Reception
How old was Wood at his father's death?
American Gothic
Wood entered the painting in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. The judges deemed it a "comic valentine", but a museum patron persuaded them to award the painting the bronze medal and $300 cash prize. The patron also persuaded the Art Institute to buy the painting, which remains there today. The image soon began to be reproduced in newspapers, first by the "Chicago Evening Post" and then in New York, Boston, Kansas City, and Indianapolis. However, Wood received a backlash when the image finally appeared in the "Cedar Rapids Gazette". Iowans were furious at their depiction as "pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers". Wood protested that he had not painted a caricature of Iowans but a depiction of his appreciation, stating "I had to go to France to appreciate Iowa." Nan, apparently embarrassed at being depicted as the wife of someone twice her age, began telling people that the painting was of a man and his daughter, which Grant seems to confirm in his letter to a Mrs. Nellie Sudduth in 1941. Art critics who had favorable opinions about the painting, such as Gertrude Stein and Christopher Morley, also assumed the painting was meant to be a satire of rural small-town life. It was thus seen as part of the trend toward increasingly critical depictions of rural America, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson's 1919 "Winesburg, Ohio", Sinclair Lewis's 1920 "Main Street", and Carl Van Vechten's 1924 "The Tattooed Countess" in literature. Yet another interpretation sees it as an "old-fashioned mourning portrait... Tellingly, the curtains hanging in the windows of the house, both upstairs and down, are pulled closed in the middle of the day, a mourning custom in Victorian America. The woman wears a black dress beneath her apron, and glances away as if holding back tears. One imagines she is grieving for the man beside her..." Wood had been only 10 when his father had died and later had lived for a decade "above a garage reserved for hearses", so death was on his mind. However, with the onset of the Great Depression, the painting came to be seen as a depiction of steadfast American pioneer spirit. Wood assisted this transition by renouncing his Bohemian youth in Paris and grouping himself with populist Midwestern painters, such as John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton, who revolted against the dominance of East Coast art circles. Wood was quoted in this period as stating, "All the good ideas I've ever had came to me while I was milking a cow."