Picture of American farmers. American Gothic: Famous and Unknown by Grant Wood
american gothic- Grant Wood. 1930. Oil on canvas. 74 x 62 cm
Without exaggeration, we can say that the painting "American Gothic" is one of the most recognizable in the world, comparable to, or. Over the years of its existence, the masterpiece has become the victim of many parodies and memes. There is even a very sinister interpretation of the plot. But what meaning did the author himself put into his "American Gothic"?
The painting was created in 1930 during the Great Depression. In the city of Eldon, Grant Wood noticed a neat house, created in the style of a carpenter's Gothic. The artist wanted to depict the house and its potential residents - father and daughter, an old maid (according to other sources, this is a wife and husband). The models were the painter's sister and his personal dentist. The unusual exposition of the painting is nothing more than an imitation of photographs of those years.
The characters are depicted very clearly and clearly. The man looks at the viewer, a pitchfork is tightly clenched in his hands. A woman with a strict bun at the back of her head looks away, she is wearing an apron with an old-fashioned pattern. The author allowed only one bunch to break out of the girl's laconic hairstyle. In the stern faces of the heroes and their compressed lips, many art historians find hostility and outright ugliness. Other very authoritative researchers guessed in the work a satire on the excessive isolation and narrow-mindedness of the inhabitants of small towns.
Meanwhile, Wood himself complained that the public misinterpreted his work - he saw in the rural people exactly that, an effective force that could withstand the economic problems that caused the Great Depression. These residents of towns and villages are full of determination and courage to fight problems. The artist said that the heroes of his work are a collective image, which he associates with all of America. However, the inhabitants of the town of Elton did not heed the author's explanations, they were outraged and angry at the way Wood presented them in his work.
Is this a daughter or a wife? The answer to this question is also very interesting. The viewer is inclined to "read" this heroine as a wife, but Wood's sister, who was a model, insisted that she was a daughter. She just wanted to see herself in famous work younger, because at the time of posing she was only 30 years old.
The pitchfork is the central element of the painting. The strict, straight lines of the teeth of this agricultural tool are also read in other details of the canvas. The seams of the man's shirt almost perfectly follow the contours of the pitchfork. It seems that all the work consists of referring to direct vertical lines- the exterior of the house, the spire, the elongated windows and the faces of the characters themselves. Dentist Byron McKeeby, whom we see as a father-husband, recalled that the artist once noted that he liked his face because it consisted entirely of straight lines.
The public reacted with interest to the work of Grant Wood, as soon as she appeared in an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. This is amazing, but not everyone agreed with the author's interpretation of the work, although they recognized that the painter managed to very accurately "grab" the American national spirit. After the Great Depression gave way to an ordinary stable life, the viewer was finally able to see the picture through the eyes of the creator, to see not harsh, but unshakable Americans who are ready not to fight, but to resist all the troubles.
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, their ideals, fears, philosophy, theory and practice, and much more, and sends this suitcase to different countries so that others 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 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 is a feeling of contradiction and, unfortunately, rejection.
Six people, six young people, arrive on the island, five of whom find the house and enter it. Not even five minutes pass, when the guys turn on the gramophone, climb into someone else's closet, take out clothes, put them on and dance in this form. When the hosts show up, the red line of people's conversation becomes if you want, we can pay for the inconvenience caused. Here is the first point. “We are Americans. We can behave however we want. Money saves us from any moral remorse, and we solve all problems with money. We can smoke as much as we want, anywhere, because we Americans are the masters of everything.”
An elderly couple hosts guests and feeds them. Imagine when you need to cook food not for two people, but for seven. That is, the hostess must cook a lot of food in order to feed everyone. What are the guests grateful for? One girl, without asking permission, without doubting the reasonableness and correctness of her act, takes out a cigarette and lights up. 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 makes a remark to her, she leaves with a displeased look. Americans are not allowed to make comments, they do not tolerate it. They are too important to be commented on. Yes, the girl leaves, but after a while she throws her cigarette butt in the yard. In a clean yard, which is so monitored by the owners, the girl boldly throws the bull. Because she was offended and she will do little dirty tricks, because she is an American.
Go ahead. Everyone ate, everyone was full. What do young people do when they are kindly fed? That's right, go about your business. Still, we Russians still have morals somewhere, the rule of conduct at a party. Especially if our transport broke down and people fed us and took us in. No one asked if they needed help washing the dishes, they could help around the house. Five healthy guys and girls after eating go for a walk, sit in the gazebo, 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 you help?”, no, he calmly talked to his grandfather and left. A healthy guy who was fed and sheltered. Is that their mentality? Is this normal for Americans? I just can't understand it. And they don't show us gopniks. No, all the people are adults, well-dressed, apparently educated. It turns out that this or that nationality can easily replace the lack of education, poor education of another nationality? I imagine myself in their place. Really after such hospitality and help, I will not offer my help. Would the Russian people behave the same way? Yes, in Russia we have the Caucasus, Buryatia, 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 can’t understand such disgustingness that the Americans demonstrated.
