In need of a couple’s costume this Halloween? Try a calico apron over a dark dress, a low bun with one loose strand, a cameo broach at your throat; dress a partner in overalls and wire-rimmed glasses, holding a three-pronged pitchfork. It won’t take much to be immediately recognizable as the duo from American Gothic, Grant Wood’s 1930 painting and subject of Wanda Corn’s new book, The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon. Why, Corn wants to know, did this painting become so iconic?
Corn, an eminent scholar of American art, has been thinking about this question for five decades. The painting intersected with her own trajectory as an art historian and with her personal history as a descendent of the Midwest: the book includes a photograph of her grandparents posed side-by-side at their home in Indiana, her grandfather in denim overalls, and her grandmother with hair pulled back and a homemade dress. The parallels between the family photograph and American Gothic show how thoroughly Wood, himself raised in Iowa, was tapping in to regional Midwestern identity. Yet a portrait of a midwestern couple is hardly a promising candidate for global fame.
Of course, the pair in American Gothic aren’t a couple, at least not in Wood’s view. He claimed to have intended the twosome to represent a small-town father and daughter, basing the figures on his sister Nan and his dentist. When he made the painting, Wood was searching for a way of working that would be distinctive to the Midwest. He’d tried his hand at French Impressionism, taking several trips to Paris, and worked as a decorator back home in Cedar Rapids. Growing support for the arts in small town America, funded by philanthropists including the Carnegie Foundation, created more opportunities for Wood to make work that felt characteristic of his region.
American Gothic marked Wood’s embrace of a new style as an Iowa painter, developing a pictorial language suited to the visual culture of the Midwest. Rather than straightforward realism, Corn shows American Gothic to be the product of a thorough engagement with pattern and form. Vertical lines, from the tines of the pitchfork to the church steeple in the background, organize and order the composition. Round and oval forms—the figures’ long faces, the woman’s brooch, the pattern on the calico, the shape of the man’s ears—create harmony within the scene. Wood identified what he called a “decorative” quality in his subject matter, basic geometries and hard lines that he translated into paint with such precision that the work was taken to be self-evident rather than deeply thought.
The painting was immediately misunderstood. After winning a prize in a juried exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, American Gothic—which reproduced well in newsprint thanks to those straightforward, geometric forms—became a sensation. Labeled by the press as a farmer and his wife, the depiction of the couple found detractors in both Iowans and art critics. Locals saw the pitchfork as outdated—four tines would have been more appropriate—and the woman unforgivably dour. Critics couldn’t place the work, finding it out of step with modernist abstraction. Everyone agreed it was an image of marriage.
For Corn, this misunderstanding is key to the painting’s success, allowing for endless adaptation of the archetypal form of two figures joined in union. She traces the painting’s influence in both art and popular culture, drawing on a personal archive of hundreds of reappropriations of the work: American Gothics in butter at a state fair, gay American Gothics in support of same-sex marriage, feminist American Gothics showing the woman heading off to work. Surprisingly, for a painting often dismissed as conservative and reactionary, some of the first adopters of its form were Black urban artists who saw the painting in Chicago in the 1930s. (The Art Institute acquired the painting soon after it debuted.) Certain African American artists saw in Wood a model for a self-taught artist from farm country. Reproducing the motif of a couple posed before a family home became a way of telling stories about migration for artists like Walter Ellison.
Corn’s explanation for American Gothic’s popularity is that it shows the archetype of marriage, a motif that can be traced from Egyptian princes to Etruscan terra cottas to Dutch golden age portraits, rendered in an accessible manner for the modern era. Yet unlike those other examples, beneath the smooth surface of Wood’s painting is a felt unease, a tension that animates the painting and motivates its adaptation. Wood, likely gay, experienced his own failed marriage five years after painting American Gothic. If his aesthetic was one of plainspoken values, he was also singularly able to capture all that goes unsaid when, as is so often the case, reality strains against the expectations of form.