I Can Die Happy
I went to the Chicago Art Institute today and it truly was an incredible time.
I’m not going to say that I can understand art or that I can recognize what time periods certain pieces come from, but I do enjoy it. The stories behind the pieces or just the pieces themselves catch my attention in ways that I can’t explain sometimes.
One example of this is the painting American Gothic by Grant Wood.
At its essence, it’s a pretty mundane picture. It’s just a man and a woman standing there with the man holding a pitchfork. In the room that it was in at the institute, it was pretty unassuming. It wasn’t like the Mona Lisa* at the Louvre which gets its own private room and all that, it just existed with the other paintings. There’s nothing flashy or exciting about American Gothic per se. But I think there’s something in that mundaneness that makes it so attractive to me.
And the story of the painting is quite fun. The man and the woman are not partners nor are they siblings. The man in the painting is actually the dentist of Grant Wood and the woman is Grant Wood’s sister. No one is particularly famous or anything like that in there. Just people within Wood’s life. And it’s just such a bizarre set of people. Imagine getting your teeth checked and then you just ask your dentist if they could be a model for one of your paintings. It seems like such a random thing but here it is as one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century.
And the name of the painting itself comes from just the architecture style used in the house in the back. The style is called Carpenter Gothic. This was a painting made in America. Seems explanatory enough.
So yeah. I saw a simple, famous painting today and it brought me more joy than a lot of other things which is bizarre, but I’m not mad. That is all.
*I just need to say that the Mona Lisa is OVERRATED. It’s like 2.5 feet x 2 feet which is pretty small for a painting that gets its own designated room in the Louvre of all places. There are so many rows of tourists taking photos of it like they’ve never seen a photo of it before or maybe they think they can take a better photo I don’t know. It’s just not that special to me and I don’t think it’s worth the hype.
