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A Painting with “Legs” Like All Good Cultural Icons, Gothic’S Meaning Is in the Eye of the Beholder, and the Earliest Onlookers Weren’T Too Pleased

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A Painting with “Legs” Like All Good Cultural Icons, Gothic’S Meaning Is in the Eye of the Beholder, and the Earliest Onlookers Weren’T Too Pleased RightNow-final 4/7/05 2:47 PM Page 10 RightThe expanding Now Harvard universe FORMER FARMERS OF AMERICA Wood’s third-place winner appeared in newspapers across the country, catapult- ing the stern-looking couple to fame. A Painting with “Legs” Like all good cultural icons, Gothic’s meaning is in the eye of the beholder, and the earliest onlookers weren’t too pleased. ike the poems Emily Dickinson Wood entered the painting in a compe- “Everybody took too seriously that we stored in her attic, or John Stein- tition at the Art Institute of Chicago. The should think about who these people are beck’s repeatedly rejected early prize committee rejected it, but a trustee in the real world,” Biel says. One Iowa manuscripts, one of America’s urged the committee to reconsider (and farm wife insisted that Wood should best-known paintings was almost even purchased the work and convinced “have his head bashed in.” Another wrote, Llost. American Gothic, Grant Wood’s ubiq- the museum’s backers to reimburse him “If this is all our work and progress has uitous vision of Midwestern farmers pos- and accept the painting for display). Few brought us (Iowa farmers’ wives), we ing before their home, wedged its way people remember which paintings won might as well quit the job and take up into history by winning third prize in a first and second place, Biel says, but bootlegging….We at least have progressed Chicago art competition, says Steven Biel, senior lecturer and director of studies in ©TEE AND CHARLES ADDAMS FOUNDATION history and literature and the author of a new book, American Gothic: The Life of Amer- ica’s Most Famous Painting. “If it hadn’t won anything,” he adds, “it would’ve gone home to Iowa, where no one but Wood’s friends would’ve seen it.” Instead, the image has become synonymous with America itself. The Iowa-born Wood had been a suc- cessful schoolteacher and soldier (and a failed jewelry maker and expatriate) by the time he spotted the house he would make famous, on a car ride in Eldon, Iowa. He had finished three paintings of people posing in front of haystacks and barns, rounded trees, and bright blue skies, and another of a typical Iowa farm- house where Eldon’s art gallery had been established—a painting that circulated among art patrons, who thought little of it. In 1930, these visual interests merged into American Gothic. In Charles Addams’s 1961 cartoon, the American Gothic couple climb down from the canvas and walk into life. 10 May - June 2005 RightNow-final 4/7/05 2:47 PM Page 11 beyond the three-tined pitchfork!” Wood tried to quell the criticism, insisting that the couple in the painting weren’t Iowans, weren’t even necessarily farmers, but simply “the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.” His sister, Nan Wood, who had modeled for the painting (with Byron McKeeby, a Cedar Rapids dentist), maintained that her character was not the farmer’s wife, but his daughter, “one of those terribly nice and proper girls who get their chief joy in life out of going to Christian En- deavor [a youth group].” For all their © HALLMARK CARDS,.2005 REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION public-relations e≠orts, neither Barbie® and Ken® dolls adopt the American Wood nor his sister seemed able to Gothic pose in a Hallmark anniversary card (above). In a Marisa Acocella cartoon pub- convince Iowans that the painting lished in the New Yorker just after the 9/11 wasn’t a satire at their expense. attacks (right), the couple’s faces appear sad “Maybe those are self-hating Puri- and sympathetic rather than stern. tan repressive Midwestern people. In the cultural climate of 1930, that’s how in the New Yorker showed “I ♥ NY” T- Biel started the book, he says, because lots of people perceived it,” Biel explains. shirts on the couple; others have used the the couple “nagged him.” Writing their “Within a very few years, though, they image to make arguments about subse- history didn’t resolve the relationship. were wholesome, virtuous, hardworking quent U.S. foreign policy. “I’m still disturbed that ‘we’ would want Middle Americans who exhibited re- These disparate interpretations of the to embrace their self-righteousness, their silience in the thick of the Depression and image rely on two constants, Biel con- purity, their certainty, as the essence of into World War II.” Indeed, by 1935 the tends. The first is that elusive but quin- America, as who ‘we’ are at our best,” he meaning of the image had shifted and the tessential “American” element. The sec- writes. Or put more simply, “The creepi- couple (whoever they were) became sym- ond is its transparency. “You get into it ness of it,” he says, “is that it isn’t seen as bols of American virtue—and in 1941 For- and you get out of it very quickly—into creepy.” �jina moore tune magazine argued that the painting’s something extra-artistic,” he says, “some- “don’t tread on me character” would make thing that has nothing to do with the steven biel e-mail address: a good war poster. Wood’s painting joined painting,” [email protected] works by Woody Guthrie, James Agee and Walker Evans, Theodore Dreiser, and oth- ers who, Biel writes, began “to document ROAD TRAFFIC AUGURS ILL the lives of ‘ordinary’ Americans and dis- cover or preserve a usable national past.” The painting had become a celebratory— Driving Birds Away and white—definition of the United ©THE NEW YORKER COLLECTION 2001 MARISA ACOCELLA FROM CARTOONBANK.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. States. (In 1942, Gordon Parks, then a pho- f you were a bobolink thinking speeding machines—apparently creates tographer for a New Deal agency, posed an about breeding, you would avoid lay- the broad avoidance zone on either side of African-American woman with a broom ing your eggs within three-quarters the road, a wide swath of degraded habi- and bucket in front of an American flag of a mile of either side of a busy four- tat invisible to passing motorists, where and called the photograph “American lane highway that runs by Thoreau’s certain birds don’t go or don’t breed. Gothic.” It circulated much later, after IWalden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, Richard T.T. Forman and colleagues Parks attained fame.) or within a quarter mile of the through studied the impact of di≠erent-sized The 1950s and ’60s ushered in parodies. street connecting Lincoln to Concord. roads on the behavior of grassland birds American Gothic played in cereal commer- The 30,000-plus cars, trucks, and motor- in a 150-square-mile area along a 15-mile cials and Saks Fifth Avenue ads, The Music cycles speeding along Route 2 each week- stretch of Route 2, just to the west-north- Man and Green Acres, and appeared in po- day, and the 8,000 to 15,000 vehicles on the west of Cambridge, where Forman is pro- litical cartoons and visual send-ups. After through street, make noise. That fessor of advanced environmental studies September 11, a Marisa Acocella cartoon noise—not exhaust stink or the sight of in the field of landscape ecology at the Harvard Magazine 11.
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