How American Gothic became an icon—and the myth of its married couple

By Tom Whitfield

Grant Wood painted American Gothic in 1930; Wanda Corn’s new 312-page book follows the image’s six-decade transformation into an icon.

Corn places the painting in the public consciousness on a par with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The US art historian and Stanford University professor emerita says she “never stopped watching the ways American Gothic has transitioned into the iconic ‘couple with the pitchfork’ over the past six decades.”

She assembled what she calls an “immense archive of reimagined couples” for The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon.

Princeton University Press says the book “sheds critical light on the cultural forces that transformed an image with humble roots into a global icon whose reach and charisma extend far beyond the world of art.”

What does this change for how we see American Gothic?

The practical change is straightforward: American Gothic now has to be read as a work with a changing public life. Corn treats those changing meanings as a cultural history, not as a footnote to the 1930 canvas, and links Wood’s intentions to six decades of use, reuse and mistaken identity.

Corn describes American Gothic as a realist depiction of an austere rural man and woman standing stiffly before a modest white house with a Gothic-styled window. She identifies the models as Wood’s 30-year-old sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his 62-year-old dentist, Byron McKeeby.

She writes that the two men shared a sense of humour, often chuckling over their “bridge for a bridge” exchange: McKeeby had supplied Wood with a dental bridge, and Wood paid him with a painting of a Paris bridge.

Corn says Wood and his close circle repeatedly presented the pair as a father and daughter. She quotes Wood’s explanation: “In Wood’s mind, the two people in front of the house represented a father and his aging daughter—a spinster—living in small-town America.”

Corn emphasizes the mismatch between intention and reception. She writes: “Yet when the painting went out into the world, not one person saw the couple as a parent and child, nor did they see them as from a small town …”

Her conclusion is blunt: “… this is one of the best examples in the history of art of how an artist’s intentions in a work can differ from the public’s reception of a painting.”

Wood Graham corrected Corn directly. “I too thought it represented a married couple,” Corn says.

In the 1970s, Corn and her husband posed as the pitchfork couple for Keith M. Jones Sr’s feminist work Joe and Wanda Corn, Holiday Card (1975). When Corn spoke with Wood Graham, the sister said: “They’re not a couple. It’s a father and daughter.”

Wood’s Iowa-based achievements met sustained dismissal, Corn says. The first edition of H.W. Janson’s A History of Art (1962) left out American Gothic; the book included it only in its seventh edition, published in 2006.

After surveying such texts, Corn found what she calls “passive-aggressive” coverage of American Gothic. Her 1983 exhibition, Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision, gathered Wood’s work for a museum retrospective.

Corn’s show launched at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, toured to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and prompted an accompanying book from Yale University Press.

Corn records that resistance did not disappear. A Wall Street Journal writer in May 1983 called the show the “Great Grant Wood Redemption Campaign” and quoted a well-known art dealer in town: “Flush it down the drain. It’s just cornball, provincial, nationalistic propaganda and it has nothing to do with art!”

Corn’s exhibition made its last stop at the de Young museum in San Francisco. She included the 1983 cover of the gay magazine Frontiers in the show. She says: “what better place to launch the first gay Gothic [work] on the walls of a major museum than in San Francisco.”

Corn credits art historians Tripp Evans and Sue Taylor with most of the recent psychosexual interpretations of Wood’s life and with “the uncovering of his homosexuality.”

Her conclusion resists both sanitizing and mythmaking: “The upshot is that Wood today is seen as a far more complicated and tragic figure than he presented and for many years was understood to be.”

Yet she resists making tragedy the whole account. “I can see his struggles constantly,” Corn says. “But on the other hand, I also know people who found him just boundless fun to be with, lovable and endlessly creative, not dark and gloomy … we have to get a more balanced view [of him].”

Corn maps the painting’s movement into the canon across high and low culture. Her examples include:

• Obama Gothic (2012) by Mario Piperni, which shows Michelle and Barack Obama before the White House as the pitchfork couple.
• Gothic Wave (2010), a photocollage by Barry Kite that draws on Hokusai’s famous 19th-century woodblock print.

Corn says the book’s method depends on evidence she lacked in 1983: “I actually could not have written the book I wrote now back then [in 1983] because I didn’t have the raw data.”

She adds: “I didn’t have this notion of the episodic uses of [the image] for everyday transient events and political events. I didn’t have any sense of what the computer was going to do to the image: the way it was going to translate it but also just make it a resource anybody could tap into.”

Princeton University Press publishes The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon in 312 pages, priced at $49.95 in hardback and £42.

For readers, the practical change is concrete: the father-and-daughter account and the married-couple myth now stand together as evidence of how reception diverged from intention. Corn’s history makes the next remix part of the painting’s continuing life, not a break from it.