American Idol

Second place? Oh yes, Grant Wood's 1930 oil-on-panel painting, "American Gothic," currently hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago. Being runner-up is all the more impressive when you consider that the "Mona Lisa" comes from the hand of one of the greatest all-around geniuses of all time and enjoys the historical aura of having been painted half a millennium ago. "American Gothic," to the contrary, is the product of a merely good artist who confined his career to Iowa--where the picture was posed and painted, in Cedar Rapids. Wood died in 1942 at age 51 from pancreatic cancer, his career essentially limited by an early death to the 1930s.

As with the "Mona Lisa" (exactly who is she, and why is she smiling--if she's smiling?), most of the fascination with "American Gothic" comes from the enigma in the sitters (or, in Wood's case, standers). Most people see the man (the model was a local dentist) and the woman, posed by Wood's sister, Nan, as a husband and wife displaying a stern resolve to uphold what have come to be called "American values." Call them Red Staters. But they do look a little, well, peeved at something, too. Or maybe, as thes effects of the stock-market crash rolled across the heartland, a little sad. Enter Steven Biel. Not solely to sort out what's going on in the picture, but to tell the whole story of how it got painted and what's happened to the famous image since, the Harvard professor has written a fascinating, if not wholly satisfying book, "American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting" (215 pages. Norton. $21.95 ).

Among the mysteries Biel clears up is the characters' relationship: they're father and daughter. The year before he died, Wood went to Chicago to gaze at his masterpiece and talked to an art student about it. "Papa runs the local bank or perhaps the lumber yard," he said. "He is prominent in the church and possibly preaches occasionally. In the evening, he comes home from work, takes off his collar, slips on overalls and an old coat, and goes out to the barn to hay the cow. The prim lady with him is his grown-up daughter. Needless to say, she is very self-righteous like her father." The expression "hay the cow," in turn, clears up another puzzle: the three-pronged tool held by Papa is a hay fork, not a "pitchfork," which is four-pronged. Wood was a meticulous researcher, pouring over mail-order catalogs to get the clothes and equipment in his paintings just right.

Grant Wood was a chubby, bespectacled man who'd be played by Drew Carey, with hair dyed darker, in the biopic. He was born near Anamosa, Iowa, and in his early 20s went off to Chicago to study at the Art Institute. His money ran out and he enlisted in the Army, where he designed camouflage. Mustered out to Cedar Rapids again, he taught art in a junior high, then--as even artists in Iowa felt compelled--went off to Paris for more art schooling. He ingested the minimum recommended dose of modernism, painted some bad impressionist pictures, and decided, once more, that Cedar Rapids was where he wanted to hang his smock. "I came back," he said, "because I learned that French painting is very fine for French people and not necessarily for us, and because I started to analyze what it was I really knew. I found out. It's Iowa."

Although Wood married in 1935, he ended what Nan called a "traumatic nightmare" with that domineering woman through a divorce in 1939. Wood lived mostly with his sister and mother, Hattie, and, according to the art critic Robert Hughes, was "a timid and deeply closeted homosexual." Biel is oddly noncommittal, even evasive, on that point. He fudges whether "ambiguous sexuality" is primarily a property of "American Gothic" or the artist, and whether Wood's orientation was "unresolved" by Wood himself, or just art historians, posthumously. Apparently, there are no smoking guns or burning love letters to prove things one way or the other.

After "American Gothic," Wood went on to achieve a certain recognition as a part of the "American scene" or "regionalist" movement, along with Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry. His coolly precise, Claymation-like paintings of Paul Revere's ride, fields being plowed and, of course, a certain farm duo made him an enduring popular favorite. Critically, Wood hasn't been so fortunate. The ubiquitous college art-history textbook by H. W. Janson (who'd trumpeted "American Gothic" as a satire in the 1940s) simply left Wood out of its account of 20th-century painting. When Wood got a belated traveling retrospective in 1983, Hilton Kramer called his art "abysmally phony in almost every respect" and "a calculated lie from start to finish."

