Amerikanische Gotik

Grant Wood painted this in 1930, the first full year of the Great Depression, after spotting a small white farmhouse in Iowa with a single Gothic window, the pointed kind you would expect on a church, not a farm. He thought about the sort of people who might live behind that window and built them to match. The models were not a farm couple at all. The man was Wood's dentist, the woman his own sister, and he posed them separately, adding the pitchfork whose three tines echo the seams of the man's overalls and the window itself. Iowa took it as mockery of rural folk. Wood insisted he admired them. The picture arrived just as dust storms and bank failures were emptying farms like this one across the middle of the country.