Grant Wood’s American Gothic is one of the most famous paintings in the history of American art. The painting brought Wood almost instant fame after being exhibited for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930. It is probably the most reproduced and parodied works of art, and has become a staple within American pop-culture. The portrait of what appears to be a couple, standing solemnly in front of their mid-western home seems to be a simplistic representation of rural America. As simple as it sounds, when looking deeper into this image, it reveals something much more complex.
The first thing to notice about this painting is how incredibly involved and realistic the brushwork is. The couple’s faces are so delicately rendered. Every wrinkle is visible and every hair strand is in it’s place. The soft folds and patterns of their clothing, and the grain of the vertical boards on the house, are highly developed and reveal Wood’s incredible attention to detail. The man, especially, appears to be nearly photorealistic.
There is, however, a slight opposition to this intense realism. It can be seen in Wood’s representation of foliage. The trees that appear in the upper left corner look like large green lollipops peeking over the roof of the house. The viewer knows that trees do not naturally look like that. Wood has depicted them as stylized and modern, similar to the trees seen is Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the island of La Grand Jatte. After viewing other works by Wood, it is clear that he has adopted this representation for the trees in many of his paintings.
One of the most prominent features of the painting is the use of repetition. In the forefront of the picture plane we see a three-pronged pitchfork. That sam...
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...e that way, due to the modern conveniences such as automobiles and the telephone, and wanted to pay homage to his more primitive childhood. It is hard to say what exactly it means considering Wood left us very little to go on. He died an early death and had apparently not spoken too much about his intentions of the painting.
They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. If that is true, I would have to say that many people praise American Gothic every day. It is parodied in the political cartoons of the newspapers around the country and on television as well. Almost anyone could recognize the solemn couple from having been printed on everything from coffee mugs to mousepads. Grant Wood’s classic tale of a farming family in rural Iowa has truly
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become a staple in modern American culture, as well as a highly revered Regionalist masterpiece.
Grant Wood was a Regionalist artist who continually endeavored to capture the idyllic beauty of America’s farmlands. In 1930 he had been roaming through his hometown in Iowa searching for inspiration when he stumbled upon a house that left him spellbound. From this encounter came America’s iconic American Gothic. Not long after Wood’s masterpiece was complete the once ideal countryside and the people who tended to it were overcome by despair and suffering as the Great Depression came to be. It was a time of economic distress that affected nearly every nation. America’s stock market crashed in 1929 and by 1933 millions of Americans were found without work and consequently without adequate food, shelter, and other necessities. In 1935, things took a turn for the worst as severe winds and dust storms destroyed the southern Great Plains in the event that became known as the Dust Bowl. Farmers, who had been able to fall back on their crops during past depressions, were hit especially hard. With no work or way or other source of income, many farms were foreclosed, leaving countless families hungry and homeless. Ben Shahn, a Lithuanian-born man who had a deep passion for social injustice, captures the well-known hopelessness of the Great Depression through his photograph Rural Rehabilitation Client. Shahn and Wood use their art to depict the desperation of everyday farmers in America due to the terrors and adverse repercussions that the Great Depression incited.
The Interpretation/Meaning (III) will be written without any guideline points, the aim of this part will be to determine what the painter wanted to express with his piece of work and what it tells us in a symbolic or not instantly clear way. This part will also handle why the artist drew the painting the way he did it and why he chose various techniques or tools.
There is a lot of repetition of the vertical lines of the forest in the background of the painting, these vertical lines draw the eye up into the clouds and the sky. These repeated vertical lines contrast harshly with a horizontal line that divides the canvas almost exactly in half. The background, upper portion of the canvas, is quite static and flat, whereas the foreground and middle ground of the painting have quite a lot of depth. This static effect is made up for in the immaculate amount of d...
Even the faces of the men in the foreground appear to be wax like and flat. One of the least successful faces in the piece is that of the practitioner who is in the lower right corner of the piece, closest to the bottom edge. His face only contains three distinct values of skin tone, which makes his face appear one dimensional and lifeless. Furthermore, his left hand seems to be awkwardly placed and disproportionate in its length in comparison to the dimensions of his face. While his left hand flows somewhat with his body and reflects the style of the rest of the piece, his right hand, which is much lighter in color as if it somehow managed to catch all the light from an unknown light source, shows no consistency with the artist’s technique. It is bulky and out of place. The way it grasps the surgical instrument seems very unnatural. In fact, the only purpose the hand serves in this piece is to connect this man to the scene itself as an extension of this triangular composition. In this sense this figure is important, for his disproportionate body catches the viewers eye at the very edge of the painting, just as his or her attention is about to waive, and shoots it back into the main composition.
