American psyche

The latest exhibition at the Royal Academy is entitled America after the Fall. It deals with painting in the United States during the 1930s: that is, the decade before the tidal surge of abstract expressionism. So this show is a sort of prequel to the RA’s great ab ex blockbuster of last autumn. It might have been called, ‘Before Jackson Began Dripping’.

Not much in this selection, though, can compare to the power of the abstract expressionists at their peak in the Forties and Fifties — not even an early work by Pollock himself. But it does include a couple of masterpieces by Edward Hopper, plus several pictures so brashly over the top as to be quite interesting, several others that are simply terrible — and one of the world’s most familiar images.

The last is Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’, a picture that almost everyone recognises — even if they are unable to recall the title or the name of the artist. It serves as shorthand for the pioneer spirit — devout, po-faced, plain-living and doggedly industrious — that was becoming quaintly archaic even when Wood painted it in 1930.

For that reason, plus its memorability, ‘American Gothic’ is a favourite withcartoonists. Peter Brookes of the Times has used it to brilliant effect more than once, most recently with President Trump’shead on the farmer’s body, Nigel Farage — fag in mouth — as the wife and Theresa May’s head impaled on the fork in the middle.

The original turns out to be almost as much of a collage as that parody. Wood got the idea from seeing a 19th-century wooden house in Iowa. He then set about imagining the kind of people who might have lived in such a dwelling. His sister posed for the woman, his dentist for her husband (once one learns that it is hard not to read his expression as a professional stare at a decayed molar).