It is, on one level, matter-of-fact, the homecoming of a priceless treasure of American painting. Art moves in and out of the Art Institute of Chicago all the time, so there is a procedure, a protocol, a routine to minimize stress on the works and the workers and to maximize security.
Shipping specialists open a crate, curators examine the work — in this case, Grant Wood’s beyond iconic “American Gothic” — and handling specialists wheel it through the galleries and hang it back up again. Ho and hum. Sort of like when your spouse decides the one original painting you own really ought to live on a dining room wall, for a change.
On another level, though, it’s a thrill. Not only was the painting returned to the Art Institute walls Thursday morning after almost nine months away on its first trip to Europe, it was done in time to form a brief, rare triumvirate: “Gothic,” “Nighthawks” and “Whistler’s Mother” will be on view in three roughly adjoining galleries.
“They are the three most famous icons of American art,” said Sarah Kelly Oehler, the Art Institute curator who oversaw “Gothic’s” return. “This is in some ways a curator of American art’s dream, to have all three of these paintings on view at the same time.
“It’s a privilege to have ‘Whistler’s Mother’ still here,” she said, thanks to an extension of the French national museums’ loan agreement that will keep it up in Chicago through Sunday. “It’s a privilege to have ‘American Gothic’ and ‘Nighthawks’ in the collection.”
The allure, she said, is of course the cultural resonance of those three works, under the same roof for the first time since 1954. But it is more basic, too: “It’s the joy of having beautiful things to look at. Curators are not immune to that. In fact, we may be more susceptible,” Oehler said.
The return of the prodigal beautiful thing began before the museum opened, with its specially built crate set up on low sawhorses in the middle of a room located amid the museum’s many nondescript backstage corridors.
For security reasons, the Art Institute asks that visitors not photograph or describe the crates it builds for its art to travel in, and officials won’t talk about such a work’s travel arrangements beyond generalities: It was shipped to Chicago from London by airplane and arrived “this week,” then spent acclimatization time in its crate.
On the walls surrounding the “Gothic” box hung a couple of Monets and a Toulouse-Lautrec waiting to be sent out. Using a cordless power drill, a worker removed the screws holding the crate’s lid in place. Inside, in a bed of specially cut foam and wood for protection, lay the masterpiece that Grant Wood finished in 1930 and debuted at the 43rd annual Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute; it won a bronze prize, and museum donors immediately bought it for the Chicago institution (for less than $600, Oehler said), the same path to residing in Chicago followed more than a decade later by Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.”
“Gothic” was shipped home this week bearing hosannas from the Continent. “America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s,” with Wood’s work as a kind of flagship, went up in Paris in October and London in February after a successful run last year at the Art Institute, where curator Judith Barter organized the exhibition.
“‘America After the Fall’ is not to be missed,” said the Times of London. “For a start it brings us our first visit from the bald-pated, pitchfork-wielding farmer and his puritanical consort who provide the subject of Grant Wood’s American Gothic — the most famous and frequently parodied image in 20th-century American art. You can’t help but feel a flare of excitement as you meet these celebrities in person.”
The reviewers also found echoes between the troubled America of the 1930s and the country today. The Guardian and the BBC were among those who also wrote specifically about the fame and meaning of “American Gothic.”
Part of the show’s positive reception was due to American pre-World War II painters being little-known in Europe, Oehler theorized. “Gothic” has traveled in America and went once to Canada, in 1949, she said, but it hadn’t been any farther.
Coaxed out of its crate, the midsized painting in the almost rustic, gold-tinted frame was placed flat on a nearby table, the man in the painting staring straight out, the woman, as ever, off toward something on the side. Conservator of Paintings Allison Langley examined the Condition Report that travels with the painting, filled out by an expert from each museum at each stop along the way.
“It’s almost like a passport for the work,” Langley explained.
With a small air bladder she blew along the bottom interior edge of the frame, where it meets the protective glazing, or glass, covering the image. With a cloth she wiped the dust that blew out and cleaned other spots on the glass.
Next she donned magnifying-glass headgear and, using a flashlight, examined the painting’s surface in detail.
“So essentially we’re looking for changes,” said Oehler, whose title is Field-McCormick chair and curator of American Art. The two women talked in hushed tones over the work. The phrase “very solid” could be heard.
It’s a technical process, but it is not without emotion. Said Langley, “This is incredible for us to have it come home.”
She pronounced it “good to go,” and two specialists from the American art department moved in. Wearing blue plastic gloves, they lifted “American Gothic” and placed it on a dolly, leaning against a kind of wall. They then laid large cardboard sheets against the image side to protect it and hold it in place.
After two elevator rides, and a slight detour around a small forklift working in the Alsdorf Galleries of Asian art, “Gothic” was back in its home gallery.
There, the museum had hung a small wall card explaining the absence, which it does when its best-known works are traveling or otherwise off display. Oehler had chosen Peter Hurd’s “El Mocho,” a 1936 portrait of a guy who “looks like the Marlboro Man,” she said, fitting in a gallery that shows mostly 1930s regionalist works leaning toward realism.
But “El Mocho’s” time was over. The specialists made short work of swapping in the more famous painting. (How paintings are hung is another subject the museum likes to keep to itself.)
And as the artist’s dentist and sister — his models for the old-fashioned farmer and his unwed daughter in the painting — stared back out again from their home wall, Oehler talked about the central question of “American Gothic,” which was almost instantly controversial.
East Coast critics saw it as confirmation of the heartland as “an outdated, severe place where no one has fun,” she said. Meanwhile, Iowans who saw the image protested, “‘No, this isn’t actually how we live our lives. We use tractors. We don’t look so severe'” Oehler said.
“I think it’s in some ways both satire but also a loving, affectionate look at life in the Midwest, and Iowa in particular,” she said. And one of the likely reasons for its renown, she added, is its inscrutability, its willingness to be read in whatever way the viewer chooses.
“Like ‘Whistler’s Mother,’ it has the ability to become anything,” she said. “You can do whatever you want to do to the painting.”
One of those things includes putting it up on a wall again, then reattaching the label to the wall as if it had never been gone: “Grant Wood. American, 1891-1942. American Gothic. 1930. Oil on Beaver Board.”
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
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