In 1930, an unknown American painter named Grant Wood decided to send one of his pictures to the juried annual open exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Much to his delight, he won a prize, the Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal, and with it $300 in cash: no mean sum for a struggling artist in his late twenties, born and raised on a remote farm in Iowa, trying to make his way in the provincial wilds of the American Midwest at the outset of the Great Depression.
Little did he know, but that bronze medal marked the beginning of one of the unlikeliest stories in the history of art. Wood’s prizewinning picture, portraying a hard-bitten farming couple and entitled American Gothic, was soon to be championed as the masterpiece of a new American art movement called ‘Regionalism’, first invented, and then promoted, by an impresario and art dealer from Kansas named Maynard Walker.
According to Walker, whose words carried influence, such work represented a robust all-American riposte to the ‘shiploads of rubbish that had been imported from the School of Paris’ by the effete and gullible art collectors of New York. In American Gothic he saw a picture that dared to present real Americans, in all their true grit, to American eyes.
By the mid-1930s, reproductions of Wood’s suddenly famous little picture were to be found hanging in homes from Long Island to Los Angeles and everywhere in between. During the years that followed, it would be ceaselessly pastiched by the newspaper cartoonists of the day and just as often appropriated by advertisers, in America’s first great age of advertising, who found it had the power to sell anything from electrical goods to bottles of bourbon.
The only other modern painting to rival its weird multiplicity of afterlives in the fields of homage, parody, cartoon and caricature is Edvard Munch’s The Scream. As my friend the late Robert Hughes once pointed out, in an affectionately wry tribute to Grant Wood and the disappearing world of the rural Midwest, ‘The couple in front of the house have become preppies, yuppies, hippies, Weathermen, pot growers, Ku Klux Klaners, jocks, operagoers, the Johnsons, the Reagans, the Carters, the Fords, the Nixons, the Clintons...’
It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that American Gothic has become the USA’s answer to the Mona Lisa: the one picture that every American recognises, without necessarily knowing anything about its maker, his motives, or the mystery that still clings to it.