G Wood American Gothic. Grant Wood. "American Gothic. It's all in the details

Plot

Somewhere in the vastness of Iowa, a house is lost, the architecture of which is... classic example Carpenter Gothic. At the end of the 19th century, this style formed the “face” of the Midwest. Wanting to somehow decorate their simple houses, provincial craftsmen decorated them with elements in a neo-Gothic Victorian mood.

A man and a woman are depicted against the background of a house. According to one version, this married couple, on the other - a daughter with her father. The artist’s sister Nan especially insisted on the second. She agreed to pose, made an effort to prepare the right costume, and Wood ended up making her look much older than her age. To “shave off” a few years, Nan insisted in all interviews that the woman on the canvas was a daughter, not a wife.

Photo source: wikipedia.org

Dentist Byron McKeeby posed for the man. The 62-year-old man's face, according to Wood, seemed to consist of long straight lines. The good-natured McKeeby agreed to become a model, asking only to make sure that his acquaintances did not recognize him. But, alas, everything turned out completely the opposite.

Wood reproduced many of the characters’ appearances from his childhood memories of his parents: his father had round glasses; the patch on the apron was taken from my mother’s old clothes; the brooch was bought by Wood in Europe for his mother; the church spire as a reminder that the parents, exemplary Presbyterians, met in church.

It's interesting that in real life both models were cheerful, active, and younger. But for the sake of history, they remained in the images that Wood invented for them. And yet the artist gave up. In one of his letters, he stated: “I allowed one strand to fall out to show, despite everything, the humanity of the character.”

"Evaluation" (1931). Photo source: wikipedia.org

Wood borrowed composition and technique from the masters Northern Renaissance, whose work he apparently saw during his trip to Europe. At the same time, Puritan restraint corresponds to the “New Materiality” popular in the 1920s.

Context

The painting was first exhibited in the year of its creation—1930. This happened at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the painting remains to this day. In the year of his debut, the artist received a prize of $300 for the painting. News about the exhibition spread American Gothic, making it recognizable in every corner of the country. Almost immediately, the picture became a source for caricatures and parodies.

Some - for example, Gertrude Stein, one of the critics who immediately appreciated Wood's painting - viewed the painting as a satire on the narrow-mindedness of the inhabitants of one-story America. Others saw it as an allegory for the unshakable spirit of Americans whose spirit was not broken by the Great Depression. Wood, when asked about the essence of the painting, answered: “I did not write satire, I tried to portray these people as they were for me in the life that I knew.”

Tourists pose in front of the house depicted in the painting. Photo source: nytimes.com

Iowa Residents American Gothic"I didn't like it. It was advised to hang it in a creamery so that the milk would sour faster in such conditions. sour faces. Someone threatened to bite off the artist's ear.

The fate of the artist

Wood himself was one of the same villagers from Iowa. His father died when Grant was 10 years old, so his mother apprenticed him quite early. Already in childhood, he mastered some of the techniques with which he later earned money: working on wood, metal, glass, etc.

Self-portrait. Photo source: wikipedia.org

Wood admitted that best ideas they came when he was milking the cow. At his core, he was more of a craftsman than an artist. After graduating from the University of Chicago School of Art, Wood made jewelry from silver, and even a long trip to Europe could not radically change him creative path. Yes, he looked at how the masters of the Northern Renaissance worked and adopted a lot from them; yes, he got acquainted with contemporary trends and trends in European art. But still he remained and deliberately strengthened the provincialism and realism of his work. Wood was one of the organizers of the regionalism movement popular in the Midwest. Community representatives chose scenes from the lives of ordinary Americans to create.

Wood began to be parodied and replicated en masse after the gradual recovery from the Great Depression. "American Gothic" with its severity, steadfastness and puritanism began to appear in the theater, cinema and even in pornography.

Sources:
Encyclopedia Britannica
Art Institute Chicago
The New York Times
Steven Biel "American Gothic"

