American
Gothic at the Royal Academy
American Gothic,
currently on display at the Royal Academy, is one of those paintings labelled
as “iconic” (examples given by commentators are the Mona Lisa and The Scream).
What is “iconic” ?(One modern measure would be the number of reproductions.)
The Mona Lisa doesn’t obviously
represent any wider cultural context (no doubt forensic art historians would
disagree). Its enduring power lies in the human suggestiveness of That Smile…it
is iconic of a timeless realm of beauty and ambiguity. (And, one might say, it
has spawned, like the views in Venice, a sort of meta-iconicism, whereby people
crowd, not to look at the painting, but to be photographed with their backs to it.)
The Scream, on the other hand, is
directly and rawly powerful. It is directly iconic of early C20 terrible wars,
and the advent of Freud.
American Gothic’s iconic status derives from more external factors. Painted (as were all
the other pictures in the RA exhibition in the 1930s), it depicts a steadfast,
puritanical-seeming, farming couple, standing in front of their “Gothic”
windowed farmhouse.
So- an evocation of frontier farming steadfastness at a
time of national calamity? That might be the superficial reading. But, although
the artist, Grant Wood, was a strong advocate of “American Regionalism” (the
artistic exploration of the roots of localities), he did not accept all roots,
or their flowers, uncritically.
Wood’s Daughters of the Revolution is a rather contemptuous depiction of
the smug “aristocracy” of the descendants of the Founding Fathers.
His Paul Revere is a surprisingly cartoonish
thing, looking like a still from a Disney film. As we watch from a great
height, dark houses light blazingly up as a little rider races by on a smooth
curving road. The news of the uprising against the Brits is literally
electrifying.
Back to American Gothic. Maybe, given his other works and attitudes, the artist hints at rural bigotry? And a lot
more ambiguity seeps in when we learn
about the circumstances of its actual painting. The models are the artist’s
dentist, and the artist’s sister. She is supposed to be a daughter, not a
younger wife, and was very upset when the latter status was inferred. The
dentist character can now be viewed as decidedly nervous in his model role (this isn’t really me..). And, for the
viewer, given the background knowledge, there is a terrible frisson in the
image of a real dentist with a pitchfork – Open
very, very wide… and hold very, very still..
Iconic in providing very
conflicting, and indeed disturbing, responses.
The title of the RA
exhibition After the Fall refers to
the huge economic depression in the US that followed the Great Crash of 1929.
The art is not all about Depression – on the contrary, the themes are many and
various, for a relatively small exhibition. There is a wonderfully, and
deliberately vulgar (all straining buttocks and crotches), painting of drunken
sailors and girls (and a man interested
in sailors), The Fleet is In, to
which the US Navy primly objected.
The
most emblematic “depressed” painting is a wonderful study in loneliness by
Hopper, set in the empty spaces of that pre-eminent escapist location – the
cinema (New York Movie).
April 2017
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