The Public Life of Painting

American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting. By Steven Biel. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. 215 pages. $21.95 (cloth).

To explain what he means by the "the biography of things," the anthropologist Igor Kopytoff points to a typical Zulu hut, metamorphosing from its life as a house to its life as a guest house, as a kitchen, and finally as a chicken coop, before collapsing, ravaged by termites. Monumental objects become biographical subjects more readily. The year after Andy Warhol turned a building into a movie star (in the eight-hour Empire), Alan Trachtenberg published Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965), a path-breaking example of the biographical genre that includes Marvin Trachtenberg's The Statue of Liberty (1976), for instance, and Eric Darton's Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York City's World Trade Center (2000). These are biographies that tell the history of both physical and metaphysical (symbolic, allegorical, ideological) lives.¹

Kopytoff also points to the example of artworks, explaining that "a biography of a painting by Renoir that ends up in an incinerator is as tragic, in its way, as the biography of a person who ends up murdered."² Picasso's Guernica has inspired a record number of biographies, recently and importantly Gijs van Hensbergen's Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon (2004).³ However complex the history of the mural's composition and exhibition, the history of its iconicity resolves into the simple fact of its worldwide symbolic value: the protest against unwarranted military violence. Guernica might be understood not simply as the twentieth century's most iconic painting, but as the one painting that the century could hardly live without, an image reproduced as a tapestry to hang outside the U.N. Security Council. In this century, it has already become an icon that proves somewhat difficult to live with. On the day (in February 2003) when Colin Powell explained to the Security Council why the United States must wage war on Iraq, blue drapery veiled the dramatic reminder of the human capacity to inflict chaos and suffering.

Humbler, comparatively diminutive paintings deserve biographies too, as Steven Biel demonstrates in his charming, lively American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting. I think it's debatable whether (from a non-American perspective) Grant Wood's portrait is America's most famous painting. But for Americans, it is no doubt the most recognizable painting that is recognizably American, and recognizable not just as a portrait of two Americans, but also, it seems, as a portrait of America. As Wanda Corn put it, in the catalog that accompanied the retrospective (1983–84) that reestablished Wood's importance, few people agreed about what American Gothic was supposed to be saying, but "everyone agreed" that "the painting said something fundamentally American."⁴ For part of the art world, silence would have preferable. In the catalog, Corn quotes Hilton Kramer's confident 1974 dismissal of Wood as a "corpse" one need not "disinter."⁵ In response to the exhibition, Kramer strained to exorcise this return of the dead, describing Wood's oeuvre as "a calculated lie from start to finish—the fantasy of an emotionally retarded, adolescent sensibility desperately seeking refuge from the realities of life in a dreamworld of his own invention."⁶ The invective updated the "Grant Wood Controversy," as it was already called in 1942, the year of the memorial Wood retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago.⁷ On the one hand, it's easy enough to accept the controversy as part of the "system of art" that sustains itself by drawing and redrawing boundaries (between good and bad, inside and out, legitimate and illegitimate, art and not art);⁸ on the other, the stakes of the controversy extend beyond that system. Indeed, having turned its back on modernist aesthetics, Regionalism has never been granted anything like aesthetic autonomy; this is art that is supposed to perform representational, historical, ideological work...