Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables | Art & Artists

Wood used his mother as the model for this portrait, highlighting what he called the “bleak, far-away, timeless” quality in her eyes that suggested to him the “severe but generous vision of the Midwest pioneer.” Taking his cue from the practice in Northern Renaissance art of depicting portrait subjects against a landscape background with symbolic objects, Wood presented this half-length figure holding a sansevieria plant, known for its ability to survive under the most inhospitable growing conditions, in front of a backdrop of rolling Iowa hills.

Wood completed this portrait of his studio assistant and former junior high school student Arnold Pyle during a moment of aesthetic transition, after he had resolved to paint Iowa subject matter but while he was still using a softly atmospheric style. Made to commemorate Pyle’s having turned twenty-one, Wood included images that referenced his subject’s transition into adulthood: the butterfly, a common image of metamorphosis, and the river of life that here separates youth, as represented by the two male nudes in the foreground, from maturity, symbolized by the harvested corn in the background. Despite the celebratory occasion, the work is invested with a poignant feeling of melancholy and longing.

Premiering at the Art Institute of Chicago in October 1930, this painting captivated the public’s imagination and catapulted Wood into the national spotlight overnight. A couple—modeled on Wood’s sister, Nan, and his dentist—stand in front of a Midwestern house. The house is notable for its lone “gothic” window, a typical feature of the then-popular Carpenter Gothic style of architecture, in which gothic elements are used in otherwise simple, modern wood structures.

Wood identified the pair as father and daughter, though the work was initially assumed to be a portrait of a husband and wife. “I simply invented some ‘American Gothic’ people to stand in front of a house of this type,” Wood later explained. From the painting’s debut onward, its meaning has been the subject of endless speculation. What has remained central is its seeming embodiment of something stereotypically American.

With its rounded edges, elaborate frame, and sepia tones, Victorian Survival purposely resembles the late-nineteenth-century tintype of Wood’s great aunt on which this work is modeled. With her stiff upright pose—accentuated by her long choker-bound neck—and tightly combed hair, the sitter’s old-fashioned demeanor contrasts sharply with the modern technology of the rotary dial phone. As always, Wood’s ambiguous symbolism inspires many interpretations. To some the contrast between the figure and the telephone is a humorous commentary on the trope of the gossipy spinster, while to others it has been interpreted as a clash between Victorian insularity and modernity.

In this painting Wood aimed to ridicule the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) for their claims to nobility based on ancestry, which he saw as antithetical to their celebration of democracy. The artist painted three of the group’s members in front of a reproduction of Emanuel Leutze’s painting of General George Washington crossing the Delaware River, contrasting the future president’s dynamism and bravery with the Daughters’s stiff poses, contemptuous expressions, and the inconsequential action of raising a teacup. New York critics celebrated the painting’s biting satire when it premiered at the Whitney Biennial in 1932, with one calling it “as delicious as it is wicked,” but it was met by protests from various DAR chapters that deemed it un-American.