American Classic
YOU KNOW THE PAINTING. It's the most famous American painting of the 20th century, perhaps of all time. It has been endlessly reproduced, imitated, and parodied. If we had any sense, we'd put it on the dollar bill. You probably know that it is called American Gothic, that it was painted by Grant Wood (in 1930), and that the original hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. But if, like me, you always wanted to know more about this much analyzed, but still enigmatic, painting, then by all means read Steven Biel's new book. He provides a lively, well-written, concise, and effectively organized account of the painting's genesis, the history of its reception by the general public and art critics, and the many controversies it has sparked over the years.
After reading this book, you will find yourself looking at this overly familiar work of art with fresh eyes, noting details you never spotted before, and wondering how such a deceptively simple painting could lead to so much discussion and debate.
Biel's book is an example of Cultural Studies at its best. He writes with a general audience in view and avoids the kind of dense jargon and obscure theoretical formulations that often make scholarly prose impenetrable to even educated readers these days. The great strength of Biel's book is the way he sets American Gothic in the broadest possible cultural context. By the time he is through, we learn that the history of this one painting is virtually the history of 20th-century America in microcosm. In obvious and sometimes not-so-obvious ways, the story of the painting intersects with fundamental moments in United States history, such as the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. By relating American Gothic to these and other important historical events, Biel shows that the Cultural Studies approach can genuinely enrich our understanding of art.
Biel rejects a narrowly aesthetic approach to the painting, which would concentrate on its purely formal properties. Rather than limit American Gothic to the isolated realm of High Art, Biel traces the many ways this painting has broken out of the confines of the museum and the art history textbook and circulated freely in the vibrant realm of American popular culture. We see the familiar couple popping up in musicals as diverse as The Music Man and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or in television programs from The Dick Van Dyke Show to Green Acres. In the many useful illustrations in the book, we view one odd couple after another stepping into the shoes of the famously posed Iowa couple: Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr, Buddy Ebsen and Irene Ryan as Jed and Granny Clampett from the Beverly Hillbillies, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie--even Ken and Barbie, looking more doll-like than usual.
Biel is clearly having fun with his subject, but at the same time, he makes a serious point. For a work of art truly to come alive, it needs to have a wide impact throughout a culture, and must be adopted and even appropriated by people from all walks of life for their own purposes. Charles Addams was right in his famous 1961 New Yorker cartoon to picture the American Gothic couple coming to life and promenading by a startled guard, presumably out into the streets of Middle America, where they belong and have been welcomed and embraced.
Working in the Cultural Studies mode, Biel, of course, feels obligated to go for the intellectual hat trick of race/class/gender analysis, but even here he demonstrates restraint and avoids the excesses of his colleagues. For example, Biel brings up a sort of Gay Studies reading of American Gothic--Robert Hughes's claim that "Wood was a timid and deeply closeted homosexual" and the painting is "an exercise in sly camp, the expression of a gay sensibility so cautious that it can hardly bring itself to mock its objects openly." Biel wisely rejects this reading, and on the refreshing grounds that Hughes is simply unable to offer any evidence for his claims.
On the issue of race, Biel eventually gets around to noting what might seem obvious from the beginning: that the figures in American Gothic are both white. But instead of accusing Wood of racism, Biel uses the occasion to discuss one of the many interesting variations on American Gothic, a photograph with the same title taken by the African-American artist Gordon Parks in Washington in 1942. In front of an enormous American flag hanging on the wall at the Farm Security Administration, Parks posed a black cleaning woman named Ella Watson--posed her in a way that clearly calls to mind the Grant Wood painting. According to Biel, this photo made an important statement: "The normative whiteness of the now iconic American Gothic did not go unrecognized and unchallenged."