Photo for the announcement on home page and Lida: wikipedia.org

Date of creation: 1930

Grant DeVolson Wood (born February 13, 1891 - February 12, 1942) - American artist, known mainly for his paintings depicting rural life in the American Midwest. Author famous painting"American Gothic" American Gothic. 1930 is one of the most recognizable (and parodied) images in American art of the 20th century. The painting depicts a farmer and his daughter against the backdrop of a house built in the Carpenter Gothic style. IN right hand the farmer has a pitchfork, which he holds tightly clenched fist the way they hold a weapon. Wood managed to convey the unattractiveness of the father and daughter - tightly compressed lips and the heavy defiant gaze of the father, his elbow exposed in front of his daughter, her pulled hair with only one loose curl, her head and eyes slightly turned towards her father, full of resentment or indignation. The daughter is wearing an apron that has already gone out of fashion. According to the recollections of the artist’s sister, at his request, she sewed a characteristic edging onto the apron, taking it from her mother’s old clothes. An apron with the same edging is found in another of Wood’s paintings, “Woman with Plants,” a portrait of the artist’s mother. The seams on the farmer's clothes resemble the pitchfork in his hand. The outline of a pitchfork can also be seen in the windows of the house in the background. Behind the woman are pots of flowers (also resembling pitchforks) and a church spire in the distance, and behind the man is a barn. The composition of the painting is reminiscent of American photographs late XIX century. The puritanical restraint of the characters is in many ways consistent with the realism characteristic of the 1920s European movement “New Materiality” (German: Neue Sachlichkeit), which Wood became acquainted with during a trip to Munich.

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Do you like American Gothic? You can buy it as a canvas in a baguette, printed as a framed photo, or even with a textured gel applied to make it look like the original.

Surkov Igor - its author receives royalties from each sale. By ordering this painting from the online store of paintings, posters and reproductions “Khudsovet”, you are helping this person create new works

Story

Grant Devolson Wood American artist. Portrayed rural life

Dusty side roads. Rare trees. The houses are white, low, standing far from each other. Untidy areas. Overgrown field. American flag. This is what Eldon, Iowa looks like - a city of a thousand people, where in 1930 the unknown Grant Wood, arriving at a small provincial exhibition, noticed in the distance the most ordinary farmhouse with an inappropriate pointed Gothic window on the second floor.

This house and this window are the only constants in the sketches for the painting, the task of which was to depict the most stereotypical inhabitants of the American Midwest.

No one knows why the original owners of the house decided to make a top window in the style church architecture. Perhaps to bring in tall furniture through it. But the reason could also be purely decorative: “carpenter Gothic,” as the provincial architectural style second in the USA half of the 19th century century, had a penchant for simple wooden houses with a few cheap, meaningless decorations. And that's exactly what it looks like most of States outside the city limits, wherever you go.

Interpretation

The picture itself is simple. Two figures - an elderly farmer clutching a pitchfork, and his daughter, an old maid in a Puritan dress, apparently inherited from her mother. In the background is a famous house and window. The curtains are drawn - perhaps in honor of mourning, although at that time this tradition no longer existed. The symbolism of the pitchfork is unclear, but Wood definitely emphasizes it in the seam lines of the farmer's overalls (plus the pitchfork is an upside-down window).

Flowers that were not in the original sketches - geranium and sansevieria - traditionally signify melancholy and stupidity. They appear in other paintings by Wood.

All this plus the direct frontal composition refers both to the deliberately flat medieval portrait and to the manner of photographers of the beginning of the century to shoot people against the backdrop of their houses - with approximately the same stoic faces and a slightly indirect gaze.

Reaction

In the early 1930s, the film was perceived as a parody of the population of the Midwest. During the Great Depression, she became an icon of the authentic spirit of American pioneers. In the 60s it again became a parody and continues to be so to this day. But parody is a genre isolated in time: it clings to the current and is forgotten along with it. Why do they still continue to remember the picture?

The United States has a complex relationship with history. In major metropolitan areas historical memory There are, as a rule, only a few major events of relatively recent times - for example, in New York, these would be the arrival of immigrants on Ellis Island and 9/11. They don't even remember Hudson. On the frontier, on the contrary, history is everywhere - Indian tribes, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, ethnic colonies, the first horse-drawn roads, fugitive missionaries - and these are the only places truly rich in (if short) history.

In the gray area between the frontier and the metropolis there is neither history nor culture. These are minor cities whose only function is to be populated. That's exactly what Eldon, Iowa is, and that's why Wood ended up there in the first place. The exhibition to which the artist came set itself the goal of bringing art to the most popular masses, and the city was chosen accordingly - empty, boring, away from everything, with one street and one church.

And here we need to remember what Gothic is.

Gothic

Gothic arose in the 12th century from the desire of one abbot to restore an old church dear to his heart - in particular, to fill it with daylight - and quickly won the hearts of architects, allowing them to build higher, narrower and at the same time use less stone.

With the advent of the Renaissance Gothic style went into the shadows right up to the 19th century, where it found a second wind with the rise of interest in the Middle Ages and at the peak of the industrial revolution. It was then that the world successfully invented new modern problems, the consequences of which have not yet been resolved, and a look into the past tried to find some kind of alternative - giving us not only neo-Gothic, but also the Pre-Raphaelites, interest in occult practices and - Puritan conservatism.

