American Gothic. The story of one painting
In Russia, the painting “American Gothic” is practically unknown, but in America it is truly a national landmark. Painted in 1930 by artist Grant Wood, it still excites minds and is the subject 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 precision down to the smallest detail.
It all started with a small white rural house, with a pointed roof and a Gothic window, in which, apparently, lived a family of poor farmers.
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 paint 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. In the foreground, against the backdrop of a house, an elderly farmer with a pitchfork and his daughter in a strict Puritan dress are depicted; the artist chose a familiar 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 a farm, so he deliberately depicted some of his characters’ personal belongings (glasses, apron and brooch) as old-fashioned, the way he remembered them from childhood.
Quite unexpectedly for the author, the painting won a competition in Chicago, and after it was published in newspapers, Grant Wood immediately became famous, but not in a good sense, but on the contrary. His picture did not leave indifferent a single person who saw it, and everyone’s reaction was extremely negative and indignant. The reason for this was the main characters of the picture, who, according to the artist’s plan, personified ordinary rural residents of the American outback. The threatening-looking farmer with a heavy gaze and his daughter, full of resentment and indignation, looked too rude and unattractive.
« I advise you to hang this portrait in one of our good Iowa cheese dairies.“,” the wife of one of the farmers said ironically in a letter to the newspaper. - The look on this woman's face will definitely turn the milk sour.».
This picture really frightened the children; they were afraid of the scary grandfather with a creepy pitchfork, believing that he hid a corpse in the attic of his house.
Wood has said more than once that there is no mockery, no satire, no sinister overtones in his painting, and the pitchforks simply symbolize hard farm labor. Why did he, who grew up in the rural outback, loving 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 Great Depression, it even began to symbolize the national unshakable spirit and masculinity.
And the house depicted in the picture made the small town of Eldon, home to only about a thousand people, famous. Tourists from all over the world come to take a look and take pictures near it.
At the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, interest in this picture increased sharply again, giving rise to a huge number of parodies of it. There are 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:
Gothic painting: paintings, stained glass and book miniatures of the 13th-15th centuries.
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Gothic- a period in the development of medieval art, covering almost all areas of material culture and developing in Western, Central and partly Eastern Europe from the 12th to the 15th centuries. Gothic replaced the Romanesque style, gradually displacing it. Although the term "Gothic style" is most often applied to architectural structures, Gothic also covered sculpture, painting, book miniatures, costume, ornament, etc.
Gothic style originated in the middle of the 12th century in northern France; in the 13th century it spread to the territory of modern Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain, and England. Gothic penetrated into Italy later, with great difficulty and strong transformation, which led to the emergence of “Italian Gothic”. At the end of the 14th century, Europe was swept by the so-called International Gothic. Gothic penetrated into the countries of Eastern Europe later and stayed there a little longer - until the 16th century.
The term "neo-Gothic" is applied to buildings and works of art that contain characteristic Gothic elements, but were created during the eclectic period (mid-19th century) and later.
Origin of the term
The word comes from Italian. gotico - unusual, barbaric - (Goten - barbarians; this style has nothing to do with the historical Goths), and was first used as an expletive. For the first time, the concept in the modern sense was used by Giorgio Vasari in order to separate the Renaissance from the Middle Ages. Gothic completed the development of European medieval art, arising on the basis of the achievements of Romanesque culture, and in the Renaissance (Renaissance) the art of the Middle Ages was considered “barbaric”. Gothic art was cultic in purpose and religious in theme. It addressed the highest divine powers, eternity, and the Christian worldview.
Gothic in its development is divided into Early Gothic, Heyday, Late Gothic.
The transition from Romanesque painting to Gothic painting was not at all smooth and imperceptible. The “transparent” structure of the Gothic cathedral, in which the plane of the wall gave way to openwork ornaments and huge windows, excluded the possibility of abundant pictorial decoration. The birth of the Gothic cathedral coincided with the period of the highest flowering of Romanesque painting, especially frescoes. But soon other types of fine art began to play a dominant role in the decoration of temple buildings, and painting was relegated to secondary roles.
Gothic stained glass
The replacement of blank walls in Gothic cathedrals with huge windows led to the almost universal disappearance of monumental paintings, which played such a large role in Romanesque art of the 11th and 12th centuries. The fresco was replaced by stained glass - a unique type of painting in which the image is made up of pieces of colored painted glass, connected to each other by narrow lead strips and covered with iron fittings. Stained glass appeared, apparently, in the Carolingian era, but they received full development and distribution only during the transition from Romanesque to Gothic art.
Stained glass windows of Canterbury Cathedral.
