American Gothic, Eldon, Iowa, Estados Unidos (American Gothic) - Grant Wood

American Gothic, Eldon, Iowa, Estados Unidos (American Gothic) - Grant Wood
The Art Institute of Chicago, Estados Unidos
Óleo sobre madeira - 78x65 - 1930

American Gothic is a 1930 painting by Grant Wood in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood was inspired to paint what is now known as the American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa, along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." It depicts a farmer standing beside a woman who has been interpreted to be his sister.
The figures were modeled by Wood's sister Nan Wood Graham and their dentist Dr. Byron McKeeby. The woman is dressed in a colonial print apron evoking 19th-century Americana, and the man is holding a pitchfork. The plants on the porch of the house are mother-in-law's tongue and beefsteak begonia, which are the same as the plants in Wood's 1929 portrait of his mother Woman with Plants.
American Gothic is one of the most familiar images in 20th-century American art and has been widely parodied in American popular culture. In 2016–17, the painting was displayed in Paris at the Musée de l'Orangerie and in London at the Royal Academy of Arts in its first showings outside the United States.
In August 1930, Grant Wood, an American painter with European training, was driven around Eldon, Iowa, by a young painter from Eldon, John Sharp. Looking for inspiration, Wood noticed the Dibble House, a small white house built in the Carpenter Gothic architectural style. Sharp's brother suggested in 1973 that it was on this drive that Wood first sketched the house on the back of an envelope. Wood's earliest biographer, Darrell Garwood, noted that Wood "thought it a form of borrowed pretentiousness, a structural absurdity, to put a Gothic-style window in such a flimsy frame house." At the time, Wood classified it as one of the "cardboardy frame houses on Iowa farms" and considered it "very paintable". After obtaining permission from the Jones family, the house's owners, Wood made a sketch the next day in oil on paperboard from the house's front yard. This sketch displayed a steeper roof and a longer window with a more pronounced ogive than on the actual house, features which eventually adorned the final work.
Wood decided to paint the house along with "the kind of people I fancied should live in that house." He recruited his sister Nan (1899–1990) to model the woman, dressing her in a colonial print apron mimicking 19th-century Americana. The man is modeled on Wood's dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby (1867–1950) from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Nan, perhaps embarrassed about being depicted as the wife of a man twice her age, told people that her brother had envisioned the couple as father and daughter, rather than husband and wife, which Wood himself confirmed ("The prim lady with him is his grown-up daughter") in his letter to a Mrs. Nellie Sudduth in 1941.
Elements of the painting stress the vertical that is associated with Gothic architecture. The three-pronged pitchfork is echoed in the stitching of the man's overalls, the Gothic window of the house, and the structure of the man's face. However, Wood did not add figures to his sketch until he returned to his studio in Cedar Rapids. He would not return to Eldon again before his death in 1942, although he did request a photograph of the home to complete his painting.
Wood entered the painting in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. One judge deemed it a "comic valentine", but a museum patron persuaded the jury to award the painting the bronze medal and $300 cash prize. The patron also persuaded the Art Institute to buy the painting, and it remains part of the museum's collection. The image soon began to be reproduced in newspapers, first by the Chicago Evening Post and then in New York, Boston, Kansas City, and Indianapolis. However, Wood received a backlash when the image finally appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Iowans were furious at their depiction as "pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers." Wood protested that he had not painted a caricature of Iowans but a depiction of his appreciation, stating "I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa."
Art critics who had favorable opinions about the painting, such as Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley, also assumed the painting was meant to be a satire of rural small-town life. It was thus seen as part of the trend toward increasingly critical depictions of rural America, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson's 1919 Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis's 1920 Main Street, and Carl Van Vechten's 1924 The Tattooed Countess in literature.
Yet another interpretation sees it as an "old-fashioned mourning portrait... Tellingly, the curtains hanging in the windows of the house, both upstairs and down, are pulled closed in the middle of the day, a mourning custom in Victorian America. The woman wears a black dress beneath her apron, and glances away as if holding back tears. One imagines she is grieving for the man beside her..." Wood had been only 10 when his father had died and later had lived for a decade "above a garage reserved for hearses," so death was on his mind.
However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit. Wood assisted this transition by renouncing his Bohemian youth in Paris and grouping himself with populist Midwestern painters, such as John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, who revolted against the dominance of East Coast art circles. Wood was quoted in this period as stating, "All the good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow." Kelly Grovier sees it as a portrait of Pluto and Proserpina, the Roman gods of the underworld.

The Dibble House

Nan Wood Graham e o Dr. Byron McKeeby




Grant DeVolson Wood, pintor norte americano, nasceu em Anamosa, Iowa a 13 de Fevereiro de 1891 e faleceu a 12 de Fevereiro de 1942. Grant Wood, ficou conhecido pelo facto de nas suas obras representar a vida rural americana, mais propriamente a vida do Midwest americano.
A sua família mudou-se para Cedar Rapids após a morte do seu pai seu pai em 1901. Pouco tempo depois, Wood para ajuda a família começa a trabalhar como aprendiz numa loja de ferramentas, conciliando este trabalho com os estudos. Entre 1920 a 1928 fez quatro viagens à Europa, onde estudou vários estilos de pintura, especialmente o impressionismo e pós-impressionismo. Mas foi o trabalho de Jan Van Eyck que mais o influenciou passando a assumir a clareza desta nova técnica e a incorporá-la nas suas novas obras.
A obra Gótico Americano (American Gothic), foi pintada em 1930, é um óleo sobre tela e encontra-se em Chicago, no Art Institute of Chicago.Na obra American Gothic, Wood representa uma simples casa de campo de estilo neogótico que encontrou no Iowa do Sul, a Casa Dibble, que o impressionou. Ele realizou esta obra a partir da imagem de que se lembrava. Utilizou a sua irmã e o seu dentista como modelos para o casal que representaria um agricultor e a sua filha de meia idade. Este retrato foi pintado em 1930, na época da Grande Depressão e a obra pode ser interpretada nesse contexto. Durante a Grande Depressão muitos agricultores foram expulsos das suas terras, deixando-os sem escolha a não ser mudarem-se para a cidade e juntarem-se aos restantes desempregados tentando encontrar trabalho. O casal de American Gothic pode ser interpretado como um homem e uma mulher diante da possibilidade de serem forçados a abandonarem as suas terras. Olhando atentamente para o homem é evidente que ele não tem intenção de deixar a sua fazenda. Atrás dele, a mulher de meia-idade parece não estar tão confiante como o homem. Ela está preocupada e está fora de foco, pois ela não está a olhar directamente para o espectador, olha para um ponto indefinido, na esperança de uma mudança positiva.
Com esta obra, Wood foi acusado de satirizar os naturais do Midwest, mas o artista afirmou que tinha feito o quadro como uma homenagem à dignidade puritana e simples que encontrava na América das pequenas cidades. Por residir muito tempo no Iowa, Wood foi um dos expoentes do Regionalismo, uma forma de realismo comum no sul dos E.U.A. durante os anos 30, baseada na ideia de acabar com a dependência cultural dos artistas americanos em relação à arte europeia.O seu estilo de linhas rígidas, firmemente delineadas e modeladas, foi inspirado no Gótico e nos mestres primitivos do Renascimento, que Wood estudou na Europa, nos anos 20. Esta composição de Wood, Gótico Americano, tem sido utilizada para diversas sátiras à vida rural ou mesmo citadina dos americanos, assim como é hoje tido como um ícone artístico conhecido a nível mundial.