The Background Story of ‘American Gothic’

Bruce Thiher is accustomed to opening his door and finding pilgrims who have driven long miles to this no-stoplight railroad town where the trains don’t go anymore.

They have not come to see Thiher. They are there to see his little house.

It is one of the most famous shelters in America, though it has never housed anyone famous. But it is instantly recognizable--the porch, the pointed roof, the church-like window on the second floor.

You’ve probably seen it hundreds of times, always in the background, behind a dour man with a three-pronged pitchfork and a woman whose face, a writer once said, would “sour milk.”

Sometimes, in the hands of parodists, the man and woman have metamorphosed into Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Bill and Hillary Clinton, even Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. Or gas masks have been placed on their faces, or they’ve been dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes or kinky leather.

But it was the house that inspired a little-known artist named Grant Wood to create his masterpiece, “American Gothic.”

“There’s something magical about it, I guess,” says Lowey Cordova.

Cordova had made the 70-mile trip from Knoxville, Iowa, to Eldon with Beverly Smith. Smith suggested this pilgrimage; she had recently recreated “American Gothic” in needlepoint.

To their surprise, Thiher opens the door and invites them in. He is Eldon’s postmaster, and has rented the American Gothic house from the state since 1996. The previous tenant, an elderly woman, did not much like visitors, but Thiher welcomes them: “You meet a lot of interesting people.”

He tells them about the house’s history, about Grant Wood. They listen closely, even if it is not clear exactly why they have come all this way to see this old frame house that is not, truth be told, all that different from other old houses. Just as it is not clear why “American Gothic”--like the “Mona Lisa,” like “Whistler’s Mother”--holds a place among that small number of paintings that have become more than paintings.

“It’s an icon of Iowa,” says Thiher, a large, gregarious man of 54 who put down his cereal bowl to show the house. “There is the element of humor, and yet he has effectively portrayed the virtues of plainness, simplicity and hard work which still epitomize the way Iowa people think of themselves today.”

And indeed, Cedar Rapids, Wood’s home town, has populated its streets this summer with fiberglass versions of the “American Gothic” characters--among them, “American Gothic” beatniks, Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty, baseball and hockey players, and mimes.

But “American Gothic” is not just Iowa.

Otherwise, why would an Italian magazine editor and cartoonist take the Gothic pose for a recent ad? And why would the film “Men in Black” feature a cover of a supermarket tabloid, depicting an alien in bib overalls alongside the Gothic woman under the headline, “Alien Stole My Husband’s Skin”?

“It’s very difficult to propose a reason why something transcends everything in its class,” says Daniel Schulman, associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago, where “American Gothic” hangs. “Nobody has the answer.”

He concedes that Wood’s masterpiece has become so familiar that “it makes it hard to look at the painting with fresh eyes.” But there was a time when “American Gothic” was a sensation.

“In those sad and yet fanatical faces may be read much of what is Right and what is Wrong with America. . . .,” wrote editor Christopher Morley in 1971. “It seemed to be one of the most thrilling American paintings I had ever seen.”

He saw “American Gothic” at its debut, the annual exhibition of American paintings and sculpture at the Art Institute in 1930. Grant Wood’s painting almost didn’t make it; most of the jury didn’t especially like it, and it was only through the lobbying of juror Percy Eckhart--the museum’s lawyer--that “American Gothic” was accepted for the exhibit.

But when you look at the catalog for the show, says Wanda Corn, professor of art history at Stanford University and author of “Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision,” you’ll find “a rather humdrum group of Impressionist, Expressionist and Cubist paintings,” nothing that compares with Wood’s “very sharply focused, detailed, tough image.”

The Friends of American Art at the Art Institute paid $300 for “American Gothic”--a nice investment, as it turned out.

Grant Wood also took home a bronze medal, a $300 prize and sudden fame.

