American Gothic and a Painting I Like Better

Above is American Gothic, a truly iconic American painting.  I saw it last week for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago in a room full of American Regionalist paintings.

I recognized it immediately.  It is easily the most famous of Grant Wood's paintings.  An Iowan, he died young in 1942 at the age of 51.

Here is another picture of a Wood painting that I just pulled
up on the internet.  It is entitled The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa, 1931.  (Perhaps an unfortunate title and date, but he did others like it.)  It looks
to me like a sympathetic, even romanticized view of
farm life in Iowa early in the last century.

Still, what Wood is remembered for is American Gothic. Many art experts look at it and describe the picture as an ennoblement of the discipline, work ethic and even valor of the Midwestern American farmer.

I didn't see it that way.  When I looked at American Gothic in its original form, I recognized an icon, all right, but one that has been adopted and repurposed endlessly in American advertising and television as a big joke about how rural and square the country used to be.

Who knows what Wood had in mind?  Maybe he was imitating stiff 19th century American portraiture. I find it hard to believe he felt affection for the characters in the painting.

In any event, in that particular room at the Art Institute, American Gothic is by far the biggest attraction.  Tour groups gather around (as if there were anything new to see) and listen to careful explications of its origin and meaning.

Meanwhile, just a few yards away is what, to me, is a wonderful American Regional painting from 1945.  The Art Institute acquired it last year, and it was painted by an Art Institute alum named Thomas Hart Benton.  It is called The Cotton Pickers.  Here it is:

Benton, also from the Midwest, specialized in realistic paintings of people in their environments.  This picture was painted, from notes or memory, years after a visit Benton made to Georgia in the 1920s.  It depicts black people harvesting cotton under the hot Georgia sun.  One woman is offering a man water; a young child sleeps under a make-shift shelter.  The people, like all Benton characters, are sinewy, as is the landscape.  You can almost feel how their backs must ache. Their labor and their endurance are evident and moving.

The Art Institute of Chicago museum is an embarrassment of riches.  It is far too much to appreciate in a single visit.  But I hope that, perhaps over time, visitors will shift their focus in the American Regional room from the Wood painting to the new Benton acquisition, which rewards a longer look and more careful study.