American Gothic became famous because it arrived in Chicago in 1930 as a prize winner and, from the first week, nobody could agree whether Grant Wood was honoring the Midwest or mocking it. Wood said he meant it with respect. Many Iowans heard a joke. Every parody since has kept the argument going.
The painting shows a stern man holding a pitchfork beside a woman in an apron, in front of a white house with one pointed window. Most people take them for farmers.
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The farmers are the part Wood disowned. In December 1930, a few weeks after the painting went on view in Chicago, he wrote to The Des Moines Register: "The people in American Gothic are not farmers but are small-town, as the shirt on the man indicates."
Then he went further: "I simply invented some American Gothic people to stand in front of a house of this type." By the maker's own account, the picture everyone reads as a portrait of Iowa farm life was staged with invented characters.
I think that sentence explains most of what followed. Characters with no names and no story are free for anyone to fill in, and people have kept filling them in ever since.
Who was the farmer?
A dentist. Byron McKeeby had his practice in Cedar Rapids, the Iowa city where Wood lived and worked, and he was 62 when Wood asked him to stand for the man with the pitchfork.
Wood never hid the borrowing. The Art Institute of Chicago, which owns the painting, quotes him calling his figures "tintypes from my old family album," a reference to the stiff studio portraits of nineteenth-century families. A tintype kept a family's best manner for the camera, not its working life.
That is the register Wood was after. The man wears a dark jacket over his overalls, which looks less like a farmer going to the field than a townsman dressed up as one for a photograph. It is the shirt and jacket, I think, that Wood had in mind when he told the Register the man was small-town. The woman beside him came from much closer to home.
What You'll Discover
Who the woman beside him was.
What Wood built around one window.
Why Iowans were furious.
Who answered it in Washington.