ExclusiveNan Wood: The Real Woman in American Gothic

Welcome to American Legends. My name is Tiffany Brannon. Each culture has its legends, and that could be myths or different stories, but here in America, our greatest legends are the wonderful heroes who are right from our history pages. Now, some of these heroes are very famous and some are obscure, but each person deserves to be discovered because each man or woman stands as a great example of how we can be better Americans If you're familiar with the American art of the mid-20th century, you've surely seen American Gothic. Everyone knows the painting of the farmer and the woman standing next to him, either his wife or his daughter, and their serious expressions. If not from the original painting, you might know it from many different parodies and knockoffs. Yet behind this picture is a real woman who was a very interesting individual in her own right, and a very important support in the life of the artist. The painting, American Gothic, was created and debuted in the year 1930. It definitely reflects the Great Depression era of the Midwest. The simple clothes, the ordinary house, and the serious expressions on the subject's faces all speak of that era of quiet strength amid deprivation. Many people initially interpreted the serious blonde woman in the picture as being the wife of the pitchfork-holding farmer. However, this was not the painter Grant Wood's intention. He intended for this woman to be the daughter of the man, and as a result, he used his own beloved sister, Nan. Nan Wood was born on July 26, 1901. She was the youngest of four children. She was the daughter of farmer Francis Wood and his wife, Hattie. Their farm was located four miles east of Amiposa, Iowa. When Nan was only 16 months old, her father died very suddenly, so the family had to move to Cedar Rapids, because that was closer to where her mother's parents lived. Growing up, Nan had three older brothers, the youngest of which was Grant. Grant wasn't that close to the two older brothers, but he was very close to his sister, Nan. So the two became an inseparable duo. While Grant was developing his own artistic style, Nan began to have some artistic interests herself. She later disagreed with the story that he had told her when she was two years old that she was going to be an artist. She said that that was sort of a ridiculous, fanciful story, but she did say that her brother supported her in whatever she wanted to do. He was very encouraging of whatever her dreams might be. She ended up being very creative in many different forms. She did study art and she later taught it as well, but beyond the traditional media of paints or sketching or sculpture, she used other forms of artistic expression like sewing, making little statues and collages out of tissue, and painting on glass. That was one of her favorite types of art. She loved painting on glass and she later ended up selling some of her pictures of animals to different publications. Grant and Nan lived with their mother for many years on and off. Grant would also be traveling or working elsewhere and he was also married for a few years in the 1930s, which didn't turn out very well for him. Nan, on the other hand, had a very happy and successful marriage. She married real estate broker and investor Edward Graham and they traveled all over together. They lived in many places throughout the United States and eventually they settled in Riverside, California. She lived there with him until he died in 1967 and then she continued to live near there until her death in the 1990s. She was very old when she died. She was 90 years old. Before she got married though, Grant would support her and their mother with his art and they even lived in a little studio slash dwelling that he built because he also was an interior designer as well as a carpenter. Now being an artist is a difficult profession for many reasons. One of these reasons being that there's a lot of more than in most other businesses. Usually if, you know, if you're a realtor, if you do your job of selling houses, you'll probably be somewhat well respected. But when your business is art, even if you technically do your job well and even if you sell a lot of paintings and people love you, that doesn't mean that you won't get a lot of like very mean-spirited comments sometimes and Grant certainly got plenty of that. Having the supportive figure of Nan in his life was a very stabilizing effect for him. She was always there for him to give him some encouragement and try to help him realize what talent he had and just to not doubt himself because she did describe him as a very shy, retiring, gentle person. Nan made about four paintings of her own throughout her life but the greatest thing that she painted or she artistically created was her brother's legacy. After his death in 1942, she took it upon herself to correct the misconceptions and myths which began springing up about him. Many different journalists, reviewers, biographers, and art critics used the opportunity of his life and his early death for fodder for their pens or typewriters and Nan always knew exactly where a myth had originated. She knew the person's name, the first and she often also had an idea why that person had that misconception. Was it a point of confusion based on something else or did he make it up because he was being paid by the word? She was a very generous, kind person though and she would never out the person by name. She did however go out of her way to correct misconceptions. She would write letters to the editor, she would write personal letters to journalists, she would write articles and eventually she wrote a biography of her own about her brother. This was published in the 1970s. Later in her life she also contributed many different articles and letters which were compiled into a book that was called The Essays and Letters of Grant and Nan Wood and I highly recommend that you look that up online. You can find it particularly from her Wikipedia page but there are links to it at the Internet Archive. It's fascinating to