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

by Steven Biel

Book Overview

Is there anyone who has not seen the painting of the sturdy Iowa farmer with his pitchfork and his thin-lipped wife or daughter? Ever since it met the public eye in 1930, the work titled American Gothic has elicited admiration, disgust, reverence and ridicule - and has been reproduced hundreds of thousands of times, in every medium. Painted by a self-proclaimed bohemian who studied in Paris, the image was first seen as a critique of Midwestern Puritanism...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 039305912X
• ISBN13: 9780393059120
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 215 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

essay book

This is one of those books to use when you have to do an essay/report about Grant wood.

Review of "American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting"

Steven Biel's "American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting" is amusing, informative and anecdotal. This book provides a broad view of one of America's most well known paintings, Grant Wood's American Gothic. The painting has become a part of America's cultural identity. In the first chapter, Biel discusses Grant Wood driving by the house in Eldon, Iowa, and stopping the car to get out and sketch. He elaborates on how Wood imagined the home's inhabitants. In the second chapter Biel examines the response of the painting from Iowa's citizens. The views of the citizens ranged from those who hated it because they thought it was a cruel caricature and to the rest of the country who enjoyed it for the same reasons. Biel discusses how some were offended by the age difference of the couple. The third chapter discusses the painting on display throughout the nation, and the response it received. The fourth chapter examines parodies created as a result of the painting, stretching from Barbie and Ken to the nations Presidents and First Ladies. Biel shows just how deeply this image has worked its way into the American consciousness. Biel provides a thorough analysis of the painting American Gothic. He provides an extensive history to a painting most Americans instantaneously recognize but whose artist, they can rarely name.

The Most Famous American Painting's Biography

It is the most familiar of American paintings, and needs just a few words to bring the image to mind: a sturdy farming couple, standing in front of their house, with the man holding a pitchfork. If you have never seen Grant Wood's famous "American Gothic" in its original oil on beaverboard incarnation at the Art Institute of Chicago, you have seen it in reproduction, and even more often in parody. It has inspired praise as art or as satire or as realism or as social commentary, and condemnation for all that, too. Grant Wood himself was rather tight-lipped about it, but in _American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting_ (Norton) Steven Biel has looked at the painting in many different ways. He has not shown what the painting means; no one could do that. He has shown what different generations and schools of thought have made of it, and it is clear that the painting has inspired plenty of careful thought as well as raucous takeoffs. Not bad for a couple of dull old farmers in a frame. Biel first examines the originals the artist used in composing his painting. The house, with its clapboard siding and gothic window, actually exists. It is on Route 16 in Eldon, Iowa, and Wood conceived of the painting when he drove by the house in 1930. Wood used models for his two subjects, neither of whom posed in front of the house, and neither of whom posed together, and neither of whom was a farmer. The woman was Wood's sister Nan, whose face was too rounded so he lengthened it. The man was Byron McKeeby, an Eldon dentist. Wood knew the type of faces he wanted, and he knew the clothes, too, ordering a "prim, colonial print" apron and overalls from a mail order house in Chicago. Wood himself never specified that he had composed the picture as a satire, and made conflicting remarks about his intent, but the years of the Depression seemed to reinforce the image of the couple in the painting four-square hard-workers. It has been endlessly parodied. Mickey and Minnie Mouse have struck the pose, as have Barbie and Ken and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. When Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show" held up an image of the couple in swimwear, Wood's sister was not amused, sued, and won a small settlement; larger suits against such outlets as _Hustler_ have been unsuccessful. Biel reviews some of the laws involved in copyright and parody, and reveals that the copyright of the painting itself is a matter of legal murkiness. Biel's book is great fun, not only as it increases understanding of the painting, but as explanation of parts of American social history in the twentieth century. The painting is an enigmatic work that either symbolizes or satirizes American rural wholesomeness, and despite the certainty of qualified authorities here quoted on either side of the question, the real meaning of the painting will always be up for debate. Biel says we can't be certain what Wood intended, but even if we could, "The painting's meanings have muc

The struggle for cultural identity

"American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting" by Steven Biel is a brilliant interdisciplinary study of Grant Wood's "American Gothic" and its ever-changing meanings over the past 75 years. This engaging book intelligently discusses the painting's substantive role in 20th Century America's struggle for cultural identity. The author's cogent, well-researched and accessible writing has produced a book that should interest a wide audience, including historians, artists, pop culture afficianados and general readers. Mr. Biel profiles the artist's problematic personal life and his transformation from expatriate bohemian to earnest painter of American regionalism to illuminate some of the ambiguities that have been transposed into "American Gothic". For example, might the cathedral-like architecture and the model's buttoned-up attire represent the artist's own religious guilt and repressed sexuality or is it merely a recording of small-town Puritanical morality? Do the age differences between the male and female figures suggest a father/daughter or husband/wife relationship, with the varying meanings entailed by such a reading, and what does it say about the artist's adult relationship with his mother? According to Mr. Biel, these are a few of the painting's enigmatic qualities that serve to fascinate new generations of viewers. Painted in 1930, we learn that "American Gothic" was initially greeted with praise from the artistic vanguard who appreciated its Menckenesque critique of the culturally backward Midwest. However, as the Depression wore on, Mr. Biel writes that the steely determination of the subjects appealed to a mass audience that was in search of stability and reassurance in a time of crisis. As a result, the image was pressed into service by the corporate mass media as a propagandistic representation of American values. Not surprisingly, the painting fell out of favor with the Left. The work was savagely critiqued for its idealized depiction of Jeffersonian agrarianism, including its omission of any hint of massive popular discontent with capitalism and its subtle suggestion of isolationism and fanatacism. Mr. Biel draws on his knowledge of film, literature, theater, and popculture history to tell us that postwar society tended to parody "American Gothic" as a means to compare and contrast changing lifestyles and attitudes with the idea of a mythic, uncorrupted America. In the early 1960s, the painting was successfully used to sell cereal to consumers; in the late 1960s and 1970s, numerous parodies poked fun at changing sexual mores, the war on drugs and other topics. Exploitation of the image has continued to the present, including a noteworthy collage that makes a strong and biting comment on the war on terror. The author contends that the ubiquitousness of the parodies has served to solidify the painting's iconolatry as the normalized definition of the nation's so-called "heartland", which is commonly understood to mean