American Gothic: A Life Of America's Most Famous Painting

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American Gothic: A Life Of America's Most Famous Painting Details

From Publishers Weekly Probably no painting ever achieved iconic status so quickly as Grant Wood's flat, meticulous rendering of two people, a house, a pitchfork and a barn. Its title refers to the architectural style of the building in the background, but from its first appearance before the public in 1930, American Gothic has been regarded not as a work of art but as a work of rhetoric: a crafted, compelling statement about American life with which the viewer may or may not agree. Which aspect of that life and what kind of statement has fluctuated, as Biel's lively history shows. He does a terrific job laying out the various aesthetic and political preoccupations of the relentlessly self-regarding American century, and how they attached themselves to the work, which turns 75 this year. (The painting is detailed and contextualized in 30 b&w and eight color illustrations.) Because Wood was both an Iowan and a confirmed bohemian, the carefully staged composition was at first understood to be a pointed (or ungrateful?) satire of Midwestern puritanism; as the Depression sank in, the grim pair came to convey a noble tenacity that rallied a stricken nation. By the eve of World War II, "the celebration of the 'native' slipped into nativism" and the painting's shift from "irony to identification" was complete: the once equivocal pair came to stand for an unironic and universal American "us" whose claim to authenticity might be questionable or objectionable, but never hesitant or insincere. Biel's confident and lucid readings recover layers of complexity from a deceptively simple work. Agent, Michele Rubin at Writers House. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more From Booklist Famous the year it came off the easel (1930), Grant Wood's signature work has metamorphosed in our time into a text for parodies, editorial cartoons, and advertising. American Gothic's originally serious reception, both irate and approving, gives cultural historian Biel an irresistibly sinuous story, which is full of ambiguity. No critic, however effete or erudite, can explain what the painting is about. Wood himself, under indignant protest from fellow Iowans, refuted that he was mocking them, while cultural tastemakers praised the very satire the aggrieved detected in the woman, man, pitchfork, and eponymous Gothic window. Fast-forward one decade and the image had transmuted, in critical commentary influenced by world war, from being an attack on pinch-faced provincialism into a symbol of patriotic Americanism. That iconic status didn't last: postwar postmodernists consigned Gothic to the vale of middlebrow taste, but one step from its descent into camp in the 1960s. Integrating the biographies of Wood and his sister (the painting's female figure), Biel's narrative is an intelligent, pithy, and humorous exploration of Gothic's molting interpretations. Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Read more About the Author Steven Biel is the director of the History and Literature Program at Harvard University. Read more From The Washington Post "American Gothic," Grant Wood's 1930 painting of a gaunt, bespectacled farmer and the wan-faced woman standing alongside him, has puzzled and provoked generations of Americans. Just who are these people? (Hint: They aren't necessarily husband and wife -- or farmers, as is commonly assumed. In fact, the models weren't rural types at all. The woman was Wood's sister; her dour companion was a dentist.) And is the painting kitsch or great art? Echt Americana or humbug? A satire on Middle American provincialism or an homage to all-American sturdiness and self-reliance? Or is "American Gothic" all of these at once? These are but a few of the questions Steven Biel takes up in his new book -- a sometimes tedious study of the ways this iconic work has been read and riffed on. Published to coincide with the painting's 75th anniversary, Biel's book is the work of a cultural historian, not an art critic. As such, he is less concerned with formal analysis (although he does provide a brief, revealing account of the painting's genesis and Wood's artistic training) than with "reconnecting American Gothic to particular times and places, locating it in a variety of interpretive contexts, seeing it now from different and unfamiliar angles." For Biel, who directs a history and literature program at Harvard University, "American Gothic" is less a painting than a kind of fluctuating barometer of American cultural and social styles. Biel's habit of mind is postmodern and academic. In other words, he can be downright elusive, if not contradictory. A close reading of the original -- or "the original," as he renders it in good postmodernist fashion -- is pointless, argues Biel, who then concedes, "Were it not for the painting's aesthetic richness, American Gothic would not have opened itself up to a variety of interpretive possibilities, to so much cultural work over the years." The torrent of cultural work has kept him hard at work, and the result is a slim but jam-packed record of critical reaction. Through four detailed chapters brimming with quotation and citation, we see "American Gothic" batted around like a Wiffle ball, as critics and spectators ponder what Wood was getting at. From the very first, the painting caused a stir. To its first viewers, it appeared as "the visual equivalent of the revolt-against-the-provinces genre," a painterly echo of H.L. Mencken's war against Midwestern values and Sinclair Lewis's skewering of the Babbitts on Main Street. The little old ladies in Dubuque were not pleased; one told Wood he ought to have "his head bashed in." Another complained, "No Iowa couple that I've ever known (and I'm no spring chicken, myself) looks as sad as Wood's painting." For his part, Wood, an Iowa native, always claimed his intentions were sincere: "I tried to characterize them truthfully," he protested. "I had no intention of holding them up to ridicule." Middlebrow critics concurred with Wood and saw more complex shades of meaning. Christopher Morley, who wrote an influential weekly column in the Saturday Review of Literature, called "American Gothic" "one of the most thrilling American paintings I had ever seen." Instead of satire, he saw in it a pointed reflection of American character: "In those sad yet fanatical faces," Morley argued, one might "read much both of what is Right and what is Wrong with America." During the climax of the Great Depression and the onset of World War II, others touted the painting as a subtle tribute to rural fortitude and a vital expression of the regionalist aesthetic. Consider Gilbert Seldes, one of the very first practitioners of cultural studies, who asked, "Do we feel that Grant Wood is calling us back to a simplicity, and even a hardness, which has disappeared?" With the rise of the postwar avant garde, Wood -- and "American Gothic" -- was ejected from the canon of serious art. Regionalism was out; abstraction was in. In a 1946 letter to the Nation magazine, Clement Greenberg, the arch-highbrow champion of Jackson Pollock, thundered that Wood was "among the notable vulgarizers of our period," offering us "an inferior product under the guise of high art." But if "American Gothic" no longer had a place in highfalutin discourse, it spun out into mass culture. The painting lived on as a national joke, provoking a riot of goofy riffs and clever appropriations in New Yorker cartoons, smart advertising campaigns and other pop culture ephemera. It became the perfect postmodern artifact. Biel's point is elementary: "American Gothic" has meant different things to different people. Whether or not one agrees that it offers aesthetic riches, this is unassailably true. Above all, Biel argues, "it has not only reflected but helped create American identity." Still, after sifting through all the critical dissections -- believe me, you'll know all the angles -- one still wonders just what to make of this hauntingly peculiar couple. Putting aside the he-said, she-said, they-said debates for a moment, Biel ventures his own opinion: "Maybe they do have conflicts, pleasures, torments, fancies, secrets. Maybe if we look at them as enigmas, let them confound and haunt us, we'll see them, strangely, as very much like us after all." Given Biel's skepticism about what the actual canvas might offer us, this earnest plea comes as a bit of a surprise. But don't read his book if you want to gaze at "American Gothic" with anything like an unprejudiced eye. Reviewed by Matthew Price Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. Read more