The huge surfaces of the windows were filled with stained glass compositions that reproduced traditional religious scenes, historical events, labor scenes, and literary subjects. Each window consisted of a series of figurative compositions enclosed in medallions. The stained glass technique, which makes it possible to combine the color and light principles of painting, imparted a special emotionality to these compositions. Scarlet, yellow, green, blue glass, cut out according to the contour of the design, burned like precious gems, transforming the entire interior of the temple. Gothic colored glass created new aesthetic values - it gave paint the highest sonority of pure color. Creating an atmosphere of colored air, the stained glass window was perceived as a source of light. Stained glass windows placed in the window openings filled the interior space of the cathedral with light, painted in soft and sonorous colors, which created an extraordinary artistic effect. The late Gothic pictorial compositions made using the tempera technique or colored reliefs decorating the altar and altar surrounds were also distinguished by the brightness of their colors.
In the middle of the 13th century. complex colors are introduced into the colorful range, which are formed by duplicating glass (Sainte Chapelle, 1250). The contours of the design on the glass were applied with brown enamel paint; the shapes were planar in nature.
Gothic style in book miniatures
It reached its peak in France in the 13th-14th centuries. the art of book miniatures, in which the secular principle is manifested.
The appearance of the page changed in the Gothic manuscript. The illustrations, resonant with pure colors, include realistic details, along with floral ornaments - religious and everyday scenes. The use of acute-angled writing, which was fully formed by the end of the 12th century, gave the text the appearance of an openwork pattern, in which initials of various types and sizes were interspersed. A sheet of Gothic manuscript with scattered plot initials and small capital letters, which had ornamental branches in the form of tendrils, gave the impression of filigree with inserts of precious stones and enamels.
April. Illustration by the Limburg brothers for the Book of Hours of the Duke of Berry.
In manuscripts of the second half of the 13th century, a characteristic feature was the border that framed the margin of the sheet. On the curls of the ornament placed in the margins, as well as on the horizontal lines of the frame, the artists placed small figures and scenes of an edifying, comic or genre nature. They were not always related to the content of the manuscript, they arose as a product of the miniaturist’s imagination and were called “droleri” - fun. Free from the conventions of the iconographic canon, these figures began to move rapidly and gesticulate animatedly. Droleri in manuscripts, designed by the Parisian master Jean Pussel (Tues. Thu. XIV century), are distinguished by their generous imagination. The artist’s works show reasonable clarity and subtle taste of the capital’s school.
In late Gothic book miniatures, realistic tendencies were expressed with particular spontaneity, and the first successes were achieved in depicting landscapes and everyday scenes. The miniatures of “The Richest Book of Hours of the Duke of Berry” (c. 1411-16), which was designed by the Limburg brothers, poetically and authentically depict scenes of social life, peasant labor, and landscapes that anticipated the art of the Northern Renaissance.
Gothic art is an important link in the general process of culture; Gothic works, full of spirituality and grandeur, have a unique aesthetic charm. The realistic gains of Gothic style prepared the transition to the art of the Renaissance.
"American Gothic"- painting by American artist Grant Wood, created in 1930. One of the most recognizable images in American art of the 20th century.
The painting depicts a farmer and his daughter against the backdrop of a house built in the Carpenter Gothic style. In the farmer's right hand is a pitchfork, which he holds in a tightly clenched fist, just like holding a weapon. Wood managed to convey the unattractiveness of father and daughter - tightly compressed lips and the father’s heavy, defiant gaze, his elbow exposed in front of his daughter, her pulled hair with only one loose curl, her head and eyes slightly turned towards her father, full of resentment or indignation. The daughter is dressed in a typical 19th-century American apron, and the seams on the farmer's clothing resemble a pitchfork in his hand. The outline of a pitchfork can also be seen in the windows of the house in the background. Behind the woman are pots of flowers and a church spire in the distance, and behind the man is a barn. The composition of the painting is reminiscent of American photographs of the late 19th century.
IN 1 In 930, in the town of Eldon, Iowa, Grant Wood noticed a small white house in the Carpenter Gothic style. He wanted to depict this house and the people who, in his opinion, could live in it. The artist's sister Nan served as the model for the farmer's daughter, and the model for the farmer himself was Byron McKeeby ( Byron McKeeby), artist's dentist from Cedar Rapids ( Cedar Rapids) in Iowa. Wood painted the house and people separately, the scene as we see it in the picture never happened in reality.