Gothic is not set in stone. Gothic is a worldview.

In canon late Middle Ages it provided the necessary reason for inspiration. Her world was still not about a person and did not belong to a person, but it was still beautiful. And all these stained glass windows, columns and arches also gave off, albeit cold, perhaps inhuman, but still beauty.

So, Puritan morality and the carpenter's style as its prophet are actually a diminished gothic. This is a look at a person through the lens of double predestination, when the question of his salvation has been decided from the beginning, and this can be determined from the outside only by whether he fastens the very top button on himself.

It’s just that in the Old World, besides this button, he still had culture. And in Novy there was nothing but potatoes and Indian graves. All that remains is to make a beautiful Gothic window on your second floor as the only sign of the continuity of this culture, now reduced to a pair of painted beams placed at right angles.

Puritan morality and carpenter style are actually a diminished Gothic.

Alexander Genis: Marina Efimova will introduce our listeners to the author of the most famous painting in America, which New Yorkers are now admiring.

Marina Efimova: In New York, the Whitney Museum is hosting an exhibition of the artist Grant Wood, who lived and worked in the first half of the 20th century.

Grant Wood is not the most famous American artist. Moreover, his art remains controversial - at least according to critics and art historians - and his reputation has been moving between the bottom and the top of American painting for almost a century. I believe that many of our listeners do not know Wood’s works, but everyone has seen one of his paintings. It's called "American Gothic" and it depicts a middle-aged farming couple with a pitchfork against a typical American home with a Gothic turret. The painting was painted in 1930, and since then only “La Gioconda” has been reproduced, copied, parodied and played out more often than this painting. She was even featured on a stamp in United Arab Emirates. Journalist Jeffrey O'Brien writes in the New York Review of Books article "Polymorphic Paradise":

​Speaker: "American Gothic Painting Featured on Iowa State Memorial Stele, Turned into Sculpture for California Museum wax figures and was made into a screensaver for the 1988 horror film (with the same name). And the Internet is a bottomless well of parodies of it, advertisements and caricatures: a couple of farmers were replaced with dogs, cats, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Barbie and Ken dolls, presidential couples Clinton and Obama, same-sex couples, pairs of poor old people, zombies, psychos and thousands of other characters ".

Marina Efimova: “American Gothic” has become an unofficial symbol of America, for some it is puritanically serious, for others it is lovingly mocking, for others it is offensively sarcastic.

Almost all of Wood's paintings are landscapes of his home state of Iowa and portraits of his friends and neighbors (the painting "American Gothic", for example, depicts the artist's sister and his dentist). To put it simply, Grant Wood’s style is close to the primitivists, but this comparison concerns only the shape of objects in his paintings: tree crowns are balls, hills are semicircles, furrows in the fields, haystacks, roads, horizon are depicted with emphasized geometric lines. But if we talk about colors, then here simple technique primitivists gives way to scrupulous, m A ster technology German artists late 15th – early 16th centuries: Memling and Dürer. And this unexpected combination fascinates – like magic.

Grant Wood's biography does not provide an explanation for this amazing and rare artistic symbiosis, but does provide a chronology of its occurrence. Wood was born and raised in Iowa. From his boyhood on, he was a well-known local craftsman and (quite realistic) artist, decorating the homes and restaurants of his hometown of Cedar Rapids and winning prizes for his paintings and crafts at fall state fairs. He was a strange person - he had difficulty looking people in the eyes, could not stand still calmly and always swayed from side to side, and spoke with difficulty - like a schoolboy who reads syllables. But at the same time, he was active and purposeful in his one zeal - to learn painting from the masters. One day during school holidays he left for Minneapolis with 15 dollars in his pocket, knowing only the name of the teacher with whom he wanted to study. And I found him. True, there was enough money for a week of classes. In the early 1920s, when Grant was already approaching 30, he went to Paris with the same bird license. Art historian Sue Taylor talks about this in an interview:

Speaker: “He was an inventive poor man. Together with his friend, the artist Cone, they spent the night in hostels, earned whatever they could, ate whatever God provided, in a word, they lived like students live in Paris. There he painted, imitating the Impressionists, but so professionally that achieved a personal exhibition in a small but prestigious Parisian gallery. However, he was not successful. His Parisian works are now in private collections."