In the end, Biel evidently feels uncomfortable with the fact that American Gothic has become an icon of Middle America, and that means white, middle-class, heterosexual America. He writes: "I prefer a different American Gothic, one in which the 'they' of the framed figures have not become the 'we' of the nation." But fortunately, Biel does not let his politically correct attitudes interfere with his telling the story of American Gothic and giving the painting its due. He is legitimately trying to complicate our understanding of the painting, and constantly points out ways in which it may not mean what we think it means.
On the literal level, most people assume that American Gothic portrays a farmer and his considerably younger wife. In fact, the models for the painting were Wood's sister Nan and his dentist, Byron McKeeby. Nan claimed that the painting is really supposed to depict a father and daughter, and Wood backed her up on several occasions, leaving American Gothic shrouded in ambiguity at the most basic level. As Biel notes, a critic named John E. Seery went so far as to suggest that the female figure may be both daughter and wife to the man. American Gothic, indeed! Biel adds that a 1988 horror movie named after the painting used the slogan: "Families that slay together stay together"!
Biel's account of American Gothic is structured around what he regards as three stages in the painting's reception, which he labels "iconoclasm," "icon," and "parody." Most of the early commentators on the painting viewed it as satirizing the figures it depicts in the cynical spirit of H.L. Mencken and other sophisticated debunkers of homespun American myths in the 1920s. According to this interpretation, Wood is ridiculing the narrow-mindedness and stern morality of the prim and proper man and woman in the painting.
As Biel writes: "Contemporary viewers saw in the painting an indigenous anti-Puritanism and anti-Philistinism, a native anti-nativism, a cosmopolitan critique of provincialism, a modern send-up of repression."
Wood repeatedly denied that he meant to be critical of the American Gothic couple, especially in the face of angry Iowans who charged that he had betrayed his native state by making fun of its citizens. Biel shows that, as the Depression deepened in the 1930s, viewers turned to Wood's painting for an emblem of the qualities of the American people, and, above all, their ability to endure. The very sternness and Stoicism of the man and woman, which had made them seem laughable to the fun-loving generation of the 1920s, became a virtue to victims of the Depression--a tribute to the capacity of the average American to live through the toughest of times. As Biel writes, "The old-fashioned figures, those objects of ridicule among the knowing disciples of Mencken, come to embody an enduring, essential American spirit. No longer anachronistic, they are upright and steadfast, determined to overcome hard times and fearlessly forge ahead into the future. Depression-era viewers do not look down on the man and woman; they look up to them, see their best selves in them."
As we get closer to the present, Biel sees American Gothic entering a postmodern hall of mirrors, in which the image is ceaselessly reflected and refracted, splintering into a myriad of meanings. Instead of trying to figure out what the painting really signifies, American popular culture has employed it for a variety of purposes, deliberately severed from anything Wood may have originally meant. Biel argues: "Parody was a signature mode of the 1960s--a vital component of an emerging postmodern sensibility that delighted in the endless recycling of texts and images, a playful 'quotation' and self referentiality, in collapsing distinctions between high and low culture, between the serious and the frivolous." As Biel documents in detail, by now American Gothic circulates so freely throughout our culture that we have to remind ourselves that, behind all the parodies and recreations, the cartoons and advertisements, there is an original of the painting still hanging in a Chicago museum.
As Biel neatly sums up the situation today, "Since the late 1960s, it has been much easier to be ironic about the 'original' image than to see the image as ironic."
Biel views the wide range of interpretations and appropriations of American Gothic as a tribute to its inherent value: "Were it not for the painting's aesthetic richness, American Gothic would not have opened itself up to a variety of interpretive possibilities, to so much cultural work over the years." This judgment is sound, but it points to the major weakness of Biel's book: the fact that he more or less takes the "aesthetic richness" of American Gothic for granted. Although, as a cultural historian, Biel is justified in leaving formal analysis to others, in such a brief book he might have devoted a few pages to summarizing critical appreciation of the painting. Wood himself, at one point, described it as a formal experiment, an exercise in verticality.
