Grant Wood, American Gothic

In the 1930s, artists known collectively as the Regionalists began to paint Midwestern themes. In 1931, at the height of the Depression, Grant Wood (1891-1942), who later taught at the University of Iowa, created American Gothic, which was purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago and established Wood’s national fame. American Gothic shows an elderly father with his unmarried daughter standing in front of their Gothic Revival framed house. The couple is dressed in old-fashioned clothes for the time. Wood’s sister Nan and his dentist posed for the figures and the house was modeled on an actual house in Eldon, Iowa. The daughter in the scene wears a homemade ricrac-edged apron and Wood’s mother’s cameo. The father clutches an old-fashioned three-tined pitchfork and the house behind the is a modest small-town home. The daughter’s long sad face echoes her father’s; she is unmarried and likely to stay that way. In 1931, husbands were hard to come by in the Midwest because many of the young men had fled from the farms to the city of Chicago for jobs.^[1]

The style of their house, from which the title of the painting is taken, is called Carpenter Gothic, a nineteenth-century style evoking both the humble modesty and old-fashioned ways of the residents as well as their religious intensity, which parallels the fervor of the medieval period when Gothic cathedrals were built. Wood further emphasizes his characters’ faith by developing numerous crosses within the façade, and by putting a church steeple in the distant background. We know they are orderly and clean, as suggested by the crisp drawing and severe horizontal and vertical composition. This propriety also stems from the primness of the woman’s conservative dress and hair and the suggestions that she carefully tends to the house, as she does to the plants on the front porch. The figures’ harsh frontality, the man’s firm grasp on his pitchfork, and his overalls suggest that they are hardworking and strong. There is no hint of modernity, and the simplicity and the austerity of the setting suggests that they are frugal. Nonetheless, many critics viewed Wood as ridiculing his sitters and their lifestyle, and indeed it does contain humor, such as the woman warily looking off to the side as if to make sure nothing untoward is occurring. But regardless of the interpretation, no one seemed to deny that the picture seemed to capture something fundamentally American, and especially Midwestern.^[2]