After Paris, Grant Wood changed beyond recognition: he began to look his interlocutors in the eyes and speak more freely. His studio above the garage became a club where local artists and businessmen, collectors and city theater actors gathered. But the artist himself wrote about the lessons of Paris:

Speaker: “I was about to succumb to the idea of ​​the young Frenchmen: to sit in the Rotunda and wait for inspiration. But then I admitted to myself that the best ideas came to me when I was milking cows. And I returned to Iowa.”

Marina Efimova: He returned in the literal and figurative sense: Parisian impressionism did not fit in with Grant Wood’s Iowa. Perhaps the most important thing that Grant took from Paris was breadth of vision, the ability to look at one’s own homeworld from the outside. In his filial love Irony had come to Iowa, but he had not yet found a way to express it.

The transformation began (or rather, it happened) 13 years before the artist’s death - when he was 37 years old. The authorities of the town of Cedar Rapids ordered Wood a stained glass window for City Hall, and the artist went to Munich in 1929 to make it, where he worked the best masters. And there, in the Alte Pinakothek, he saw paintings by Dürer and Memling. Wood's biographer Darrell Gerwood wrote in his book The Iowa Artist:

Speaker: “He saw what he had dreamed of achieving for years himself: paintings created not under the influence of an explosion of emotions, but conceived and patiently painted by careful, unhurried artists, applying endless layers of almost transparent paints with small brushes, masters who were in love with the details as much as the overall idea. In Germany, Wood discovered modern Germans, first of all, Otto Dix with his clear, detailed painting, which moved away from the dramatic carelessness of expressionism. He spent hours watching the work of copyists who used the techniques of the Renaissance masters, and, like a sponge, absorbed it. both styles - old and modern German masters. This was a strong impetus for the development of his own style."

Marina Efimova: The first was the film "Stone City". Round hills are already visible in it; clear, model-like houses; balls of trees, rows of plantings as straight as a ruler, patterns of roads and at the same time - fantastic intensity and depth of color, especially green. Such a transformation of Wood’s paintings was not horse food for his ordinary viewers and buyers. The biographer writes:

Speaker: “At an exhibition in Iowa City, visitors reacted with uncertainty. Wood approached a farmer who stood for a long time, shaking his head, in front of the painting “Young Corn”. He turned to the artist and said reproachfully: “Will corn grow on such a steep slope? I wouldn't give 35 cents an acre for this lot."

​Marina Efimova: The artist Grant Wood as we now know him appeared in a short period between 1930 and 1935. 1930 is the year of creation of “American Gothic”. It was exhibited at Chicago's main museum, the Art Institute, and, as they say, made Wood a celebrity overnight. In 1931, his second most popular painting appeared - “The Night Ride of Paul Revere” (a messenger galloping on the night of April 18, 1775 from Boston to Lexington, warning everyone about the approach of the British). In Wood's painting, Revere races on a horse copied from wooden toy. The houses from which people in nightgowns jump out are theatrically illuminated... the white ribbon of the road winds, as in an illustration to a children's fairy tale. And the whole mood of the picture is alarmingly fabulous. Wood found his secret - he filled geometry with emotions. But most critics looked down on Wood's work. According to Professor Taylor:

Speaker: “Some critics attributed him to the so-called regionalist artists with their homely, mostly realistic, mostly patriotic, cast-iron-serious painting. These critics reproached Wood for the lack of realism and reflection of the truth of life in his paintings, that is, the Great Depression. University critics preferred avant-garde and abstract art. To them, Wood was a hillbilly whose paintings were only good for provincial antique shops."

Marina Efimova: Wood even made a personal enemy: Professor Hurston Johnson, who wrote in a 1942 article that Wood's sleek nationalism resembled the style favored by the Nazis. Death from pancreatic cancer, which took Wood in the same 1942, saved him from many humiliations.

Only in the 1980s, when the passion for the avant-garde faded, was the strange “artist from Iowa” remembered - thanks to the works of art critic Wanda Korn. But a current exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York has again sparked controversy. The author of the article about this exhibition, Jeffrey O’Brien, honestly admits:

Speaker: “I don’t know how to perceive and where to classify “American Gothic”. And I think I’m not alone. What kind of people are these two? What did the author mean? In 1930, the picture captivated viewers with the surprise of its poster, but critics were so different then it was perceived that they even went to extremes. And Wood’s other works never gave rise to unanimity. In 1983, Hilton Kramer wrote that the haystacks in Wood’s paintings were “as perfect as marzipan.” Clement Greenberg called Wood “one of our most notable vulgarizers.” time." Peter Shildahl, in a review of the current exhibition at the Whitney, suggests using Wood's paintings as backdrops for Disney films. "They cannot be mistaken for natural landscapes," the critic writes, "but they radiate a joyful feeling. This is some kind of polymorphic paradise, the vegetation of other planets."

