Un tableau de Grant Wood: American Ghotic (document en anglais)

American Gothic Wood submitted American Gothic—the name a nod to the house’s architectural style—to a 1930 competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Overnight, the painting became a hit.American Gothic won a bronze medal and a $300 prize, was acquired by the museum, and was reproduced in newspapers around the country. Something about it resonated with audiences, and in that mysterious process by which paintings become famous, it quickly achieved near-universal recognition.

Not everyone saw the same thing. Some perceived the work as a scathing parody of the Midwest—one outraged farm wife even threatened to bite off Wood’s ear. Meanwhile, Gertrude Stein and other critics praised the painting as a cutting small-town satire, the visual equivalent of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. Still others saw the painting as honoring the Midwest and its strong values. As the Great Depression bore down on the country, Americans yearned for positive depictions of themselves, and Wood’s work provided the nation with a pair of ready-made secular saints of the American heartland.

Perhaps the strangest reaction, however, was from an audience focused on the age disparity between the husband and wife in the picture. Protests poured in. Nan, too, became increasingly concerned—she didn’t want to be memorialized as “married” to a much older man. So Wood altered his initial stance to claim that the painting depicted a father and daughter. In fact, Wood frequently rewrote the artwork’s history. When the painting was hailed as a satire, he went along; when it was declared an homage to the Midwest, he agreed with that, too. Finally, he came out with a bold statement that clarified nothing: “There is satire in it, but only as there is satire in any realistic statement. These are types of people I have known all my life. I tried to characterize them truthfully—to make them more like themselves than they were in actual life.”

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