In the years following the first World War, there were two strong crosscurrents rippling through American art. The Armory Show exhibited in this country for the first time the innovative and increasingly abstract works of a small number of European artists who were among the first to create “modern” works of art. This exhibition had a tremendous impact on the growing cadre of American modernists and informed a great deal of the work being created in New York and Philadelphia. There was also an antithetical response by a number of other artists who turned to modern interpretations of narrative works that embraced the figure to present a different mode of modernism. Artists who chose the latter form of dialogue on the East Coast were branded ‘Social Realists” for their gritty definitions of the daily struggles in a more industrial world. In the heartland of the country, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood became the three painters that defined the creation of “Regionalism” which was that region’s manifestation of the lurching changes in modern day life.

Grant Wood’s career was defined by a meteoric rise in fame following his 1930 creation of American Gothic which is likely the most famous painting created in this country in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Wood weaved together the influences of the European Old Masters and a rural view of life in his native Iowa. American Gothic was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in the Forty-Third Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture and was purchased that year by the Friends of American Art of the Institute, becoming one of that great institutions most important works of art. A rather simple portrayal of Wood’s sister and the town dentist, American Gothic was immediately received as a simple comic portrayal of simple townsfolk but in later years has been appreciated for the thoughtful satirical approach that Wood employed to work through many of the changing issues of a rigid spiritually grounded life in the heartland of America.