American gothic art

UNDERSTANDING ART
For analysis of paintings
by Regionalist painters
like Grant Wood, see:
How to Appreciate Paintings.

Among the most influential 20th century painters of the American Midwest, Grant Wood is famous for his unique contribution to Regionalism (c) - the American reaction to the country's dependence on European modern art which flourished during the interwar period.

Like other Regionalists his detailed, polished style of painting reflected traditional old-fashioned values found in small town America - an America with which he himself was very familiar. He was born on a farm in Iowa, where he remained for most of his life, teaching art in Cedar Rapids.

Grant wood american gothic meaning Anastasia Manioudaki 18 August min Read. Masterpiece Stories. Museum Stories. Under the blue sky of Iowa, a man and a woman stand solemnly in front of their house. They are farmers, as suggested by their clothing and the pitchfork the man is holding.

On visits to Europe between and he encountered the highly detailed realism of 15th-century Flemish painting, as well as works of the German Renaissance of the time. Applying this to his idiosyncratic depictions of rural America he earned himself the nickname of "the Hans Memling of the American Midwest." See also his history paintingThe Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

American Gothic is unquestionably Wood's masterpiece and ranks among the finest portrait paintings of its day.

Like the Mona Lisa, it remains an enigmatic composition, but one which has become an icon of American art of the 20th century as well as one of the greatest paintings of Midwest Americana.

The picture depicts a middle-aged couple (usually interpreted as a farmer with either his wife or daughter) standing in front of their home, a wooden farmhouse built in the s architectural style known as Carpenter (or American) Gothic.

Little of the background is visible however, because the figures are so close to the viewer. Wood based the farmhouse on Dibble House, a building he saw in the small Iowan town of Eldon, and used his sister Nan (&#;) and Dr. Byron McKeeby (&#;) his dentist, as models for the couple, dressing them in traditional clothes.

Their resemblance to the stereotypical image of Midwest rural folks, complete with pitchfork and dungarees, led many art critics to interpret the work as a satirical commentary on small-town culture.

Grant wood american gothic meaning pdf But what drove him to paint it? It is an image that most of us know by heart: a man menacingly holds a pitchfork, while a woman stands by in Sunday best, as stiff as a rod. Behind them is a timber house with an eerie black window. This is American Gothic, an icon of American art, and an austere emblem of rural life in the mid-western United States. Painted by Grant Wood in , the artwork has become the subject of study and parody throughout the art world for nearly years.

In fact, it raised a storm of protest when a copy of the image appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Readers were outraged by Wood's portrayal of them as grim-faced, puritans. But in fact Wood created American Gothic as an affirmative statement about traditional American values: as an act of reassurance just as the Great Depression was beginning to bite.

The two people, living in their sturdy well-crafted wooden house, armed with their down-to-earth qualities of resilience, fortitude and pride, represent those who are most likely to overcome the hardship of the s. As it happens, encouraged in part by Wood's close association with populist Midwestern painters, such as Thomas Hart Benton () and John Steuart Curry (), opinion rallied behind the painting which has become an iconic pictorial statement of American pioneer culture.