Art And Grant Wood: The American Gothic

Throughout history, there have been different types of art that has risen to fame. But why and how has it become such a symbol in the world? So today I picked a well-known painting that many people may have seen and heard about, the American Gothic.

It was first painted during the Great Depression in the 1930’s by a US artist named Grant Wood. Grant started painting in the late thirties, and studied school in Paris in his twenties. Eventually, he was familiar with modern painting and decided to paint like that for a long time. That soon ended when he returns to the Midwest, he forgot everything that he had learned about modern art to paint realistic style art. He wanted to paint art that had a cultural and colonial meaning to it.

Around august,

The woman in the painting is Grant’s sister, Nan and the man is a town’s local dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby. Hired to be Grant’s models for the American Gotic. The reason why the two-showed lack of emotion was because they weren’t good at posing. And because they were painted separately can also explain their awkwardness. In addition, grant painted his sister with a thin and longer face and made the window of the house with the same detail. Some people also saw the portrait given off a funeral vibe to it because of the dark colored clothes (Solomon, Gothic American). But why did grant decided to paint the man with a hayfork that is often symbolized as the devil’s pitchfork? And why did grant painted the curtain closed from the window when there is daylight outside? Actually, Grant wanted to give the American gothic a comic tone to it. Grant said he wanted the painting to have humor. He wanted to copy the elegance cathedrals style structure that high class people would buy to live in during the depression. Usually, cathedrals are meant to look elegance, while grant made the house look cheap. He painted the American gothic as a knock off from the modern American culture, so people can find it funny. But many people didn’t find it funny at all, they thought it was insulting to the people that worked very hard to own a luxurious house during the depression. Grant disagreed and said he wanted to show how hardworking people actually felt during the depression. He tightly cropped the man and the woman in the painting to represent the private life in a small town and the sad and humorless expression on their faces represented how they felt about their