As several commentators have stressed, the patterning of American Gothic is quite remarkable. The vertical lines of the pitchfork, for example, are immediately echoed in the adjacent stitching on the man's overalls, and inverted in the central gable window that defines the architectural style of the house as what was known as Carpenter Gothic in the Midwest. The window also places a cross between the man and the woman, which resonates with the vertical line of the lightning rod atop the house, as well as the church steeple faintly visible in the
left background. Before classifying American Gothic with American naive painting and dismissing it, as some hostile critics have done, we need to pay attention to how carefully composed the picture really is.
Biel's book would have been stronger if, among the many contexts in which he discusses American Gothic, one of them had been the full range of Wood's achievement as an artist. Biel makes surprisingly few references to Wood's other paintings, and only one of them is reproduced in the book. The result is, unfortunately, to reinforce the mistaken impression that Grant Wood was a one-trick pony, or, more precisely, a one-painting wonder. In fact, Wood's output as a painter was substantial and more diverse in subject matter and style than most people realize. As much as I admire American Gothic, I do not think it is Wood's best painting. I prefer his Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931) which, with its night lighting, dramatic aerial "camera" angle, and uncanny shadows, has a surreal effect, reminiscent of René Magritte--a good reminder that, however American Wood's paintings may be, he remained open to significant influences from Europe.
Even though Biel is writing a book of cultural studies, and not of art appreciation, he should have confronted the issue of Wood's quality as a painter more fully and directly than he does. In his account of the reception of American Gothic, he cites at length so many vicious and scathing comments that he leaves his reader wondering what his response to these withering critiques would be. If Wood is as worthless and noxious a painter as so many famous art critics have claimed--and the gamut runs from H.W. Janson to Clement Greenberg to Hilton Kramer--why is Biel devoting a whole book to American Gothic, and why does he expect us to take the painting seriously? Biel's book, as a whole, amounts to a defense of the value of American Gothic, but he really needed to articulate the principles of this defense better and not leave the critical attacks on the painting unanswered.
The history of art critics' hostility to American Gothic turns out to be instructive, but Biel fails to draw out the lessons it teaches. American Gothic was an early victim of political correctness in art criticism. We think of criticizing art works for ideological reasons as a recent development, but "political correctness" is actually a time-honored term among Marxists, and already in the 1930s, they were subjecting art to doctrinal scrutiny. Some of the early attacks on Wood took a form that has become common in contemporary left-wing aesthetic criticism, especially of literature--damning the artist for what he did not do, for what his works omit--in this case, condemning Wood for what he did not paint. Some critics in the 1930s claimed that Wood was papering over the disaster of the Depression by his optimistic images of the rich farmland of the Midwest, when he should instead have been painting the Dust Bowl and scenes of agricultural strife.
Given the rather genial image most people have of the painter of American Gothic, readers may be surprised to learn that Grant Wood was subject to the ultimate charge of the politically correct crowd: He was called a fascist. Evidently, American Gothic was a bit too American for some art critics. Precisely because the painting began to be regarded as a national icon, some critics turned on Wood and associated him with various sinister nationalist movements at home and abroad. As Biel notes, Lewis Mumford linked Wood with his fellow Midwestern painter, Thomas Hart Benton, and accused them of representing "the corn-fed Middle West against the anemic East" and thus threatening to "become a National Symbol for the patrioteers." Later, in 1943, H.W. Janson (yes, the Janson, author of the famous textbook History of Art) pulled out all the stops in a tirade against Wood, charging that he was substituting "'Americanism,' i.e. nationalism, for esthetic values of any kind." In a nasty attempt at guilt by association, Janson, a refugee from Nazi Germany, went on to link Wood and his fellow Midwestern painters with the most reactionary developments in European art: "In fact, almost every one of the ideas constituting the regionalist credo could be matched more or less verbatim from the writings of Nazi experts on art."
