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| Models used by Grant Wood in American Gothic Picture credit - Time January 18, 1943 |
Nan is the female character and Doctor McKeeby stands as Woods male puritan American hard working farmer. The American Gothic McKeeby is in reality a dentist and Nan is Grant's sister.
Grant Wood, the Regionalist Iowa based American painter, claims that he went beyond the actual being of his American Gothic models and the portrait is his rendition of the deeper ethics of solid hard working American folks.
He studied art in Paris, France at a time when the Impressionists were populating the art scene. He returned to the USA and his hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His gothic america theme rendered in paintings like American Gothic, Pioneer, and Daughters of Revolution were influenced more by the works of artist like Durer and Holbein than Impressionists like Monet, Renoir, Pissaro and others.
Holbein the Younger was a Bavarian born German who learnt the skills of an artist from Holbein the Elder who'd started painting in the late Gothic style and had been tested the evolving Renaissance classical style. Elder Holbein was a painter who made mostly religious images in the years leading up to religious reformations. Younger Holbein travelled Europe from Bavaria, to Switzerland, to England where he ended up getting the job of court painter to Henry the Eight.
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| Grant Wood Gothic America - Daughters of Revolution detail |
Wood was supposedly going to work on artistic stories which involved the esoteric nature of evolution and revolution. Amongst his collection of scrapbooking were articles on information about the Arabic Order of Mystic Shriners.
Shriners were not novelty in America in Grant Wood's lifetime. Assemblies of the AAONMS or Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, or simply the Shriners had been meeting in Temples within Mosques since the 1870's. The Shriners were American men who grew out of the freemason ideologies. AAONMS was and remains an appendage of freemansonry.
Grant Wood was questioning the deeper reasoning of such fellowship. The rest of America was accepting that fellows like this who provided services such as the Shriners Hospital for Children could do no wrong. The general public was calling the Shriners Hospital project " The World's Greatest Philanthropy ".
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| Death on Ridge Road - Part of Grant Wood's Gothic America |
Nearly overnight all of America was looking at Nan and Dr McKeeby and looking at the rest of the Wood collection with deeper interest. Many were calling the Gothic theme grotesque while others fell passionately in love with the painted renditions of hard working yeoman evolving in America alongside auto giants and other well to do elite.
At first glance, when looking at Death on Ridge Road, most people see a house on the horizon. A closer look shows that it is not a house. It is a huge truck coming straight into the path of an oncoming car. This painting was used by an Insurance Company with the caption " Death begins at 40 " to advertise and sell insurance policies. Ironically, Wood had painted after both he and a close personal friend had been in separate automobile accidents. Even the hydro poles have that eerie religious dark gothic feeling in this picture.
Wood died in 1942 at the age of 50 from complications related to cancer of the liver. The Gothic America estate went to his sister Nan who lived until 1990.
The full name of the Anamosa, Iowa, painter and founding father of the Regionalist movement of art, is Grant DeVolson Wood.
Devil's Son !!!!! Go figure.........Things of Gothic things never cease to amaze and amuse.
For example, when Nan died in 1990, the then named Davenport Museum of Art ( Figge Art Museum ) became the owners of the Wood estate and all of it's content. The Davenport Museum is a product of the Davenport Art Association which was founded in 1878 at about the same time that the masons are meeting in New York at the Knickerbocker Cottage. The Davenport Museum of Art opened in 1925 and it was supplied with a huge collection of art memorabilia by a prominent lawyer named Charles Ficke.
The Davenport Museum becomes the Figge Art Museum in 2005. A top supporter of the Figge is the Henry Luce Foundation. Interestingly enough Henry R. Luce is co-founder and editor in chief of Time Inc. which ran the article used as a resource for this blog post called Gothic America.
Figge is Ficke in Swedish.
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