Marina Efimova: Indeed, in Wood’s paintings there is a kind of ideal, but also disturbing world - rather, not a dream, but a strange, unpredictable dream. In these landscapes there are no signs of his time - tractors and cars, only horses, plows - a vision of the 19th century. Only one painting depicts cars. It's called Death on Ridge Road. The deserted scene after the accident: a bright green field, a black truck rearing up, a red car with bulging headlights - an absolutely tragic thing.

Grant Wood died on the threshold of a new stage of creativity. In 1940–41 he made 4 winter landscapes. Two of them are unforgettable (both black and white): "January" - with rows of snow-covered stacks of corn stover, vaguely reminiscent Japanese painting. And “February” is a lithograph on stone: three black horses are approaching the barbed wire fence through the night snow - tragic, like death itself.

The movie is really important because it clearly shows the mentality of the country that made it. Cinema is a huge suitcase into which this or that state stuffs its views, values, cultural heritage, his ideals, fears, philosophy, theory and practice and much more, and sends this suitcase to different countries so that others can look into it and understand something about the sender. Now, if you approach the film “American Gothic” from this point of view. And the film itself invites you to approach it from precisely this point of view, since the name of the sender is in the title itself. So, the mentality of the country is fully revealed. And in comparison with our mentality, Russian, Siberian, there are feelings of contradiction and, unfortunately, rejection.

Six people, six young people, arrive on the island, five of whom find a house and enter it. Not even five minutes pass before the guys turn on the gramophone, climb into someone else's closet, take out clothes, put them on and dance like that. When the owners appear, the red line of people's conversation becomes: if you want, we can pay for the inconvenience caused. This is the first point. “We are Americans. We can behave the way we want. Money saves us from any moral repentance and we solve all problems with money. We can smoke as much as we want and anywhere, because we Americans are the masters of everything.”

An elderly couple receives guests and feeds them. Imagine when you need to cook food not for two people, but for seven. That is, the housewife must prepare a lot of food to feed everyone. What do the guests thank you for? One girl, without asking permission, without doubting the reasonableness and correctness of her action, takes out a cigarette and lights it. Right at the dining table in the kitchen, where the owners sit, where the food is. This is fine? But she's American. She will smoke wherever she wants. When the owner reprimands her, she leaves with a dissatisfied look. Americans cannot be reprimanded; they do not tolerate it. They are too important to be reprimanded. Yes, the girl leaves, but after a while she throws the cigarette butt in the yard. In a clean yard, which is so closely watched by the owners, the girl boldly throws the bull. Because she was offended and she will do minor mischief, because she is an American.

Go ahead. Everyone ate, everyone was full. What do young people do when they have been kindly fed? That's right, they go about their business. After all, we, Russians, still have morals somewhere, a rule of behavior when visiting. Especially if our transport broke down and people fed us and took us in. No one asked if they needed help with washing the dishes, or if they could provide help around the house. After eating, five healthy guys and girls go for a walk, sit in the gazebo, and smoke. And no one offered to help the owners. The owners are not young. The owners, who have a huge house on their shoulders, where they do everything with their own hands, because there is no electricity. When Jeff meets the owner, who is sawing something, Jeff did not say “can I help you?”, no, he calmly talked to his grandfather and left. A healthy guy who was fed and sheltered. Is this their mentality? Is this normal for Americans? I just can't understand this. And they don’t show us the Gopniks. No, all the people are adults, well dressed, and, apparently, educated. It turns out that one or another nationality can easily replace the lack of education and poor upbringing of another nationality? I imagine myself in their place. Really, after such hospitality and help, I won’t offer my help. Would Russian people really behave the same way? Yes, in Russia we have the Caucasus, Buryatia, and Asian republics, where the laws of hospitality and the laws of etiquette are almost in the first positions. It is in our genes to visit each other and receive guests. And I cannot understand such disgusting behavior as the Americans demonstrated.

That is why from the first minutes I wanted all these young people to be beaten. I didn’t know what or who would kick them. The genre of the film is horror and thriller, but since six people are going somewhere in this genre, according to the law, they will be the ones who will be killed.

And everything would be fine if they were kicked and then the credits rolled, but the authors clearly wandered into last minutes 20 films. Twisted new story, absolutely miserable, stupid and naive. I barely made it through this round of events.

The film did not leave anyone indifferent. The film showed the nature of the average young American guy and girl. But it’s clearly not possible to call this film a masterpiece. The ending is poor.