Homage to the Heartland

Eric K. Curtis, DDS

"I get most of my best ideas while milking a cow," said Grant Wood. While the quintessential midwestern regionalist artist actually accomplished many of his painterly celebrations of rural life from a Connecticut studio, his lifelong inspiration lay in the life he left back in his native Iowa. Wood’s most famous achievement, in fact, was to create for two of his fellow Iowans the most famous faces in the world.

In retrospect, the idea for his masterpiece probably came to him in bits and pieces, evolving stylistically with each new canvas, and it emerged finally not from squeezing an udder but from visiting a small town. Wood was living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1930 when he was invited to tiny Eldon, Iowa, to give the local citizens a painting demonstration. He was intrigued by a modest five-room house he found there, built in the 1880s in a style called "carpenter Gothic" for its prominent gable window. The artist immediately envisioned a portrait of a long, lean couple to emphasize the distinct vertical lines of the house.

Wood’s father once returned a book of Grimm’s fairy tales to a neighbor because he wanted his children to "read only true things." Likewise, no matter how playful his paintings, the artist demanded a thorough grounding in hard facts. Insisting on visual and historical accuracy, he studied the house in a pencil sketch, and again in a quick oil rendering. He had the place photographed. Then he went home to find his faces.

Pursuing a vision grounded in grass-roots imagery and local history, Wood had adopted the most primitive, exacting, detail-oriented style among American Scene realists (painters who portrayed simple country folk in a realistic way). He gave his models a stiff, unsmiling look, as if they were posing for a long-exposure nineteenth century photograph. This would be his interpretation of his ancestors. Wood finished the portrait in time for an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Jurors were unimpressed with the painting’s small size and deliberate quaintness. But one judge’s opinion prevailed, and it was awarded a bronze medal. Critical notice of the canvas rolled in right away from Boston and New York, and the Art Institute presciently offered Wood $300 for the piece.

American Gothic was an instant hit. The interpretations were fast, furious, and wide-ranging. Sophisticated Easterners, who regarded Wood as a social critic, howled at the gaunt figures of supposed religious probity and sexual repression. Iowans feared the painting was mocking their homespun looks. "That woman’s face," wrote one indignant local, "would positively sour milk." To viewers the pitchfork suggested instantly, if erroneously, that the subjects were farmers, and farm wives complained to the editor of the Des Moines Register that real farmers never looked that somber.

But while some saw fanatical grimness in the two figures, others saw strength, truth, and independence. Here was constancy in the face of change, a rugged determination that would triumph over the Depression. Wood insisted he meant to create warmth and humor, not parody: "To me they are basically good and solid people." He included the man’s pitchfork simply to suggest a pre-industrial age. He elongated their faces, he explained, "to go with this American Gothic house."

Whatever the interpretation of Wood’s careful, highly calculated rendering of real people, the picture touched a chord. Raw and honest, the couple identified the essence of middle America—a national portrait of the archetypal American family. It is perhaps the best recognized portrait in this country. It is undoubtedly the most copied. By the 1950s, American Gothic had begun a second life as popular icon. Meredith Wilson’s 1957 Broadway hit The Music Man featured actors striking the "American Gothic" pose to set the scene in River City, a small Iowa town. Artists and advertisers around the world rushed likewise to send their messages against the backdrop of American Gothic.

The reason goes back to the original ruckus surrounding the picture: Who are those people? As the image of grassroots America, American Gothic is the perfect medium to transmit broader meaning. Because the two are so universally recognized and can speak from so many positions—as rural people, farmers, upstanding, clean living folks, average Americans, and even senior citizens—they have been used to address all kinds of major social and political issues these past several decades. Art historian Wanda Corn calls the painting an "all-purpose blackboard" on which the whole country can writes its messages, voice its concerns, or market its products. In fact, she writes, the pair of faces of American Gothic is practically a barometer of our times.

So who are the people whose mock sternness embodies the soul of the country? They are not, as many have supposed, a farmer and his wife, but rather father and daughter. In fact, from Wood’s point of view, the picture was not about farmers, not about marriage, and not even a satire. It was meant simply to be an affectionate look at his provincial, small-town relatives. Appropriately, the model for the daughter was the artist’s own sister. Thirty-year-old Nan Wood Graham (in real life married and stylish) was talked into wearing the now-familiar dark dress, cameo, and rickrack-trimmed apron when Wood lost the nerve to ask an older spinster neighbor to sit for the painting. She was not thrilled by her modified portrait. The model for the father was Dr. Byron H. McKeeby, Wood’s Cedar Rapids, Iowa, sixty-two year old dentist. McKeeby let himself be painted, as the story goes, after the artist promised him he would never be recognized.

And these days we complain about wearing masks at the office.