Before “American Gothic” he was a successful artist, but mostly in Cedar Rapids, where he had painted portraits and murals on commission, decorated homes, taught school and created a large stained-glass window for the town’s Veterans Memorial Building.

He was a hometown boy, with local patrons and a reputation as a gregarious (if sometimes distracted) neighbor who generally wore bib overalls. He spent a year or two in Europe, and came back with a bohemian beard. He got rid of it before too long. It just wasn’t Iowa.

He was not so quick to discard other European leanings. Many of his paintings from the 1920s are Impressionistic French scenes. Gradually, he began to look closer to home for his subjects; his most useful, authentic reference book, he said, was the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

“The really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow,” he once said. “So I went back to Iowa.”

In August 1930, he went to Eldon to give a painting demonstration. On a hot summer day--Thiher says the southerly breeze from the stockyards across the way brought a real Iowa fragrance to the moment--Wood caught sight of the house and its “pretentious” gothic windows.

Right away, he envisioned a painting with a man and woman in the foreground, their features elongated to match the house’s vertical lines. He scribbled a sketch on an envelope, and when he went back to Cedar Rapids he asked for a photograph of the house.

“American Gothic” took about 2 1/2 months to complete. The man, the woman and the house were painted separately. For the man, he chose his dentist, Dr. Byron H. McKeeby. For the woman, he chose his sister, Nan Wood Graham.

From the beginning, “American Gothic” provoked arguments. Who were these people?

Wanda Corn says Wood intended them to be father and daughter, but others saw them as husband and wife. (Last year, American Heritage used a riven “American Gothic” for a cover on divorce.)

Then there were those who complained that Wood was making fun of small-towners--an accusation that Wood denied heatedly. This was not satire, he insisted. “I admit to the fanaticism and false taste of the characters in ‘American Gothic,’ but to me, they are basically good and solid people,” he wrote.

The controversy did nothing to hurt Wood’s star status among the American regionalists--artists like Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, who found their inspiration in their own backyard and their subjects in the common folk.

To some in the art world, Wood’s work was too simple, too obvious. But with the rise of Nazism, the word “folk” took on a different meaning. Wood’s paintings began to look like the Aryan art the Germans so loved, Corn says. By the time he died of liver cancer in 1942, a day before his 51st birthday, his career was in decline.

There was a memorial exhibition in Chicago, but the New York-centered art world ignored it. “People just stopped talking about him,” Corn says

Grant Wood--and his most famous painting--went into eclipse. But only for a few years.

In 1962, H.W. Janson first published his “History of Art,” a monumental survey that covered everything, from Greek sculpture to, well, “American Gothic.” Janson and others contributed to a democratization of art, Corn says; the art world’s experts lost control of an expanded canon that was within reach of everybody--to appreciate, to parody, to customize.

“When Joe Shmoe opens his newspaper and sees the Mona Lisa with a mustache, it means something to Joe Shmoe that it wouldn’t have meant 50 years before,” Corn says.

So “American Gothic” is reproduced in myriad ways. And as a result, the New York-based Visual Artists and Galleries Assn. is a busy watchdog--serving as agent for those who own the rights to “American Gothic,” the Art Institute and the 10 beneficiaries of Nan Wood Graham, who died in 1990.

“People think, ‘I’ve seen it so much, I can do whatever I want with it,’ ” says Robert Panzer, VAGA’s executive director. But no one has the right to reproduce “American Gothic” without permission. “It is not the public’s,” he insists.

He relies on two arguments.

* Copyright. The copyright on “American Gothic” does not expire until 2025--if, in fact, it is valid (given the laxness of Wood and his estate in affixing and renewing the copyright).

* The right of publicity. Nan Wood Graham spent most of her life in California, which has strong laws giving celebrities the rights to their likenesses.

Nan Graham was her brother’s fiercest champion. She threatened to sue Johnny Carson and Penthouse magazine, among others, for using “American Gothic” in what she deemed poor taste.