That is why from the first minutes I wanted all these young people to be poked. I didn't know what or who would kotsat them. The genre of the film is horror and thriller, but since six people are going somewhere in this genre, according to the law, it will be them who will be beaten.
And everything would be fine if they were pokotsali and after that the credits went, but the authors obviously went crazy in the last 20 minutes of the film. Twisted a new plot, absolutely miserable, stupid and naive. I barely endured this round of events.
The film did not leave indifferent. The film showed the nature of the average young american guy and girls. But this film is clearly not a masterpiece. Poor ending.
Alexander Genis: Marina Efimova will introduce our listeners to the author of the famous painting in America, which New Yorkers are now admiring.
Marina Efimova: In New York, the Whitney Museum hosts 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 is still controversial - at least according to critics and art historians - and his reputation has been moving to the bottom of American painting, then to its top for almost a century. I believe that many of our listeners do not know the works of Wood, but everyone saw one of his paintings. It's called "American Gothic" and it shows a middle-aged farm couple with a pitchfork in front of a typical American house with a Gothic turret. The picture was painted in 1930, and since then only the Gioconda has been reproduced, copied, parodied and beaten more often than this picture. She was even featured on a stamp in United Arab Emirates. Journalist Geoffrey O'Brien writes in "Polymorphic Paradise" in the New York Book Review:
"American Gothic". Grant WoodSpeaker: "The painting 'American Gothic' is depicted on an Iowa memorial stele, turned into a sculpture for the California Wax Museum, and used as the opening theme for the 1988 horror film (of the same name). farmers were replaced by dogs, cats, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Barbie and Ken dolls, Clinton and Obama presidential couples, same-sex couples, beggar couples, zombies, psychos and thousands of other characters."
Marina Efimova: "American Gothic" has become an unofficial symbol of America, for some - puritanically serious, for others - lovingly mocking, for others - offensively sarcastic.
Almost all of Wood's paintings are landscapes of his native 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 fields, haystacks, roads, horizon are depicted with geometric lines. But if we talk about colors, then here simple technique primitivists give way to scrupulous, m A Sterskoy technique German artists late 15th - early 16th centuries: Memling and Dürer. And this unexpected combination fascinates - like magic.
Biography of Grant Wood does not explain this amazing and rare artistic symbiosis, but gives a chronology of its occurrence. Wood was born and raised in Iowa. From boyhood he was a well-known local craftsman and artist (quite realistic), decorating the houses and restaurants of his hometown of Sider Rapids and winning prizes for his paintings and handicrafts at the fall state fairs. He was a strange person - he could hardly look people in the eye, he could not stand still and always swayed from side to side, and he spoke with difficulty - like a schoolboy who reads syllables. But at the same time, he was active and purposeful in one of his zeal - to learn painting from the masters. Once upon a time school holidays he left for Minneapolis with $15 in his pocket, knowing only the name of the teacher he wanted to study with. And found it. True, the money was enough for a week of classes. In the early 1920s, when Grant was already under 30, he went to Paris on the same bird's rights. Art historian Sue Taylor talks about this in an interview:
Speaker: "He was an inventive poor man. Together with a friend - the artist Cone - they spent the night in hostels, earned what they had to, ate what God sent, in a word, they lived the way students live in Paris. There he wrote, imitating the Impressionists, but so professionally that achieved a solo 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 unrecognizably changed: he began to look into the eyes of his interlocutors and speak more freely. His studio above the garage turned into a club where local artists and businessmen, collectors and actors of the city theater gathered. But the artist himself wrote about the lessons of Paris:
Speaker: “I used to succumb to the idea of the young French: to sit in the Rotunda and wait for inspiration. But then I admitted to myself that I best ideas came when I milked the cows. And I went back to Iowa."
Marina Efimova: Came back straight and figuratively: Parisian impressionism did not fit with Grant Wood's Iowa. Perhaps the main thing that Grant brought out of Paris was the breadth of his vision, the ability to look at his native world from the outside. There was irony in his filial love for Iowa, but he had not yet found a way to express it.
The transformation began (or rather, it happened) 13 years before the death of the artist - when he was 37 years old. The authorities of the town of Sider Rapids ordered Voodoo a stained-glass window for the City Hall, and in 1929 the artist went to Munich 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 The Iowa Painter:
Speaker: "He saw what he had dreamed of achieving for years himself: paintings created not under the influence of an outburst of emotions, but conceived and patiently drawn out by careful, unhurried masters, applying endless layers of almost transparent colors with small brushes, masters who are as in love with details as they are with general idea. In Germany, Wood also discovered modern Germans, especially Otto Dix with his clear, detailed painting, which had departed from the dramatic carelessness of Expressionism. He spent hours watching the work of copy artists who used the technique of the Renaissance masters, and, like a sponge, he absorbed both styles - old and modern German masters. It was the strongest impetus for the development of his own style."
