Excerpts from Three Essays

Grant Wood Excerpt

American Gothic may well be the most thoroughly analyzed painting in the history of American art, all of it an attempt to shake down the picture for its essential message. Art historians, social anthropologists, movie critics, political analysts, cultural historians, retired museum directors, close relatives and even closer friends—the list goes on—have produced a torrent of theories on the seemingly simple genesis and ultimately puzzling significance of this picture. Many of these writers have articulated important insights; but after a while, they all merge into one inconclusive heap. Or, at any event, none has risen to the top. All we know at this point from reading them is that American Gothic is a very recondite picture. But the wonder is not that the picture engages so many plain folks, critics and scholars. It is that none of them has ever seen a phallic symbol in the outlines of the gothic window and the two, curiously oval heads of the figures.

Charles Sheeler Excerpt

Before we begin, let us—in spite of the title of this paper—be clear on one point: it is simply untenable to suggest—and I do not—that Charles Sheeler, aged twenty-two in 1905, could have independently conceived Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.

It is hardly less believable that Sheeler, aged thirty-two, in 1915, when Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, could have read, comprehended and incorporated into his work a concept then so arcane that it confounded even the greatest physicists of the era.

I do, nonetheless, vigorously assert that Sheeler, closely associated or acquainted, in the period 1909-1918, with Leo and Gertrude Stein, Marius de Zayas, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Schamberg, Patrick Henry Bruce, Max Weber, Walter Pach, John Covert, Man Ray and other members of Alfred Stieglitz’s circle at “291” and dozens more European avant-garde writers, photographers, painters and sculptors was wholly swept up in the quest for the inclusion of the fourth dimension into two-dimensional art. I further assert that this quest was central to Sheeler’s work and his lifelong pursuit.

George H. Durrie Excerpt

A lovely little painting entitled Farmyard in Winter or sometimes Selling Corn but now referred to as Settling A Bill, 185_? and a close variant with the same string of alternate titles, have long been given to George H. Durrie, (New Haven: 1820-1863), as has another painting called Holidays in the Country, The [or A] Cider Party, as has another called Sledding. But there are notable problems with the choice of subject matter in these four works, with their dates, their execution, their titles, their provenances and, consequently, their attributions.