American Gothic

American Gothic is a painting (oil on chipboard, 76 cm × 63.3 cm ), which was in 1930 by Grant Wood ( 1891-1942 ) painted. The realistically painted picture shows a man holding a pitchfork, and his unmarried daughter, in a neo-gothic wooden house. The man looks sternly the viewer directly, which also serious woman looks past the man. The picture now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Interpretation

His painting style was based on Wood exact realism of northern European masters of the 15th century. The image is ambiguous in many ways:

  • Is the representation satirical, ironic or pushes it out of admiration for the people pictured? Is it even an ambiguous mixture of parody and glorification?
  • Displays the image a nostalgic view of the past or the present?

The image composition indicates a type of photography, as it was often made ​​in the period after the Civil War by traveling photographers. In addition to the same format these images is the inclusion of symbolic objects, such as the man held by Pitchfork, intrinsically.

Wood gave way to questions about what he had intended with the picture, mostly from: He had "types" represented that he had known all his life and did not want to expose this.

On the Origin

The house in the style of Carpenter Gothic had seen the artist in August 1930 in Eldon, Iowa in search of inspiration randomly from the car window and decided to paint it. The characters he created for his idea of ​​the people who could live in such a house. Wood asked his sister Nan (1900-1990) and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby (1867-1950) to model for, and clothed them in this country- colonial style. However, the two were never together in front of the building model, each element has been drawn separately.

Reception

Recognition and criticism

The painting was first exhibited in 1930 in the exhibition Forty- Third Annual Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture of the Art Institute of Chicago. Although it was accepted only reluctantly by the jury, it won the bronze medal and a cash prize of $ 300. One of the patrons of the event convinced the other responsible then to purchase the image. Even today, the painting can be seen in the Art Institute of Chicago.

The image was soon reprinted by many newspapers, partly provoked strong reactions: Some farmer from Iowa, for example, felt attacked because they felt denigrated as ill -tempered Puritan moralists. Wood rejected such accusations of himself. On the other hand, the painting got a lot of encouragement, including Gertrude Stein, who estimated the portrait as satire on the American small town and rural life. Proponents put the image in the context of contemporary critical images of the conservative rural America, for writers like Sinclair Lewis with Main Street (1920), Sherwood Anderson Winesburg (1919 ) and Carl Van Vechten with The Tattooed Countess (1924 ) Trailblazer were.

One further flow according to the picture quickly developed into a kind of national shrine and a symbol of the American pioneer spirit and the vanishing rural America. It marks the beginning of regionalism in American art.

Popularity

American Gothic is one of the most frequently staged and cited pictures at all. Many artists have cited this by having the couple exchanged by famous personalities and the house replaced by known houses. On the image reference is also made for example in the Rocky Horror Picture Show by Richard O'Brien and in the opening credits of the television series Desperate Housewives, in the episode Bart wins the elephant animated series The Simpsons, as well as in the episode of the TV series Dexter Nebraska. 2001 Sophie Matisse painted a painting of the same title on which it aussparte the persons originally shown.

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