"American Gothic," just 30 inches high, is a solid, even rigid composition rendered on cheap beaver board. It shows the influence of Flemish old masters; "American Gothic" is almost a Yankee riff on Jan van Eyck's 15th-century Aniline wedding painting. The vertical line of the hay fork's middle prong rises almost dead center and is echoed in window's mullion, the house's lightning rod, its porch posts and siding and even in the seams of Papa's overalls. The colors are subdued (pale flesh, white house, baby blue sky) and contrasted with black; red and green are limited to the accenting barn and trees. The whole effect is one of austerity, seriousness and piety. When we look at the painting, most of us think, "OK, glad to have these industrious folks shoring up the heartland, but I wouldn't want to move in next door."

Which is not exactly the way "American Gothic" was originally received. Submitted to the Art Institute's annual national juried exhibition, it was initially rejected--too obvious, too homely, too downscale--until a board member lobbied it back in and arranged for it to be bought for the Institute's collection. The price was $300--not bad money for 1930. Wood got another $300 for taking the Norman Wait Harris Bronze Medal at the exhibition. When word, and newspaper reproductions, filtered back to Cedar Rapids, locals were incensed at being "satirized." (Wood had read H. L. Mencken's debunking of the American "booboisie" and, for a time, agreed with it.) Modernist art critics, on the other hand, consistently denounced the painting over the years as reactionary cornpone sentiment. The more they railed, though, the more the public liked it. Finally, the conflicting views merged in the 1960s into an ironic appreciation of "American Gothic's" campiness.

Wood, who was capable of overt satire (check out his depiction of the D.A.R. in "Daughters of Revolution"), must have seen them coming. The first telling reference was Gordon Parks's 1942 "Ella Watson in Washington, DC," showing a black cleaning woman in a large federal building holding up a mop and broom. Parks used the image to decry racism. Twenty years later, General Mills produced its famous deadpan TV commercial, spinning "American Gothic" to sell cornflakes. Along the way and afterward, the painting inspired (if that's the word) a scene in "The Music Man," an episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show," perhaps the whole concept of the sitcom "Green Acres" and a peacenik poster. When Johnny Carson featured an altered "American Gothic" with the daughter in a bikini, Nan sued--not for defamation, but for infringement on her "right of publicity." Five years ago Coors beer ran an ad based on the painting, only with a gay male couple replacing daughter and Papa. The Art Institute obtained a cease-and-desist order because it didn't want any of its artworks promoting alcohol.

Biel, like a lot of cultural commentators, makes a deep deal out of why "American Gothic" is so often graphically quoted. It all has to do, they say, with its resonance in Americans about individuality, hard work (you can almost hear President George W. Bush doing the Acoustiguide) and religion (if that window says anything, it says "church"). True, but it also has to do with the work's simplicity, and it being a cinch to graft any faces you want onto the farm couple, even before the advent of Photoshop. The more that happens, the more well-known the work becomes; the more well-known the work becomes, the more that happens. Expediency sometimes explains a lot more than profundity, especially in pragmatic America.

"American Gothic" (the book, that is) begins with Biel driving up to the house in Eldon, Iowa, that Grant Wood saw on a car ride in 1930 and decided to use as a backdrop for his famous painting. He describes the back and sides of the place, its traversement from dilapidation to cleaned-up would-be tourist mecca before achieving peace at "Eh." Biel doesn't get in the house on his first visit and returns in 2004 only to find the caretaker has moved on and that it's "too late," for some reason, to contact the new one. "I fended off mosquitoes," he writes, "and thought that if I looked through the window from the inside out, I'd have done something that Grant Wood never did. But I'd already visited the house two times to his one, and it didn't look like anyone was home anyway." One hundred sixty-three footnotes notwithstanding, this is what passes for thorough research at Harvard? "American Gothic's" Papa would have worked harder than that.