Panzer will not say how much money the painting earns from commercial usages. (“Let me put it this way: It’s not making anybody rich.”) But one beneficiary, David Rozen of Millbrae, Calif., says he and his wife, Martha, receive less than $5,000 a year. That could put the total for all the heirs, the Art Institute and VAGA at less than $150,000.

Panzer makes no friends with his vigilance. When he demanded that Larry Jordan, publisher of Midwest Today, remove “American Gothic” from his magazine’s Web site, Jordan fired back, calling Panzer’s action “elitist and paranoid.”

Panzer also tussled with the organizers of Cedar Rapids’ celebration of Grant Wood, “Overalls All Over: An American Gothic Happening.”

By the time a settlement was reached--no cash changed hands--the exhibit had opened. And on a First Avenue sidewalk, 54-year-old Linda Rae Norton had come face to face with an “American Gothic” pair dressed as rockers, with tinsel for hair and a microphone in place of a pitchfork.

A third-grade teacher at Grant Wood Elementary School, Norton was almost overcome with excitement at the opening back in June. “I hardly slept last night,” she said. She is a self-professed Wood fanatic; among other things, she has created Grant Wood playing cards for her students.

“He is up there in heaven, up there just enjoying this,” she said. “He loved parties.”

That same weekend, the town in which Wood was born and buried, Anamosa, sponsored the 29th annual Grant Wood Art Festival. Thousands turned out; none took the organizers up on their offer of free admission to anyone dressed as the Gothic duo.

On Anamosa’s Main Street, there is a Grant Wood Tourism Center and Gallery, full of published riffs on “American Gothic.” Exploiting Anamosa’s connection to Wood is a way of bringing visitors to the town of 5,000 people, just as the organizers of “Overalls All Over” hoped it would promote Cedar Rapids tourism.

But Cecilia Hatcher and her husband, John, co-chairs of the art festival, say there is more to it than that. In Grant Wood, they say, they are celebrating something inherently American.

Look at “American Gothic,” Cecilia says. “It’s just solid American values is what he is painting, and that’s what people see in it.”

Not long ago, she says, she saw an “American Gothic” in which one character was black and the other Hispanic. “That’s the new America.”

But does “American Gothic” really reflect America 2001?

Wanda Corn makes the case that Wood didn’t even intend his work to reflect America 1930. Instead, she says, Wood was inspired by the people he knew in Anamosa, the small town he left in 1901 when he was 10 years old, after his father died.

Of course, there are still farmers and small-town people, in Iowa and elsewhere. Some of them even bear more than a passing resemblance to the “American Gothic” couple.

“If you’d like, I could introduce you to my aunt and uncle, who pretty much look like that today,” says Jordan, the publisher of Midwest Today.

Still, he asks, “How many kids really know what a pitchfork is and what it’s used for?”

Daniel Schulman has seen a change at the Art Institute. “American Gothic” hangs in the same intimate gallery with Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” a dark and moody depiction of an all-night cafe. Over the last 10 or 15 years, “Nighthawks” has become a greater draw for visitors, Schulman says, and has been referred to more often on TV, in movies and in other artwork.

The reason, to Schulman’s mind: “The nighthawks are urban dwellers.”

And more and more, so are we.

There’s no chance that “American Gothic” will recede into obscurity any time soon. Friends around the world still send Wanda Corn new parodies every week. Children still flock to the gallery, point to the funny-looking couple on the wall and say, “See that?”

And Bruce Thiher still welcomes visitors to the old house in Eldon--people like Jeremy Schultz, 24, and Lori Cortelyou, 26, of nearby Ottumwa. They looked around, chatted with Thiher, checked out the table of souvenirs (including bolo ties with wooden clips in the shape of the house’s famous windows).

It was a worthwhile visit, they agreed afterward.

“It’s unique,” Schultz said. “How many ‘American Gothics’ are there?”

Really, only one.