Wood presented American Gothic in a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. The judges praised it as a humorous valentine, but the museum curator convinced them to give the author a prize of $300 and convinced the Art Institute to purchase the painting, where it remains to this day. Soon the picture published in newspapers in Chicago, New York, Boston, Kansas City and Indianapolis. However, after publication in a Cedar Rapids newspaper, there was a negative reaction. Iowans were angry at the way the artist depicted them. One farmer even threatened to bite off Voodoo's ear.)))
Grant Wood justified himself that he did not want to make a caricature of Iowans, but a collective portrait of Americans. Wood's sister was offended because in the painting she could be mistaken for the wife of a man twice her age.
Critics believed that the film was a satire on rural life in small American towns. However, during the Great Depression, attitudes towards the painting changed. It came to be seen as a portrayal of the unwavering spirit of the American pioneers.
In terms of the number of copies, parodies and allusions in popular culture, American Gothic stands alongside such masterpieces as Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Munch's Scream.
The artist's sister and his dentist, from whom the painting was based.
The work of photographer Gordon Parks is considered the first parody.
Countless parodies have been created, here is the smallest part:
Grant DeVolson Wood (1891-1942)- famous American realist artist, or in other words - regionalist. He gained wide fame due to his paintings dedicated to rural life in the American Midwest.
To begin with, a little about the artist himself. Grant was born into a farmer's family in a small town in Iowa. Unfortunately, for a long time he could not paint. His Quaker father - that is, a member of a religious Christian sect - had a biased negative attitude towards art. It was only after his death that Wood was able to take up painting. He entered the School of the Arts at the University of Chicago. Then he made four trips to Europe, where he studied various directions for a long time.
His first works belonged to impressionism and post-impressionism. The most famous of them are Grandmother's house inhabit a forest, 1926 and The Bay of Naples's View, 1925.
Two completely different works, impeccably executed in the presented style. If “Grandma’s House in the Forest” is written in a sand color scheme and is filled with light and warmth, then the second landscape literally emanates coldness. The canvas, which the master painted in dark colors - black, blue and dark green - depicts trees bent by the wind. Perhaps, like other authors who paint in the post-impressionist style and strive to depict the monumentality of things, Wood wanted to show the greatness of the storm, before which even the trees bow.
A little later, the artist became acquainted with the paintings of German and Flemish masters of the 16th century. It was then that Wood began to paint realistic, and in some places even exaggeratedly realistic, landscapes and portraits. Regionalism, which the master turned to, is a direction whose main idea is an artistic work of the “essence” of an ethnocultural region. In Russia there is an analogue of this term - “localism” or “pochvennichestvo”.
Many people probably associate the image of rural life in the American Midwest with the famous portrait of a woman and a man with a pitchfork standing in front of a house. And not in vain, because it was Grant Wood who wrote this famous painting - “American Gothic” (American Gothic, 1930). It is unlikely that the artist could have imagined that his work would become one of the most recognizable and parodied in American art.
And it all started with a small white house in the Carpenter Gothic style, which he saw in the city of Eldon. Grant wanted to depict it and the people who might live there. The prototype of the farmer's daughter was his sister Nan, and the model for the farmer himself was the dentist Byron McKeeby. The portrait was entered into competition at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it remains to this day.
This painting is not known to many people in Russia, but throughout the world it is considered a classic of American art.
The author of the picture is Grant Wood. The artist was born and raised in Iowa, where he later taught painting and drawing. All his work is performed with incredible precision down to the smallest detail. But his most famous painting, American Gothic, has become a truly national landmark.
The story of the painting began in 1930 when the author accidentally saw a house in the neo-Gothic style in a small town in Iowa. Later he depicted a family who, in his opinion, could live in this house. It is noteworthy that the characters depicted have nothing to do with either this house or each other. The woman is the artist's sister. The man is his dentist. Wood painted portraits from them separately.
Why gothic? Pay attention to the attic window. In those days, it was popular among rural carpenters to weave various Gothic motifs into the construction of residential buildings.
Perhaps this is the most replicated image, but the lazy one didn’t come up with a parody of this picture. However, at one time the picture was perceived differently. After the publication of a reproduction of this painting in one of the local newspapers, angry letters rained down on the editor. Residents of Iowa did not like the way the artist depicted them. They accused him of mocking the rural population. Despite all the attacks, the popularity of the film grew rapidly. And during the Great Depression, this picture actually became an expression of the national spirit.
A monument to the painting was erected in Chicago. The enterprising authors of the sculptures released the heroes into the big city, taking a suitcase with them.
The picture made the small town of Aldan in Iowa with a population of almost 1,000 people popular. The house still stands in the same place, attracting tourists from all over the world.
Parodies of the painting "American Gothic".
