Excellent cultural history, using American Gothic to illuminate Americans’ evolving relationship with our heartland values.
The extraordinary odyssey of America’s most loved—and reviled—painting.
American Gothic was almost sent back to Grant Wood after he submitted it in 1930, the paint still wet, to the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual exhibition of American paintings and sculpture. Salvaged from the reject pile by a trustee, it won $300 and a bronze medal. The rest is history—and pretty amazing history at that, demonstrates Biel (History and Literature/Harvard; Down with the Old Canoe, 1996, etc.). Beginning with a present-day visit to the background house, which still stands at the edge of Eldon, Iowa, the author outlines the painting’s creation, its depiction of Wood’s sister and a local dentist (who did not pose at the same time), and the birth of its notoriety. American Gothic caused controversy almost immediately. Iowans were concerned about being depicted as sour, and moralists were concerned about the age difference between the man and the woman: Were they a husband and wife or not? Everyone assumed it was a satire, until Wood fanned the flames by claiming it wasn’t, therefore implying the subject matter was accurate. It was one of the most discussed works of art of the era. As America drew closer to WWII, the painting became transformed into an iconic image of steadfast resolution and individual freedom. Yet it has also been used to parody practically all aspects of American life; Biel sherpas us through some of the more trenchant examples in our own time, from the wedding scene of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (parodying Brad’s and Janet’s straitlaced background) to a New Yorker cartoon after 9/11 in which the figures’ “I ? NY” T-shirts suggested the heartland’s empathy for the city. Ironically, the author points out, in the 75 years since it was painted, “an image blasted for its inauthenticity [came] to assume the authenticity of folk art, the aura of genuine Americana, the authority of a national icon.”
Excellent cultural history, using American Gothic to illuminate Americans’ evolving relationship with our heartland values.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05912-X
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Stiff and hobbled by its own exhaustiveness, this biography of Paris's tiny painter/provocateur (18641901) takes lively material and renders it lifeless. Frey (French/Univ. of Colorado, Boulder) raided a trove of newly released Toulouse-Lautrec family letters for this life study. Writing to his dear ``Maman'' and other dotty family members, the painter reveals himself only in the most guarded terms. He presents a foppish self-caricature, one that pokes fun at his own dwarfism, aristocratic background, and artistic pretensions. Frey provides more than ample surrounding historical context. She discusses thoroughly the wealthy Toulouse-Lautrec bloodline, its possible genetic inbreeding, and prickly family dynamic. Lively illustrations throughout enrich the text, and in art historical matters Frey, who has training as a printmaker, is most solid. Paris's period atelier system is depicted with some color. A sensible account of Toulouse-Lautrec's technical development follows, particularly strong in its analysis of the liberating effect that lithography had on the artist's work and its role in propagating his public image. Examined at length are Toulouse- Lautrec's possible influences: the formidable shadow of Edgar Degas, the development of still photography, the radical perspectival schemes introduced to Westerners by Japanese prints, and the philosophical convictions of the social realist and art nouveau movements. Less convincing are the author's constant attempts to second-guess Toulouse-Lautrec's psychological motivations for depicting his chosen subjects—the performers and prostitutes of Paris's bohemian Montmartre—and her ceaseless harping on his chronic alcoholism, possible sex life, and probable syphilitic condition. Frey includes extraneous detail to the point of annoyance. No true sense of Toulouse-Lautrec the person emerges. Painstaking and scrupulously scholarly without managing to be evocative. (84 b&w illustrations; 24 pages color illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-80844-X
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
Andrew Wyeth's Helgas be damned. Klimt's erotic turn-of-the- century Viennese paintings have of late become popular iconographic fodder, and this handsome and luxuriant coffee-table extravaganza goes a long way to showing why. Nebehay's father was a friend and art dealer of Klimt's (18621918). The author himself is an Austrian antiquarian bookseller and scholar of Klimt, and of his notorious student, Egon Schiele. Nebehay puts his penchant for detail to great use as he incorporates a lively variety of visual sources: period postcards, posters, sepia photographs of the artist and his milieu, industrial-design objects of the period, examples of Viennese Ringstrasse neo-baroque architecture, and facsimile reproductions of sketchbook pages and correspondences. Special attention is paid to Vienna's utopian Secession movement, of which Klimt served as de facto leader. Its members included Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, and Joseph Maria Olbrich. The work of these men, as well as that of Klimt's students Oskar Kokoschka and Schiele, is detailed in depth in the author's workmanlike and thoroughly annotated text. The book's real strength, though, is pictorial. The images are arranged in powerful juxtapositions. Klimt's loose and mellifluous pencil studies of nudes are counterposed with his intricate and stiffly stylized finished paintings. Elsewhere, full-bleed double-page spreads are effectively employed to reproduce sketchbook studies- -virtuoso doodlings in India ink of achingly erotic waifs and hollow-eyed death skulls. Lastly, a curriculum vitae time line is augmented with photos, Klimt's personal writings, and exhaustive supporting notes. In all, a package filled with studious information that succeeds foremost through its daring and stylish visual presentation. As art books go, this one offers quite the ride—heights of intoxicating decadence tethered down by scrupulous scholarly documentation.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8109-3510-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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