Biel dutifully reports these negative judgments on Wood, and rightly so, since they are an essential part of the record of his reception. I, for one, take a kind of cold comfort in the realization that academics were already recklessly throwing around the term "fascist" more than half-a-century ago. But it is nevertheless surprising that Biel, at times, appears to endorse these critiques of Wood, and does not feel compelled to refute even the charge that the subject of his book was no better than a Nazi. By contrast, James Dennis, in his Renegade Regionalists, documents in detail that Janson was ignorant of Wood's work and that his presentation of the painter's views was distorted.
More is at stake here than one painter's reputation. In a conflict that Biel sketches but does not thoroughly analyze or try to adjudicate, American Gothic stood at the flashpoint of one of the great aesthetic debates of the 20th century. Attacks on the work were among the opening salvos in the relentless war of the modernist art establishment against representational painting and in favor of abstract expressionism. In the modernist view, this was a battle between a mean-spirited, narrow-minded regionalism and a generous, forward-looking internationalism. But for those, like me, who are skeptical of the preeminent value of abstract expressionism, the battle could be reformulated as an attempt on the part of a single brand of 20th-century painting to erect itself as the one and only authentic form of modern art, while condemning all alternative visions to the realm of inauthenticity and kitsch, to use Clement Greenberg's favorite term of reproach.
The way Wood functioned as a negative example for the modernist camp in this debate is summed up in a passage Biel quotes from the Chicago Times art critic, Fritzi Weisenborn, writing in 1942: "Art is never national but always international in interest and content. Grant Wood's work which hangs in the gallery of honor at the Art Institute contributes nothing scientifically, emotionally, or esthetically to art or society. It is the culmination of a trend of escapist and isolationist thought which was popular with some groups yesterday, but which is definitely obsolete today."
Was Grant Wood a mere regionalist, and does American Gothic represent a hopelessly antiquated form of painting, made obsolete by the triumph of abstract expressionism in the works of painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning? I cannot adequately deal with these complex questions here, and must refer readers interested in the issues to the Dennis book I mentioned, whose full title is Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry, and to Erika Doss's Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. These two books appear to be among Biel's chief sources, and show in much greater depth what was truly at stake in the reception of American Gothic. They are serious and sustained efforts to rethink the history of 20th-century art, and to consider whether the triumph of abstract expressionism was as inevitable and progressive as many art historians have claimed.
I will offer on my own a brief defense of Wood as a "regionalist" painter who may yet be regarded as modern (if not modernist). Like many artists in the first decades of the 20th century, he made his obligatory pilgrimage to Paris in the 1920s, and was overwhelmed by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. He returned to America and started to produce a series of highly derivative paintings, including the requisite homage to Van Gogh, with a composition called Old Shoes in 1926. But Wood eventually decided that, if he wished to be an American painter, he could not go on copying European models slavishly. In his writings on the subject, he presents this as an issue of colonialism, and he sought to become free in his art from European domination. (Although not free from all European influences; as many critics have noted, American Gothic is heavily indebted to the work of Hans Memling, which Wood saw during a visit to Munich.)
Wood's turn to distinctively American subject matter, and especially the distinctively American landscape of the Midwest, was an attempt to carve out a distinctively American place for himself in the history of art. One might, in fact, turn the tables on Wood's politically correct critics and point out that, in one respect, he seems quite fashionable in contemporary terms: He can be viewed as a postcolonial painter--an artist who wanted to escape the iron grip of his European heritage, and sought inspiration in his native soil to do so.
This would put Wood in good company. His work, together with that of fellow "regionalists" Benton and Curry, can be linked under the postcolonial rubric with that of the Mexican muralists, Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros, as well as with that of several "regionalist" female painters, like Georgia O'Keeffe (American Southwest) and Emily Carr (Pacific Northwest). Like Carr, other distinguished Canadian painters, including Lawren Harris and his fellow members of the Group of Seven, could also be classified as "postcolonial regionalists," along with several Australian painters, such as Russell Drysdale. All these painters felt that the way to be truly modern was to draw upon European techniques but to use them to represent the distinctive reality of the new lands in which they lived.