Reviews

I really expected to love this book, especially after the positive reviews it got in the papers (and even in The Economist). But I was disappointed. Biel has landed on a great and potentially fun topic. He has done impressive and seemingly exhaustive research, especially about early reception of American Gothic. But, gosh, the writing is bad. Cursory attention to any composition style manual would have corrected some of the basic sins this book commits: loopy organization within chapters, topic sentences in the middle of paragraphs, chronic repetition (sometimes almost verbatim, often within a few paragraphs -- as if Biel believes all readers to have short-term memory problems), re-use of quotations, quotations without comment, quotations introduced or followed by completely redundant paraphrases, lack of balance in subtopics, and generally clunky prose. I found the overall effect to be utter irritation. There are also some long, ultimately digressive sections, like the start-to-finish synopsis of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (in which Biel never really deconstructs the significance of the film's early reference to the painting, so what's the point?). Overall, Biel's book reads like a well-researched but hastily completed dissertation, with an old term paper on Whistler's Mother plowed in for good measure. At the beginning of the book, Biel acknowledges his "brilliant" editor. If this is the result of her brilliance, one wonders just how rough Biel's draft was to begin with. Truly disappointing is the paucity of reproduced images -- and Biel's limited discussion of them. Biel notes in his introductory matter that many friends sent him various spoofs and reworkings of American Gothic. One can imagine the variety and hilarity of such a collection; it's too bad he didn't include more of them among the illustrations. A more generous selection of American Gothic ephemera would have not only attested to the painting's place among our cultural referents, but been hugely entertaining. Those that Biel does include, like the postcard of Bill and Hillary Clinton, tend to be somewhat uninspired and, again, Biel doesn't show much taste for interesting cultural deconstruction of popular imagery. Perhaps even worse, given the topic, is the seeming humorlessness of much of Biel's prose. This is a shame -- someone with Biel's scholarly skills AND a flair for cultural deconstruction AND a gracefully wry writing style could have turned out the "gem of a book" this one is alleged to be. The unfortunate bottom line: there's still a really good book to be written on this subject.

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