One of America’s most famous residents has just arrived in Britain,
happily unaccompanied by petitions for and against. Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic has made a rare trip across the Atlantic to star in
the Royal Academy’s much anticipated new show, ‘America after the Fall:Painting in the 1930s.’
Even if you’ve never seen the painting in its usual home in the Art
Institute of Chicago you are likely to recognise it – Wood’s 1930 painting is
perhaps the most reproduced of all American artworks, and certainly the most
parodied, even making a guest appearance in The
Rocky Horror Picture Show. Just write American Gothic into your search
engine to see the weird and wonderful variants that come up.
So what is it that makes
American Gothic so compelling? Not, I think, its execution; if I am
remembering correctly from my student days in Chicago Wood’s neat but plain
brushwork makes this one of the rare cases of a great artwork which is not much
more impressive in the flesh than it is in reproduction. What makes American Gothic special is, rather, its
combination of utterly lucid design and immensely striking subject matter, both
qualities which work as well in reproduction as in the original. Wood’s picture
is perfectly balanced, the care with which it is constructed epitomised by the alliterative
echoes between the shapes of the pitchfork, the pattern on the man’s dungarees,
the gothic window and the cactus on the porch.
And then there is the
subject matter, so oddly fascinating that the image, once seen, is impossible
to forget. ‘Haunting’ and ‘uncanny’ are
two of the words most often applied to American
Gothic and uncanny is perhaps the one that fits it best – uncanny in
Freud’s sense of something which is at once both utterly familiar and
unfathomably strange. The couple seem so ordinary, so commonplace, and yet
there is also something disturbing about them, about their long, pinched,
expressionless faces, the hint of threat in the sharp tines of the fork, the overtones
of religious repression lent by that improbable gothic window. The very title, American Gothic, suggests that dark
themes of the sort explored in ‘gothick’ fiction might be lurking beneath the
respectable facade.
Perhaps there is
something else, too, which contributes to the uncanniness of the picture,
something which might resonate with particular force for a British audience. It
is well-known that Wood painted American
Gothic shortly after a trip to Munich in which he became fascinated by
fifteenth-century Flemish paintings. On his return to America he started to
apply the precise brushwork, neat drawing and meticulous imitation of
appearances he had seen in these works to his Iowan subjects. These traits are
highly developed in American Gothic,
and the word ‘gothic’ would itself have evoked the medieval world to which these
Flemish painters were then thought to belong. Wood even borrowed actual
compositions from his Flemish predecessors.
It is one of these borrowings, often noticed but insufficiently
explored, which, I believe, helps to lend American
Gothic its unique flavour.
I do not know whether
Wood saw Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini
Portrait in the National Gallery in London during his trips to Europe.
However, he must surely have known the work in reproduction, and it seems to me
highly likely that he conceived American
Gothic as an updating not just of early Netherlandish art in general, but
of the Arnolfini Portrait in
particular.
Placed side-by-side, we
might first be struck as much by the differences between the two paintings as
by their similarities. Wood’s couple are
outside, they are bare-headed, and the man stands on the right. But the more we
look the stronger the echoes become. In both cases the couples, symmetrically
arranged, stand on either side of a glass artefact which seems to bear immense
significance, the gothic window in American
Gothic, the convex mirror in the Arnolfini
Portrait. Mr Arnolfini’s raised right hand is echoed by the pitchfork in
the male farmer’s hand, while the spikey verticality of the fork itself has its
equivalent in the Arnolfini’s chandelier.
Meanwhile, the still-life detail of the oranges on the Arnolfini’s
windowsill is situated in exactly the same place in the composition as the
cactus on the porch in American Gothic. In both pictures the man looks out at us
while the woman looks more askance, and in both the woman wears a belted dress
and has her hair tightly combed. In both pictures the man’s face is unusually
long and lugubrious. It even seems possible to me that Wood chose his male
model, actually his dentist, for his passing resemblance to Mr Arnofini.
Once we’ve got our eye
in, even the deviations from the original start to seem like deliberate
comments on the differences between modern Iowan farmers and fifteenth-century
European merchants. The plain clothes
and simple surroundings of the Americans are in stark contrast to the sumptuous
costumes and costly possessions flaunted by the Arnolfinis. The Protestantism
of the former is asserted as strongly by the chapel-like window of their house
as the Catholicism of the Arnolfinis is asserted by the rosary beads on their
wall and the scenes of Christ’s Passion around their mirror. And the sensuality of Mrs Arnolfini’s body
(she looks pregnant but her shape was probably meant to indicate her youth and
beauty) is so very much more pronounced than that of the flat-chested,
strait-laced farmer’s wife.
These differences and
similarities make me think that in American
Gothic Grant Wood was attempting not so much to copy the Arnolfini Portrait as to make a modern
version of it. Is it mere coincidence
that the titles of the two works (the Van Eyck was then as now known as the Arnolfini Portrait) contain the same
pattern of syllables and start with the same letter? As the two works are now situated just a
short walk from each other in London, it will be fascinating to see if they are
as similar as I think they might be.
Verily, well said & seen.
ReplyDelete