Marina Efimova: The first was the picture "Stone City". Round hills are already visible in it; clear, as if on models, houses; balls of trees, rows of plantings, even as if on a ruler, patterns of roads and at the same time - a color of fantastic intensity and depth, especially green. Such a transformation of Wood's painting was for his ordinary viewers and buyers - not horse fodder. The biographer writes:
Speaker: “At the Iowa City exhibition, visitors reacted uncertainly. Wood approached a farmer who stood for a long time shaking his head in front of the Young Corn painting. The artist 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 - the year of the creation of "American Gothic". It was exhibited in the main Chicago museum - "The Institute of Art" and, as they say, overnight made Wood a celebrity. In 1931, his second most popular painting appeared - "Paul Revere's Night Race" (a messenger who galloped 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 deducted from wooden toy. The houses, from which people in nightgowns jump out, are theatrically lit ... the white ribbon of the road winds, as in an illustration from a children's fairy tale. And the whole mood of the picture is disturbingly fabulous. Wood found his secret - he filled geometry with emotions. But most critics have looked down on Wood's work. According to Professor Taylor:
Speaker: "Some critics attributed him to the so-called regionalist artists with their domestic, mostly realistic, mostly patriotic, iron-serious painting. These critics reproached Wood for the lack of realism in his paintings and the reflection of the truth of life, that is, the Great Depression. University critics favored the avant-garde and abstraction.For them, Wood was a redneck whose paintings are good only for provincial antique shops. "
Marina Efimova: Wood even had a personal enemy—Professor Hurston Johnson, who wrote in a 1942 article that Wood's slick nationalism resembled the style favored by the Nazis. Death from pancreatic cancer, which claimed Wood in the same 1942, saved him from many humiliations.
It wasn't until the 1980s, when the avant-garde craze faded, that the strange "artist from Iowa" was remembered, thanks to the work of art critic Wanda Korn. But the current exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York has once 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 attribute “American Gothic.” And I think that I’m not alone. What kind of people are these two? What did the author mean? and Wood's other work was never unanimous.In 1983, Hilton Cramer wrote that the haystacks in Wood's paintings were "as flawless as marzipans".Clement Greenberg called Wood "one of the most notable vulgarizers of our time". Peter Shieldal, in a review of the current exhibition at the Whitney, suggests using Wood's paintings as backdrops for Disney films. "They can not 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 - 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 picture shows cars. It's called Death on the Ridge Road. Deserted scene after the crash: bright green field, black rearing truck, red a 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 scenery. Two of them are unforgettable (both in black and white): "January" - with rows of snow-covered stacks of corn straw, vaguely resembling Japanese painting. And "February" - a lithograph on a stone: three black horses are approaching the barbed wire of the fence through the night snow - tragic, like death itself.
Story
Grant Devolson Wood
American artist. Depicted rural life in the American Midwest. His painting American Gothic (1930) is one of the most recognizable and parodied US works of the 20th century. Stored at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was first exhibited and where its author studied.
Dusty side roads. Rare trees. The houses are white, low, standing far apart. Uncleaned areas. Overgrown field. American flag. This is what Eldon, Iowa, looks like - a city of a thousand people, where in 1930 an unknown Grant Wood, arriving at a small provincial exhibition, noticed in the distance the most ordinary rural house with an inappropriate pointed Gothic window on the second floor.
This house and this window are the only constant in the sketches for the painting, which was designed to portray the most stereotypical residents of the American Midwest.
No one knows why the original owners of the house decided to make the top window in the style of church architecture. Perhaps to bring tall furniture through it. But the reason could also be purely decorative: "carpenter's Gothic", as they call the provincial architectural style second in the US half of XIX century, had a penchant for simple wooden houses with a couple of cheap, meaningless decorations. And that's exactly what much of the United States looks like outside the city limits, wherever you go.
Interpretation
The picture itself is uncomplicated. 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 a window. The curtains are drawn - perhaps in honor of mourning, although at that time this tradition no longer existed. The symbolism of the pitchfork has not been clarified, but Wood definitely emphasizes it in the seam lines of the farmer's overalls (besides, the pitchfork is an inverted window).
Flowers that were not in the original sketches - geranium and sansevieria - traditionally denote melancholy and stupidity. They also appear in other Wood paintings.
All this plus a direct frontal composition refers both to a 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 look.
