget the hard times.

American Gothic by Grant Wood

Still, American Gothic is considered one of the top three paintings that Americans recognize today, along with the Mona Lisa and Whistler’s Mother. One reason for its continued popularity may be because it's often recreated with different people in place of the farmer and his daughter, or with the farmer and daughter in different clothing or settings. Pop culture recreations have included everything from the farmer and daughter as the Clintons, to the farmer and daughter as Marilyn Manson and Marilyn Monroe. The scene has even been depicted as underwater with the pair wearing scuba helmets, or with the two standing in front of a McDonald’s.

If you’d like to learn more about Grant Wood and one of America’s most famous paintings, here are a couple books to try.

American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting by Steven Biel 
Steven Biel explores the enduring life of America's most popular painting. American Gothic has been interpreted as both a critique and a celebration of rural life, and it seems to speak deeply to our ideas and feelings about American-ness. The image was first seen as a critique of Midwestern Puritanism and what H.L. Mencken called "the booboisie." During the Depression, it came to represent endurance in hard times through the quintessential American values of thrift, work, and faith. Later, in television, advertising, politics, and popular culture, American Gothic evolved into parody - all the while remaining a lodestar by which one might measure closeness or distance from the American heartland.

Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed by Brady Roberts 
Grant Wood's paintings epitomized the Regionalist movement and attracted an immense audience. This book, published as the catalog for the traveling exhibit which premiered at the Davenport Museum of Art in Iowa (1995), is richly illustrated with some sixty of Wood's paintings and preparatory studies. The text examines Modernist influences on the artist, specifically in relation to his abstract design principles and the lasting influence of Neo-Impressionism on his painting.