Reading the Art World: Wanda Corn
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Listen to our latest podcast episode featuring Wanda Corn, discussing her new book, The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon, published by Princeton University Press.
Corn calls this the last book on her “intellectual bucket list,” one she could not have written fifty years ago. In 1970, she began collecting what she calls “Gothiciana”—the countless reinterpretations of Grant Wood's American Gothic that have appeared in cartoons, advertisements, political imagery, and popular culture. Her first discoveries were on the streets of Berkeley, where the familiar couple had found their way into the counterculture.
Over the following five decades, that collection grew into an extraordinary record of how a painting becomes an icon. Wood's two famously stern figures have been adopted, parodied, and reinvented by generations of people who may know little about the artist or the original painting.
The conversation also turns to Wood's complicated standing in American art history. As a graduate student at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, Corn was discouraged by the influential art historian H. W. Janson from studying American Gothic. Wood and other American Regionalists had fallen out of favor as modernism came to dominate the critical and academic conversation. Corn's long engagement with Wood offers a fascinating perspective on how artistic reputations change—and how art history itself is written.
One of the book's central distinctions is between American Gothic, the painting, and the Couple with the Pitchfork, the image that has taken on a life of its own. Nearly a century after Wood painted them, the couple continues to appear in new forms and contexts around the world.
“There’s the life of the painting, and then there is the life of the icon. And the icon is not a painting, it’s an image, and it’s free-floating, and it is open to anybody to grab and to use any way they wish.”
– Wanda Corn
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About the Author
Wanda M. Corn is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in Art History at Stanford University, where in 1980 she became the university's first permanent appointment in the history of American art. Her books include The Great American Thing and Georgia O'Keeffe: Living Modern. She has chaired the Advisory Committee for Historic Artist Homes and Studios, an affiliate program of the National Trust, since 2000.
Brown & Brown is the sponsor of this episode of Reading the Art World, helping to bring conversations like this one to a wider audience. Their fine art specialists advise museums, collectors, artists, galleries, and artist-endowed foundations around the world on insurance and risk management, including loan and consignment agreements, storage, transit, and conservation. Brown & Brown works across the fine art insurance market, advocating for customers and helping them navigate the unique risks that come with owning, exhibiting, transporting, and preserving art. Their team includes professionals with backgrounds in art and art history. Learn more at Brown & Brown Fine Art.