Reaction
In the early 30s, the picture 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 became a parody again and continues to be to this day. But parody is a genre isolated in time: it clings to the actual and is forgotten along with it. Why is the picture still remembered?
The United States has a complicated relationship with history. In major metropolitan areas historical memory there are usually only a few major events of relatively recent time - for example, in New York it will be the arrival of immigrants on Ellis Island and 9/11. Even the Hudson is not remembered. On the frontier, by contrast, history is everywhere - Indian tribes, the Revolutionary War, civil, ethnic colonies, early horse-drawn roads, runaway missionaries - and these are the only places that are really rich in (albeit 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 inhabited. And that's exactly what Eldon, Iowa is, and that's why Wood was 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 you need to remember what Gothic is.
Gothic
Gothic arose in the 12th century from the desire of an abbot to restore the old church dear to his heart - in particular, to fill it daylight- and quickly won the hearts of architects, allowing you to build higher, narrower and at the same time using less stone.
With the advent of the Renaissance Gothic style went into the shadows right up to the 19th century, where it gained a second wind on 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 contemporary issues, the consequences of which have not been resolved so far, and a look into the past tried to find some alternative - giving us not only the neo-Gothic, but also the Pre-Raphaelites, an interest in occult practices and - Puritan conservatism.
Gothic is not in stone. Gothic is a vision of the world.
in canon late Middle Ages She provided the right 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 a cold, albeit inhuman, but still beauty.
So, puritan morality and the carpenter's style as its prophet - this is actually a belittled Gothic. This is a look at a person in the lens of double predestination, when the issue of his salvation is resolved from the very beginning, and this can be determined from the outside only by whether he fastens the topmost button on himself.
It's just that in the Old World, besides this button, he still had a culture. And New had nothing but potatoes and Indian graves. All that remains is to make a beautiful Gothic window on the second floor as the only sign of the continuity of this culture, now reduced to a pair of painted beams set at right angles.
Puritan morality and carpentry style is actually belittled Gothic.
In Russia, the picture "American Gothic" is practically unknown, but meanwhile in America it is truly a national landmark. Written in 1930 by the artist Grant Wood, it still excites the minds and is the object of numerous parodies. It all started with a small house and an unusual window in the Gothic style…
American artist Grant Wood was born and raised in Iowa, he painted realistic, sometimes exaggerated, portraits and landscapes dedicated to ordinary Americans, rural residents of the Midwest, executed with incredible accuracy to the smallest detail.
It all started with a small white rural house, with a gabled roof and a Gothic window, in which, apparently, a family of poor farmers lived.
This simple house in the city of Eldon, in southern Iowa, so impressed the artist and reminded him of his childhood that he decided to draw it, and at the same time those Americans who, in his opinion, could live in it.
Painting "American Gothic"
The picture itself is completely uncomplicated. On foreground an elderly farmer with a pitchfork and his daughter in a strict puritan dress are depicted against the background of the house; the artist chose a friend of 62-year-old dentist Byron McKeeby and his 30-year-old daughter Nan as models. For Wood, this picture was a memory of his childhood, also spent on the farm, so he deliberately portrayed some of his characters' personal items (glasses, apron and brooch) as old-fashioned, the way he remembered them from childhood.
Quite unexpectedly for the author, the picture won the competition in Chicago, and after it was published in the newspapers, Grant Wood immediately became famous, but not in good sense words, and vice versa. His picture did not leave indifferent any person who saw it, and the reaction of everyone was extremely negative and indignant. The reason for this was the main characters of the picture, personifying, according to the artist, simple villagers American outback. Too rude and unattractive looked menacing-looking farmer with a hard look and his daughter, full of resentment and indignation.
« I advise you to hang this portrait at one of our good Iowa cheese factories., - the wife of one of the farmers ironically in a letter to the newspaper. - The expression on this woman's face will definitely sour milk.».
This picture really frightened the children, they were afraid of a terrible grandfather with a terrible pitchfork, believing that he hid a corpse in the attic of his house.
Wood has repeatedly said that in his picture there is no mockery, no satire, no sinister overtones, and the pitchfork simply symbolizes hard farm work. Why did he, who grew up in the rural outback, who loves its nature and people, laugh at its inhabitants?
But, despite the endless criticism and negative attitude, Wood's picture became more and more popular. And during the years of the Great Depression, she even began to symbolize the national unshakable spirit and masculinity.
And the house depicted in the picture made famous the small town of Eldon, in which only about a thousand people live. Tourists from all over the world come to take a look and take pictures near it.
At the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century, interest in this picture sharply increased again, giving rise to a huge number of parodies on it. Here and ridicule using black humor, and parodies of famous characters with the substitution of the main characters of the picture, their clothes or the background against which they are depicted.
Here are just a few of them:
