Grant Wood, American Gothic

GRANT WOOD, AMERICAN GOTHIC

How art is there a puritanical Protestant religious America and traditional?

In 1930, Grant Wood painting depicts two characters in front of a home in Iowa, a rural state of the middle West. This work, initially poorly received, has since become one of the most famous of all American painting tables.Grant Wood represented a typical real house, rural Gothic style in vogue in the late nineteenth. His models are a dentist, Dr. McKeeby, and his sister, Nan Wood Graham ( below)

The characters wear clothes of the late nineteenth century which reinforces the image of a still totally Protestant rural America. The man who stands to the left of the woman, his wife or his daughter, is a farmer, but it looks like a pastor and a church home. Their whole attitude shows self-control and feelings that embodies the American Puritanism.

Grant Wood has always said it was a tribute to traditional America, austere, driven by faith and a sense of duty and work. Yet, they have also seen a critique of religious and moral certainties narrow rural America.