Grant Wood was driving through Eldon, a tiny Iowa town in the fall of 1930 when he pulled off Main Street and drove four blocks north. There he saw a small whitewashed house with gothic windows. Wood took a fancy to the place, and hastily drew a 3-by-3-inch color sketch on the back of an envelope. That afternoon when the 39-year-old painter returned to his Cedar Rapids home, he asked his sister, Nan, and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, to pose.
Nan Wood Graham, 30 at the time, wore a brown apron over a plain black dress, adorned only by a cameo brooch. Her blond hair was pulled back tight against an oblong face. McKeeby, then 62, who was more accustomed to a dentist’s white coat and drill, was painted in a black jacket and faded blue overalls while holding a pitchfork in his right hand. Although many viewers of the painting have assumed the couple to be husband and wife, Wood said he intended to show a stoic Iowa farmer and his daughter.
The small, 25-by-29-inch painting initially brought Wood a bronze medal and $300 from the Art Institute of Chicago in a contest that awarded $2,500 for the top prize. But as soon as the public saw “American Gothic,” the painting caused a sensation.
“American Gothic” has become one of the world’s most recognized paintings, as sure an American icon as the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge. Perhaps the only other painting more recognizable on the planet is the “Mona Lisa”-with Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” a possible runner-up.
For a while, “American Gothic” also was one of this country’s most misunderstood paintings-a characteristic of celebrated works of art. The depiction of Nan Wood Graham brought forth protests from hundreds of Iowa farm women who said her dour portrait would “sour milk.”
Some viewers mistakenly figured the bald McKeeby to be a minister, an inference drawn because of the somber jacket he was wearing, and confusion that the tall vertical house and gothic window in the background could be a church. Others looked at the symbolic importance of the pitchfork McKeeby was holding and thought the three tines represented the divine Trinity.
Curiously, although Wood painted McKeeby as a stern Iowa farmer, the dentist was known as a live wire in that part of Iowa, a man who loved to speed around town in a red sports car.
The first time Nan Wood Graham ever saw the house in Eldon was in 1980, a half century after her brother painted her and McKeeby in separate sessions back in his studio in Cedar Rapids, 80 miles northwest of Eldon.
Graham said the painting “made a personality out of me.” Without it, she said, she would have spent her days as “the world’s worst stenographer.” Her brother, who died of cancer in 1942, would never know the dizzying extent of the public’s fascination worldwide with “American Gothic.” The painting also has become a hearty symbol of American culture. On their White House bedroom wall, President and Mrs. Clinton have hung a parody of “American Gothic.” Tens of thousands of such knockoffs of the painting have woven the simple portrait into the American tapestry. Although the painting made Wood an overnight celebrity, the parodies didn’t start until the late 1950s.
Everyone from George Washington and Elizabeth Taylor to Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog and the Wegman dogs have been pictured with the backdrop of the small Gothic house. In a 1961 New Yorker magazine cartoon, Charles Addams depicted the Gothic pair strolling down a museum corridor as though they had just stepped out of their portrait.
A memorable episode on TV’s “Dick Van Dyke Show” had Van Dyke buying a clown painting at an auction, and-while dusting the canvas-he then thinks he has discovered “American Gothic” under the clown image. Dozens of commercials, including ones for corn flakes, corn oil and deodorant, further popularized the duo of Nan Wood Graham and Dr. Byron McKeeby.
Parodies of the painting continue to pop up everywhere. When Time magazine sought to illustrate a cover story last year on “Everyone’s Hip ,” editors chose to use “American Gothic” adorned with various “hip” accouterments. And in the fall, the CBS network plans to debut a TV series entitled “American Gothic.”
But some representations may have gone too far. In 1968, Nan Graham sued Playboy and Look magazines, NBC and Johnny Carson for a topless parody of “American Gothic.” Graham received an out-of-court settlement. Moral standards change, and several years later, when publisher Larry Flynt printed in Hustler magazine another more explicit version, Graham filed another lawsuit, this one for $10 million. The second case was thrown out of a Los Angeles Superior Court; the judge said the depiction was a parody and as such was not intended to be taken seriously.
Realizing that the parodies themselves were as much icons as the original, Edwin B. Green, the retired managing editor of the Iowa City Press-Citizen, started collecting “American Gothic” knockoffs in the mid-1950s. They first filled a shoe box, then a drawer, then a closet and finally an entire room. In 1979, Green donated the collection to the Davenport Museum of Art, which today houses the world’s largest collection of parodies of the painting. In fact, the parodies have led to a renewed interest in Wood. In 1985 “Arbor Day,” the last major painting of his that sold, fetched $1.37 million, a record price for a Grant Wood. And the upcoming Grant Wood exhibit (see the accompanying article) promises again to bring his name to more Americans.
