‘American Gothic’ and a Grant Wood Retrospective Are Coming to the Whitney (Published 2017) (2024)

It has found its way into “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Saturday Night Live,” appeared on the covers of magazines from Time to Forbes to Mad, and been aped in countless advertisem*nts, art-class sketches and comic strips.

Now, Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” will make its way to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

The 1930 oil painting will be the centerpiece of the exhibition “Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables,” an attempt to broaden and complicate Wood’s legacy, coming to the Whitney from March 2 to June 10, 2018.

It will be the first major retrospective of Wood’s work in New York since the Whitney’s 1983 exhibition “Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision.”

“It’ll be a much bigger view of his work than has ever been seen, probably anywhere,” Barbara Haskell, the show’s curator, said in an interview.

Ms. Haskell previously displayed “American Gothic” as part of the Whitney’s 1999 exhibition “American Century,” placing it in the American Regionalism section. But after extensive research, she said her perspective on Wood’s place in art history has shifted.

“In really looking at the work by organizing this exhibition, I totally changed my mind about him. One of the hopes of the show is to bring him out from under the shadow of regionalism,” Ms. Haskell said. “He’s really this very complicated, elusive figure.”

Ms. Haskell says she hopes to reveal the menacing undertones of Wood’s work, as well as its relevance to the nation’s current political climate. “In the ’30s, when those issues were being debated, he was at the forefront of trying to figure out national identity. And in our conflicted, divided America, those issues become compelling again,” Ms. Haskell said.

“American Gothic” will be on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. (The two museums conducted a trade, of sorts: the Whitney sent Ben Shahn’s very fragile “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti” to the Art Institute for an exhibition last year.) “American Gothic” made its first trip outside the United States in 2016, stopping at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris and the Royal Academy of Arts in London.