'American Gothic,' Pitchfork Perfect

The picture takes its title from an architectural fashion. In its higher manifestations, American Gothic gave us the Washington Cathedral and the colleges at Yale. Far out in the sticks (in, for instance, rural Iowa), the style left its mark on the factory-made windows, porch columns and pattern books that in the 19th century were shipped in by train.

"American Gothic's" farmhouse, with its pointed gable window, is another local artifact. Wood discovered that wooden building in nearby Eldon, Iowa. It's still there. His figures were local, too. The bald man is his dentist, B.H. McKeeby. The woman is Wood's sister, Nan. (She was 30 at the time, McKeeby, 62.) Their eyes are cold, their mouths are prim. They wear period clothes. He stares the viewer down, she averts her gaze. They understand their roles.

Modern art, this isn't. Wood's painting is behind its times, rather than ahead of them. What gives the work its punch is its slippery ambiguities. These haven't aged at all.

Try asking it a question. Is the woman the farmer's wife, or might she be (nudge, nudge) the famous farmer's daughter of countless naughty jokes?

What does this painting mean to do, celebrate or satirize? Do its figures dwell in paradise, where the pioneering Protestant verities still hold, or is their rural neighborhood not so far from Hell?

What is he defending, and could it be too late? Bamboo is not of Iowa, but a roll-up shade of green bamboo is hanging at the farmhouse door as if to say the alien has already gotten in.

I don't know whether Wood expected "American Gothic" to become an American icon, but he wouldn't have been surprised. In the early 1930s, mythic American icons were very much on his mind.

Had you asked him to identify America's best-known paintings, you can bet he would have named two pictures of George Washington: Gilbert Stuart's likeness, the so-called Atheneum Portrait of 1796, the one that's on the dollar; and "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1851), Emanuel Leutze's famous river scene with ice floes. In fact, both of these chestnuts can be found in Wood's own art.

A framed print of Leutze's general standing up in his rowboat is hanging on the wall behind the three prim ladies in Wood's "Daughters of Revolution," a canvas he completed in 1932. Wood's three ladies are satirized, but he paints his Leutze straight. Wood's painting is here on view.

The bewigged head of Stuart's Washington, who is clearly a grown man, appears on a boy's body in the preparatory sketch for "Parson Weems' Fable," another work on view.

Honest little George, who cannot tell a lie, has just hacked at the cherry tree. Such Grant Woods are jokes, of course, but they are not jokes entirely. Wood didn't paint obscurities. His pictures aren't mysterious; he wanted everyone to get them. In 1931, when he painted his dollhouse version of the "Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," he expected it to resonate with the famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow -- Listen my children and you shall hear . . . -- whose thumpety-thump rhythms were already present in the public's mind.

What is remarkable about "American Gothic" is its famousness. What is equally remarkable is that the picture's fame was not achieved by accident. The Renwick's show suggests that's what Grant Wood had in mind.

Grant Wood's Studio: Birthplace of American Gothic will be at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street NW, through July 16. The exhibition was organized by the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art (sponsors include the Archer Daniel Midlands Company, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Friends of Grant Wood and the James Renwick Alliance). The Renwick is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Admission is free.