Whether or not American Gothic is a national icon—or even a good painting—is open to discussion. As R. Tripp Evans shows in this deeply felt but flawed biography, that painting is hardly typical of the work produced by Grant Wood (1891–1942). If for no other reason than its ubiquity, this odd painting demands our attention even as its creator remains elusive.
A native of Iowa, Wood lived on a farm until the age of ten, when his father died and his family moved to Cedar Rapids. In high school, Wood designed furniture, jewelry, and theater sets. He was also an avid reader of Craftsman Magazine, especially the art instruction articles written by Ernest Batchelder. Wood completed Batchelder’s correspondence course on design and later enrolled in his classes at the Minneapolis School of Design.
Wood’s early work shows the artist casting about among a variety of influences. Some of these—though fewer than might be expected—came through three trips to Europe. By far the most lasting influences were the ideas of Batchelder and his fellow design theorists Arthur Wesley Dow and Leo Stein. Seeking to inspire a new generation of teachers and artists, they aimed to integrate design and representation through formal pictorial “systems.” As James M. Dennis has pointed out in his fine work on Wood, the artist’s impressionistic still-lifes from the 1920s derive directly from Dow’s theory of “notan” (the distribution of light and dark colors); Georgia O’Keeffe also followed Dow as can be seen inJack-in-the-Pulpit,