One of the most famous and iconic American paintings of the 20th century is American Gothic by Grant Wood (1891-1942). American Gothic created quite a controversy in 1930 when it was first exhibited at the Art institute of Chicago and was awarded a $300 prize. Viewers of American Gothic either loved the painting or hated it.
The painting American Gothic is a double portrait of a farmer and his daughter in front of the farmhouse. The farmer looks directly and soberly at the viewer and holds a pitchfork. The daughter looks over toward her father with a similarly blank expression on her face. As simple as the painting appears, the meaning behind American Gothic has been interpreted in a variety of ways.
Grant Wood was initially inspired to paint the painting by a Gothic Revival style house and then further imagined who might live in such an American building. Wood recruited his dentist to pose as the farmer, his sister posed for the farmer’s daughter. Inspired by the Flemish Northern Renaissance portraiture of Jan Van Eyck, Wood was trying to recreate the intimacy of these realistic and unflinching portraits of people.
While the artist’s intention may have been otherwise, many perceived American Gothic as a parody of rigid, puritanical Midwestern thinking. People in Grant Wood’s home state of Iowa were upset over the image, feeling as if Wood were making fun of them as old-fashioned bumpkins. Wood was praised by art critics such as Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley who saw the painting as a satirical statement about small town America. Given the context of timing in the shadow of the Great Depression, the painting was also seen as a tribute to hard working Americans overcoming adversity.
The title, American Gothic, is perhaps what gives this painting its ambiguity. The title seems to imply that the tale of the farmer and his daughter is epic and perhaps from the Dark Ages. It seems the artist used the word Gothic to refer to the architecture more so than any underlying meaning, but the title is what it is and is therefore intriguingly open to interpretation.
However you choose to view American Gothic there is no denying that it is one of the most recognizable paintings in art history. (It is rivaled by Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch’s The Scream.) While American Gothic is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, there are also many works by Grant Wood at the Figge Museum in Iowa.