see these personal anecdotes that she had about Grant, about their life together, about her own childhood, about his artistic output and about the people who worked with him. Particularly at the end there is a section where she talks about every different myth that she knew about him and why it wasn't true. Right down from the fact that he didn't have red hair to the notion that he wouldn't make eye contact with anyone. She said it was somewhere between the two because some people said he was a really strong confident person who just commanded a room when he came into it. That wasn't true. But on the other hand he wasn't so aloof that he wouldn't even look at you. He was shy but he was a very friendly kind person. After American Gothic debuted a lot of people began making very negative comments about the appearance of the woman. Saying things like her face would curdle milk or how dour she looks and criticizing Grant for making such an unflattering picture of midwestern womanhood. Now he had adjusted the features of his sister a bit because he didn't want it to be just exactly his sister. He made her face much longer and he gave her that very serious expression. She was wearing that actually an apron which Nan herself made sewing bric-a-brac on it that was from one of their mother's dresses. And she had the simple brooch just to convey that almost Victorian look. I've never found the woman's face to be that grumpy or grim. She looks very serious. She looks like you know she's had a hard life. She's clearly supposed to be a spinster. A spinster daughter who chances are her mother died years ago. Maybe there were other siblings who went on, got married or perhaps they died. And she alone is there to help her father take care of the farm. It's a face of duty, of love ultimately and self-sacrifice. And I think that Grant captured that with great tenderness in her expression. Yet nevertheless Nan was not too happy about the mean things people were saying about what was her likeness. And she said it didn't bother her as much as Grant thought it did but he felt really bad. So to make it up to her he made a painting of her which he called Portrait of Nan. And that was more of a depiction of she herself, of actually her. And in it you'll see that she definitely looks different than in American Gothic. Although it's more impressionistic I would say than American Gothic. The actual facial structure and even the body composition is less realistic and a little more impressionistic. In it she's sitting in a chair with her sort of golden blonde hair in a typical like shoulder length 30s style. She's wearing a polka dot blouse. It's a sort of off-white with large black polka dots, a black belt, a long black skirt as much as you can see. She has a simple bracelet on one wrist and in her hands she's holding a plum and a chick. The plum was to match the color of her lips and he wanted something that would be the color of her hair. So that's why he chose a cute little chick. And it also represents her tenderness and her background as a farm girl. Now he wanted her to have some kind of a blouse or attire that would have an interesting pattern to it. But being that this was the Great Depression you couldn't really get new fabric and none of her clothes had quite what he wanted. So he took an old feed bag which was actually a common practice at the time. Women would make dresses out of feed bags. Now there were patterns sometimes. They didn't have polka dots. So he took a light colored one and he took a round shape and actually made different black spots on it to create this pattern. She kind of sewed it into a top and put little black ties on the shoulders and there you go. That's the blouse. Apparently he may have been thinking of giving it to Nan but first it was on display and it received a lot of criticism too. So then he was he was disgusted and he said that that was one of the last times he would really publicly display something that had such personal meaning to him. So he took it out of display and he actually had it above his own mantle in his house. And that was the only one of his paintings that he had in his house on display. Obviously reflecting how much he loved his sister. Nan Wood understood the importance of American regionalism which was her brother's art style in the American scene. Indeed it began to go out of style shortly after Grant's death. Maybe partly because of his death. And she recognized that even as it was no longer current it still was very important and very reflective of that time period. That era in American history when the country was you know between two world wars. That was really when it flourished. First with the rowdy wildness of the Roaring Twenties and then the dour struggles of the 1930s with the Great Depression. Through these different works Grant Wood expressed one of the core tenets of American life at this time and that was family. So it's impossible to study his works and his life without acknowledging the woman who really was the most important in his life. Not his mother and not his short-lived wife but his beloved sister Nan who was not only the model in two of his paintings but sort of a a model of a woman who was supportive and and helpful and a very creative artist in her own right as well as being a model but above all a muse and an artistic support. And she definitely took on the role that many wives of great men will take in trying to preserve his legacy or the role of a daughter. He had no children and he didn't have a wife at the time of his death so Nan took it upon herself to be that keeper of the flame and to keep his legacy burning bright and I think that we can thank her for his enduring success and popularity. She is an excellent example of that strong American stock a woman who lived in every decade of the 20th century experiencing all the amazing ups and downs the drastic change in technology art and culture and through it all remaining a great American patriot and a loyal sister. Thank you for spending this time with me and I hope you'll join me next time for more American Legends.