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Wanda Corn - The Couple With the Pitchfork [at the James]
Past event
Featured Book
The Couple With the Pitchfork: American Gothic From Easel to Icon
A rich, evolving history of one of the most recognized couples in the world
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-styled 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 extends far beyond the world of art.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
The event is organized by the University of Iowa's Grant Wood Art Colony, the James P. Hayes Foundation, and ICON.Award-winning art historian Wanda M. Corn will read from her new book, The Couple With the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon, at The James Theater, sponsored by The Grant Wood Society. Described as "A rich, evolving history of one of the most recognized couples in the world," The Couple With the Pitchfork is "A highly readable and personalized study of a painter and the work he would forever be tied to" (https://press.princeton.edu).Wanda Corn’s scholarship, as well as her teaching, has focused on art and artists of the American Gilded Age, early twentieth-century avant-garde modernist culture along the Atlantic rim, and American artists commonly identified as regionalists. She named and defined the American Tonalist movement and has renewed interest in forgotten artists such as Grant Wood and the women artists who produced murals for the 1893 World’s Fair. Working across the boundaries of the academy and the museum, her books have accompanied and initiated major exhibitions. In her curatorial practices, she was an early adopter of extended wall labels and contextualizing ephemera and material culture. Her travelling exhibition on Georgia O’Keeffe, supported by a Mellon Emeritus grant, pioneered in showcasing not only works of art but examples of clothing drawn from the artist’s distinctive wardrobe and photographs demonstrating her singular style of modeling for the camera. Corn’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, The Center for Advanced Study at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Clark Art Institute, and the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center (https://art.stanford.edu/people/wanda-m-corn).
Featured Author
Corn, Wanda M.
Wanda M. Corn is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford University. She is the author of The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935; Women Building History: Public Art at the 1893 Columbian Exposition; and Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern.
About the Venue
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