Grant Wood
American Gothic

It's hard to admit, but culturally the 20th century fits entirely into little more than 4500 cm².

In 1930, Grant Wood painted "American Gothic". Oil on beaverboard, a panel made from compressed wood fibers, depicts a male figure, bordering on old age, holding a pitchfork, and another, female, younger character, perhaps the man's wife or perhaps daughter—this ambiguous doubt would contribute to the success of the work—standing in front of one of the typical constructions of the American Midwest: a house in Rural Gothic architecture. The two characters are painted in clothing reminiscent of 19th-century American settler style, and their facial expressions are serious, composed in an almost grimace of severe simplicity. The atmosphere's gloominess is heightened by the silhouette of the pitchfork, subtly mirrored in various other elements of the painting.

From the start, the painting, created for a competition at the Art Institute of Chicago and never moved from there, elicited contrasting reactions: for some, it was a funny parody, described as a "comic valentine" by the judges of the debut competition, mocking the habits and customs of the American rural class, often trapped in a narrow-minded and petty provincialism, while others saw it as an exaltation of the spirit of sacrifice and the sobriety of a generation of hard but simple people who contributed to achieving the American Dream. Wood claimed it represented all the American people, not just a part, but the suspicion that this was an after-the-fact explanation remained and remains strong.

The sure thing is that in every era of 20th-century America, "American Gothic" assumed a well-defined, always different role depending on the historical circumstances, more or less dramatic, until it became a painted metaphor: this transformism sparked quite a few irreverent imaginations, as much as one can desecrate something born "ugly", we will never know whether intentionally or not, and the parodies began to rain more and more numerous until they turned the farmer couple into an icon of folk art and Pop Culture.

Returning to the beginning, one cannot help but feel a sense of discomfort in admitting that an innocuous work by an obscure American painter unwittingly anticipates the pressing cultural themes of the Short Century: the "ugly" becoming an art form, the boundary between satire and drama, a lack of technique, whether intentional or not, suggesting the possibility of "serializing" art, the emergence of the boundary between kitsch and camp, and even a small glimmer, born not from the painting itself but from the reflections around it, of Criticism of Criticism.

If Wood had wanted all of this, he would be a genius, but he did not, and this makes him the prototype of the conceptual artist we must still confront today.