This representational painting looks reactionary from the perspective of the standard narrative that sees all 20th-century art as moving inexorably toward the triumph of abstraction, but it looks quite progressive from the perspective of painters all around the world who were trying to find ways to advance the cause of art by adapting European techniques of painting to their local circumstances. This "regionalism" actually became a source of strength for these painters and accounts for the way they maintained links with a broader public, even as they lost the favor of the elite art establishment.
As Biel shows, whatever else one may say about American Gothic, it has spoken to the American people and been embraced by them in ways that have eluded thousands of abstract canvases, for all the favorable publicity and promotion they received from art critics. High Modernist critics like Greenberg attribute Wood's success to the ineradicable American taste for kitsch. Such critics actually seem to hold the popularity of American Gothic against it: If the masses like the painting, then there must be something wrong with it. But perhaps the popularity of American Gothic can teach us something: that Americans take a special interest in a work of art that seeks to represent something distinctively and recognizably American.
And is there anything wrong with this, or anything peculiar to the American public or American artists? Vermeer was a Dutch "regionalist," who painted Dutch subjects for Dutch customers. Many of the great European artists could be described as regionalists. It was only the promoters of abstract expressionism who managed to turn "regionialism" into a dirty word and condemn artists as parochial simply because they wanted to root their art in the concrete world with which they were familiar. (Something artists have been doing since the cave paintings of Lascaux, an early example of "French regionalism.")
Is it really true, as we saw Fritizi Weisenborn claim, that "art is never national but always international in intent and content"? There was nothing "international" about Vermeer's art in his own day; his subject matter and appeal barely reached the national level. If we no longer regard him as a "regionalist" today, the reason is that the development of an international art market, and an international network of museums, has lifted Vermeer out of his original local context. Nevertheless, his paintings remain as identifiably Dutch as Delft china or Edam cheese--though, of course, of much greater artistic merit. It is abstract expressionism that is anomalous in the history of art, not Wood's regionalism.
I am not trying to claim that Grant Wood was as great a painter as Johannes Vermeer--only that the mere fact that he can be described as a regionalist does not mean that he was not a true artist, or that he had nothing to contribute to the development of 20th-century painting. The key to reinterpreting the history of modern art may turn out to be a renewed appreciation of the artists whom High Modernist critics were eager to pigeonhole and dismiss as mere regionalists.
In the end, when I search for an explanation for the success of American Gothic, I look to the title. We have become so familiar with the name of the painting that we forget how suggestive it is and how pregnant with meaning. The title stations the painting in place and time, evoking a national context and a specific period style. Indeed, the name conjures up the very idea of regionalism, almost as if Wood were filing the painting under an art-historical category: "What is this painting? It is American Gothic."
The title, thus, points away from the demands of High Modernism--this is not going to be an "international" painting but an American one, and it is not going to break completely with artistic tradition, but will somehow be related to the historical concept of the Gothic. In short, this is a painting that will not seek to abstract from geography and history. It will, instead, derive its power from being rooted in a specific place and a specific artistic tradition. And the hybrid nature of the title--its almost oxymoronic character--points to what is central in Wood's achievement as an artist. (As for Wood himself, as an oxymoron, Lincoln Kirstein once referred to him as "an Iowa Memling.")
Wood seeks to produce the paradox of an American Gothic, to combine the best of the New and the Old Worlds--a synthesis he found adumbrated in the quaint house that inspired the painting and led to its name. The quest to bring together the American and the Gothic in this particular painting is emblematic of the course of Wood's career in general. He sought a way to be a recognizably American painter without wholly rejecting European artistic traditions. Indeed, he sought a way to develop a distinctively American style by drawing upon European traditions, while at the same time trying to advance those traditions by freshly applying them to the new subjects available on American soil.
