I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa.
--Grant Wood, on his famous 1930 painting American Gothic, so-called because the window on the top floor of the farmhouse is in the Gothic style, much like you would see on a medieval cathedral in Europe.
The actual house, in Eldon, Iowa. Built in 1881-82, the top floor window is thought to have been purchased through a mail order catalog.
By way of comparison, the pointy arch-shaped windows of a medieval cathedral in Europe, one that very nearly burned to the ground a few years back.
These guys never made it to that Iowa farmhouse.
Nan Goldin Graham, the artist's sister, and Dr. Byron McKeeby, the artist's dentist.
The artist himself in a 1932 self-portrait, a strapping Midwestern farm boy made good. Too strapping for some. A colleague named Lester Longman at The University of Iowa's School of Art tried to get Wood fired as a teacher, publicly citing the limitations of an artistic movement known as Regionalism, of which American Gothic was a prime example. Yawn. However, the complaints were much less esoteric behind closed doors. Longman complained to university officials about Wood's "personal persuasions", and that he had a "strange relationship" with a man helping him write his autobiography. It didn't help matters any that some of the rural workingmen in Wood's paintings occasionally felt the need to take off their shirts as they toiled under the hot sun. Remember, this was around 80 years ago, and a least a quarter of a century before Stonewall. What for some of us today is another welcome addition to the growing LGBTQ roster of historical figures, and what for the art historian adds another layer of meaning to Wood's work, would have been career-damning at the time, with a possible additional visit to a jail cell or mental ward. Fortunately for the artist, nothing was ever proven, and Wood kept his job. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1942, one day short of his 51st birthday.
As for the supposed artistic limitations of the Regionalist Movement (which also counted Thomas Hart Benton as a member), the main complaint seems to be that it romanticized rubes, celebrated unsophistication, and in its pursuit of the parochial, ignored the richness of the wider world. But perhaps Grant Wood, an American expatriate in Europe throughout much of the 1920s, appreciated how that wider world could make its way to some Iowan rube's house via a mail order catalog. Multiculturalism on the prairie.
Besides, there are some sophisticates who DO seek out the simplicities of rural living:
Nice homage, but what about the windows?
Arched, but not nearly pointy enough to be Hooterville Gothic, I'm afraid.