In his day, Grant Wood’s art scored a hit with actors, musicians and directors on both coasts. His paintings were snapped up by Edward G. Robinson, Katharine Hepburn, Cole Porter and King Vidor. Such popularity irked critics, who even today still snicker at Wood’s artistry, derisively labeling it “representational” and “regional.” Throughout Wood’s career, he was despised by the American art establishment. Such venom wasn’t confined to elite New York art circles. While the soft-spoken, bespectacled Wood was a faculty member at the University of Iowa from 1934 to 1940, jealous colleagues repeatedly tried to get him fired. One of them, H.W. Janson, who later wrote a standard reference work, “The History of Art,” went so far as to call Wood’s painting style similar to that of state art approved by the Nazis.
The hue and cry continued. When Wood’s art became the subject of a massive one-man show at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1983, Newsweek’s art critic John Ashbery took a verbal pitchfork to the exhibition.
“Few artists have managed to enter Parnassus on slimmer credentials,” Ashbery wrote. “On the evidence of the Whitney show, it would seem that Wood’s work must remain a dead letter, a cluster of prettily-made baubles that inspired no imitators and whose thinly veiled regional-chauvinist principles seem not only quaint but slightly distasteful today.”
Grant Wood, who had been born in 1891 in a farmhouse four miles from Anamosa, Iowa, is a native-son hero to Iowans. The two largest holders of his work are the Cedar Rapids School District, for whom Wood worked briefly as a high school teacher, and Turner Mortuary, the Cedar Rapids funeral parlor that once gave him free studio space.
Grant Wood elementary schools in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Bettendorf attest to his legacy. Byron McKeeby, one of the models, died at the age of 82 in 1950. Nan Wood Graham died at 91 in 1990.
Today fewer than a dozen tourists a week make the pilgrimage to see the 115-year-old “American Gothic” house in Eldon (population 1,255). The weekly trickle spurted in 1993 after Roseanne Barr and Tom Arnold bought a pizzeria and converted it to Roseanne & Tom’s Big Food Diner, complete with shiny aluminum siding and an entree called the Loose Meat Sandwich. The diner-patterned after The Lunch Box, the restaurant in Roseanne’s television show-was situated four blocks from the “American Gothic” house. But now that Roseanne and Tom have called it quits, The Big Food is closed and boarded up. The last Loose Meat Sandwich was served the day before Valentine’s Day this year, the same day Roseanne married her former bodyguard.
As for the nearby 28,000-square-foot mansion Tom was building for Roseanne and all their Hollywood buddies (it would have been the largest house in the state), that came to a halt after the foundation was laid and some walls were put up. Last spring, Tom gave the whole concrete mess to the local community college district, which doesn’t know quite what to do with it.
Back in the ’80s, a self-styled local entrepreneur erected tacky painted plywood cutouts of Graham and McKeeby and, for a price, tourists could stand behind them and have their photographs taken with the famous house as a backdrop. Hooligans vandalized the then vacant house, and often held parties there. But in 1988, the Iowa State Historical Society acquired the house. These days, the only improvisation comes when tourists take out silverware from their picnic baskets and pose in front of the “American Gothic” house, holding table forks, rather than pitchforks, shoulder high.
Although the house is owned by the state, it is closed to the public. The state rents the 1,000-square-foot, 11/2-story house to Mari Beth Johnston, a nurse who pays $150 a month, excluding utilities. In a bizarre twist of fate, Johnston is the great-granddaughter of Gideon Jones, who owned the house when Wood painted it in 1930. Steven Ohrun, the historic sites coordinator for the State Historical Society, says the aesthetic value of the property is the house’s exterior, not its interior.
Ohrun said tenant Johnston’s lease does carry three special provisions: There can be no smoking in or around the premises; she must display the lace window curtains the Society provides (identical to those depicted in the painting); and she “shall treat the visiting public in an appreciative manner,” although she “may deny access to the interior of the house.”
The State Historical Society has poured $150,000 into the house in renovations, which include a new foundation, roof, heating and plumbing systems, as well as a fire sprinkler system. And that’s not all. Ohrun’s office made a request to the State Department of Cultural Affairs for almost a half million dollars, as part of a development that would include bicycle paths, roads, a lake and a dam adjacent to the tiny historic house. Last April, the state legislature approved $225,000 to begin design and construction for a Visitors Center, but in June, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad vetoed the appropriation.
WOOD’S WORK
A major exhibition of Grant Wood’s art, with 70 of the artist’s works, including “American Gothic,” will open in December. “Grant Wood: An American Master Revealed” will establish Wood’s role clearly in the establishment of 20th Century art, says Brady Roberts, curator at the Davenport (Iowa) Museum of Art. The show will go to three museums-the Joslyn in Omaha, Neb., Dec. 9, 1995-Feb. 25, 1996; the Davenport Museum of Art, March 17-Sept. 8, 1996; and the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Mass., Oct. 6-Dec. 31, 1996.
