Demanding that your friend pull the car over so you can examine an unusual architectural detail is not, I’m told, endearing. But some of us cant help ourselves. For the painter Grant Wood, it was an incongruous Gothic window on an otherwise modest frame house in Eldon, Iowa, that required stopping. It looked as if a cottage were impersonating a cathedral. Wood tried to imagine who would fit into such a home.” He recruited his sister and his dentist as models and costumed them in old-fashioned attire. The result, American Gothic,” as he titled the painting from 1930, is probably the most famous art work ever produced in the United States. The painting was also decidedly enigmatic. Was it biting satire? Grim realism? Proud patriotism? In the words of the late Thomas Hoving, a longtime director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the image served as a Rorschach test for the character of the nation.”
For Wood, however, the meaning was clear. Although he faced "a storm of protest from Iowa farm wives’—one threatened to "smash my head,” he recalled— he had painted "American Gothic” with sympathy. Cities dominated culture, he wrote, yet they were far less typically American” than the rural places "whose power they usurped.” In 1935, Wood, who was born on an Iowa farm forty-four years earlier, published the manifesto "Revolt Against the City.”
Esta historia es de la edición October 23, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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Esta historia es de la edición October 23, 2023 de The New Yorker.
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INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.