American Gothic
American Gothic is a 1930 painting by Grant Wood in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It depicts a farmer standing beside his daughter – often mistakenly assumed to be his wife. Figures were modeled by Wood’s sister Nan Wood Graham and their dentist Dr. Byron McKeeby. The woman is dressed in a colonial print apron evoking 20th-century rural Americana.
About American Gothic in brief
American Gothic is a 1930 painting by Grant Wood in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. It depicts a farmer standing beside his daughter – often mistakenly assumed to be his wife. The figures were modeled by Wood’s sister Nan Wood Graham and their dentist Dr. Byron McKeeby. The woman is dressed in a colonial print apron evoking 20th-century rural Americana. The plants on the porch of the house are mother-in-law’s tongue and beefsteak begonia, which also appear in Wood’s 1929 portrait of his mother, Woman with Plants. It was displayed in Paris at the Musée de l’Orangerie and in London at the Royal Academy of Arts in its first showings outside the United States. It is one of the most familiar images of 20th century American art and has been widely parodied in American popular culture. The image soon began to be reproduced in newspapers, first by the Chicago Evening Post, and then in New York, Boston, Kansas City, and Indianapolis.
However, when the image finally appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, there was a backlash. Wood protested that he had not painted a caricature of Iowans but a depiction of rural life. In a 1941 letter, Wood said that, in general, I have found, the people who resent the painting are those who feel that they resemble the portrayal of small-town life along lines of Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley, who were critical of depictions of rural America along the lines of the paintings of the 1930s. The painting was meant to be a satire of the trend of critical depictions of small town life along line of the artists of the time. It remains part of the Chicago museum’s collection and is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Chicago.
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This page is based on the article American Gothic published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 29, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
