American Gothic, one of the most instantly recognisable of all 20th-century paintings, is to leave North American soil for the first time when it travels to Britain for an exhibition on Great Depression art.
The Royal Academy of Arts announced that the Grant Wood painting, showing a solemn Iowa farmer with his wife and pitchfork in front of a wooden house, will be part of a show opening next February.
The work, as widely parodied as it is admired, has only left the US once before – for a 1949 show in Montreal, Canada.
Andrea Tarsia, RA head of exhibitions, said the painting was a cornerstone of the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. “It has become one of the most celebrated icons of American art and this is the first time it will be viewed outside North America,” he said.
American Gothic will be one of 45 works drawn from collections across the US in a show exploring American painting in the 1930s after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
It was a time of huge economic, political, social and cultural flux, said Tarsia. “It also triggered a crisis in the American dream: that dream of opportunity, progress and hope.”
There were lively debates on whether American art should be realist or abstract. Should it be about modernity and progress or tradition? Should it represent the farm or the factory?
In Woods’s 1930 painting, the glum Iowa farmer is said to be the archetypal American pioneer.
“It is a painting that has been seen as both idyllic and dystopic at the same time,” said Tarsia. “Is it a celebration of good working traditions and upstanding citizens ... or is it pointing to a nostalgic hankering after a 19th-century past that is no longer attainable in a rapidly modernising context?”
RA artistic director Tim Marlow said he hoped the exhibition would restore the painting’s centrality in “a very interesting debate” rather than it just being seen as “a popular icon of American nostalgia”.
In total, there will be 45 works from collections across the US, many of which have not been seen together. Represented artists include Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper, whose 1940 painting Gas, in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, will travel to London.
Tarsia said there will also be works by one of the great American figurative and portrait painters, Alice Neel, whose significance and influence was only discovered in the 1970s.
The exhibition, organised by the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the RA and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, will be called America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s. It will run in London at the same time as a previously announced major show planned on post-Revolution Russian art 1917-32.
Other 2017 exhibitions announced by the RA on Thursday include the first major show to look at how Matisse used his personal collection of treasures from around the world in his own art; a big show dedicated to the American titan Jasper Johns, who is still working aged 86; and a smaller exhibition exploring the little known friendship between Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí.
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