'American Gothic,' Pitchfork Perfect

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, March 10, 2006

Is "American Gothic" America's best-known painting? Certainly it's one of them. Grant Wood's dual portrait -- with its churchy evocations, its stiffness and its pitchfork -- pierced us long ago, and got stuck into our minds. Now, finally, it's here.

"American Gothic," which hasn't been in Washington in 40 years, goes on view today at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. By all means, take it in -- although, of course, you have already.

It should have gone all fuzzy -- it's been parodied so often, and parsed so many ways -- but the 1930 canvas at the Renwick is as sharp as ever. Its details are finer than its travesties suggest, its image more absorbing. It's also smaller than one might have imagined, at only two feet wide. Wood painted it in his home town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, showed it only once and then sold it, with relief, to the Art Institute of Chicago -- for $300.

The picture with a pitchfork is an American unforgettable. Few paintings, very few, have its recognizability. Maybe Whistler's mother. Maybe Warhol's soup can. Maybe Rockwell's Thanksgiving turkey. They're national emblems, all of them, visual manifestations of the American dream.

Whistler's figure, stiff and dark, looks half-enthroned and half-embalmed; what she evokes is Mom. Family and food are the twin themes of the Rockwell. And with his Campbell's can, fluorescent-lit, Warhol nails shopping.

"American Gothic," too, hits the psychic bull's-eye. Wood's sly painting gives us the bedrock Christian values, the sober rural rectitude and the gnawing fear of sex that have made this country great.

The dangers of the dirty deed might not be depicted, but they're present nonetheless. The sinful is suggested by the serpent made of hair that slithers up the woman's neck to whisper in her ear, by the lightning rod atop the house and, of course, by the Devil's pitchfork. Wood's painting has a wink in it. No wonder it has been so frequently cartooned.

"The couple in front of the house have become preppies, yuppies, hippies," writes critic Robert Hughes, "Weathermen, pot growers, Ku Kluxers, jocks, operagoers, the Johnsons, the Reagans, the Carters, the Fords, the Nixons, the Clintons, and George Wallace with an elderly black lady."

But cartoons tend toward the slapdash, and Wood's calculated image is not at all haphazard. Nothing's out of place. The bright tines of the fork have been echoed one, two, three, by, at the left, the distant steeple, the window's pointed arch and the sharp roof at the right. The pitchfork rhymes as well with the seams of the man's overalls. When Wood painted "American Gothic," he fit its symmetries together as if he were making a watch.

Often, for self-portraits, the painter posed in overalls. But don't fall for the costume. Grant Wood (1891-1942) was no hick. He'd been four times to Europe. He taught in universities. He'd studied art in Paris, Germany and Italy, and it's clear he'd learned a lot. He was an exceptionally skillful painter, although not for long. Most of his best pictures -- a dozen are included in "Grant Wood's Studio: Birthplace of 'American Gothic,' " the Renwick's exhibition -- were painted in the five years after 1930. He had other things to do.

He was, this show reminds us, a carpenter, a carver, a skilled interior decorator. He could make a metal lampshade, or devise a chandelier, or embellish a posh room with faux rococo decorations. He could design a woman's necklace or a stained-glass window. He hammered teapots out of copper. Examples are on view.

They're here for a reason. And two works of art are key to Jane C. Milosch's exhibition. One is Wood's strict picture; the other is the vaguely medieval studio in which he made that painting -- a charming, hand-built place acquired by the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art in 2002. They have a lot in common. The painting and the studio demonstrate the principles -- the insistence on the local, the display of traditional craftsmanship -- of the decorative movement known as American Arts and Crafts.

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.