Artists are masters of manipulation. They create unimaginably realistic works of art by using tools, be it a paintbrush or a chisel as vehicles for their imagination to convey certain emotions or thoughts. Olympia, by Manet and Bierstadt’s Sierra Nevada Mountains both are mid nineteenth century paintings that provide the viewer with different levels of domain over the subject.
As with his every other painting, this one captures a moment, freezing it permanently in time. He depicts moments that could not have lasted for more than few mere seconds and paints them in particular manner that immortalizes them. This particular ballerina is not performing, she seems to be practicing in the dance room; however, he d...
American Gothic is a realistic painting, and in a sense this is true. Looking at the painting and then at the
Ringe, Donald A. American Gothic: Imagination and Reason in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Lexington KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982.
In 1930, an artist by the name of Grant Wood painted American Gothic. The painting consists of a man and woman who happened to be brother and sister in real life. Two modes of analysis are used to compose this art analysis. A biographical analysis is used because the artist, Grant Wood, grew up and lived on a farm for most of his life in Iowa. By painting the background to look as if it were set on a farm, Grant Wood references the setting back to the time of living on the farm in Iowa. A contextual analysis was also used to write this analysis. In 1930, the Great Depression was occurring and people in the United States were suffering greatly. The Great Depression made people’s lives stressful and unhappy. The painting depicts a woman and man with very grim faces which can be inferred to the hard times people faced during the Great Depression.
At first glance, in Grant Wood’s Stone City you see a wide variety of visual elements. As you look longer you see the pieces come into focus. The eight terms that help me analyze the visual experience of Wood’s painting are line, shape, mass, light, value, color, texture, and space. This picture is in landscape view, and is three-dimensional.
Southern gothic is a type of literature that focuses on the harsh conflicts of violence and racism, which is observed in the perspective of black and white individuals. Some of the most familiar southern authors are William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy. One author in particular, Flannery O’Connor, is a remarkable author, who directly reflects upon southern grotesque within her two short stories, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Revelation.” These two short stories are very similar to each other, which is why I believe that O’Connor often writes with violent characters to expose real violence in the world while tying them in with a particular spiritual insight.
Kathy Prendergast, further contends, that it is this convergence of the Gothic art style and Romantic genre which was quintessential of the nineteenth century era. Both collided to spotlight terror, valuelessness emotion and vulnerability. Both collided to perpetrate a sense of wonderment in the reader/viewer, a sense of helplessness in the face of some superior force. The Gothic architecture with its peculiarity, mystery and imperilment; the Gothic architecture with its a...
Looking at the piece at first you will see a bedroom and you might think ‘oh what a simple and modest accommodation’ it’s not much of a room but it is nice. You get the sense that the person who sleeps in this room doesn’t have a lot of money to spare, and might even be on the brink of going bankrupt. The walls might be decorated with paintings but if you assume that the artist is painting his own room, which he was, then you would think that he hung up his own paintings. With the exception of two Japanese prints he did just put up his own paintings (Brooks, The Paintings).
...hese repeated vertical lines contrast firmly with a horizontal line that divides the canvas almost exactly in half. The background, upper portion of the canvas, seems unchanging and flat, whereas the foreground and middle ground of the painting have a lot of depth to them.
The painting Olive Trees, now at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, is one of a series of ten or twelve paintings of olive orchards, which Van Gogh painted in 1889 while living at the asylum of Saint-Remy. This painting is a landscape accomplished in bright, complementary colors, with Van Gogh’s characteristically brisk brushwork. The image is divided roughly into thirds, with the middle zone, the trees, being highly capricious. The brushstrokes describe the lay of the land, the movement of the wind in the trees, and the rays of the sun. The sun itself is hugely misrepresented in size, and highlighted also by an outline of orange. It dominates the picture and takes on perhaps a “supernatural” aspect, possibly representing deity or faith. The curved trees all lean, even quiver, away from the center of the painting. They cast violet shadows which shouldn’t be possible, given the placement of the sun: Realism is sacrificed for the content. The most prominent of these shadows is at the center of the foreground, and is not associated with any one tree. One could see this central shadow as the thing from which the trees are bending. The base of each tree is painted with red lines that ambiguously outline where the shadows would fall if the sun were directly overhead. Both the ground and the trees have a singularly wave appearance, while the sun is more stable, and the distant mountains are still.