Book Talk: The Couple with the Pitchfork by Wanda Corn

In this abundantly illustrated book, award-winning art historian Wanda Corn tracks the fortunes and vicissitudes of Grant Wood’s American Gothic, his realist painting of a rural man and woman posed stiffly before a modest white house with a Gothic-style window, made in 1930. She explores Wood’s scrappy formation as a disadvantaged Midwestern artist and his unexpected, overnight fame when American Gothic premiered at the Art Institute of Chicago and was purchased for the museum’s collection. After a close look at the painting’s volatile reputation over its first thirty years, Corn turns to that historic moment in the 1960s when the couple with their pitchfork left the museum and journeyed into the streets. Shedding their preciousness as art, they became a versatile, free-floating image open to reuse and reinterpretation. That moment also found Corn beginning her long career in art history, and she interweaves her story with that of the couple’s evolving appearances in pop art, cartoons, advertisements, and grassroots reenactments. She offers compelling explanations for the painting’s entry into the pantheon of cult visual images. Today, Wood’s couple stands alongside other art icons: Whistler’s mother, Rodin’s thinker, Hokusai’s wave, Munch’s screamer, and the enigmatic beauty in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

A highly readable and personalized study of a painter and the work he would forever be tied to, The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon sheds critical light on the cultural forces that transformed an image with humble roots into a global icon whose reach and charisma extend far beyond the world of art.

The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon will be available for purchase in the Museum Shop late fall.

Wanda M. Corn is a scholar of late 19th- and early 20th-century American art and photography. Having earned a BA (1963), MA (1965), and PhD (1974) from New York University, Professor Corn taught at Washington Square College, the University of California, Berkeley, and Mills College before moving to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1980. At Stanford, she held the university's first permanent appointment in the history of American art and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art History and Acting Director of the Stanford Museum. From 1992 to 1995 she was the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2000, she became the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History. She retired from teaching at Stanford in 2008. In 2009, she was the John Rewald Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at the CUNY Graduate Center. Active as a curator of museum exhibitions, she has produced various books and exhibitions, including The Color of Mood: American Tonalism 1880-1910; The Art of Andrew Wyeth; and Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision. Her current work, The Couple with the Pitchfork, focuses on Grant Wood's most famous painting and the greater impact it has had on popular culture.

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