Your face is too well known

**The model denied it for five years, and the denial is what the press covered when it ended.** Dr Byron McKeeby, a Cedar Rapids dentist, "didn't want to be famous. He shied away from artist Grant Wood's initial offer" to be the male model. He eventually posed in overalls holding **a theatre prop pitchfork**, painted in Wood's dental office, at 62. Friends recognised him and joked about the pitchfork's role in his dental procedures, and "McKeeby stood firm in his denials... The real McKeeby was nothing like the dour farmer who challenged the painting's viewers." **It was literally national news when McKeeby broke his silence in 1935** and admitted that yes, he was the farmer with the pitchfork; an Associated Press bureau chief had been helping prod him into it. So here is a real person who spent five years refusing a one-sided relationship with a painted version of himself, while a country attached itself to the painting - and the refusal was treated as news because the bond was real enough to be denied. **Wood designed the likeness to fail, and it failed absolutely.** He "exaggerate[d] McKeeby's features so no one would recognize him", and he stretched his sister's face "so that no one would be able to recognize her". **Opacity was the design choice - the exact inverse of the `made` shelf, where the transparency is the design choice** - and the painting became "an indelible icon of Americana", described by one framing as "a Rorschach test for the character of the nation". The Whitney's own account is that Wood "sought pictorially to fashion a world of harmony and prosperity that would answer America's need for reassurance at a time of economic and social upheaval occasioned by the Depression", and that "his image as a farmer-painter was as mythical as the fables he depicted in his art". **A painter built a figure specifically to be unrecognisable, and it became the most recognised face-pair in the country.** **And the sister credited the painting with her own interior.** Nan Wood Graham, an artist and teacher in her own right, said: **"Grant made a personality out of me. I would have had a very drab life without [American Gothic]."** That is the `mirrored` and `undemanded` structure stated out loud by the person it happened to - a woman saying a painting supplied a self she would otherwise not have had, thirty years after she watched strangers build a national character out of her face without asking. She was not a passive sitter either: she posed for her brother for years, kept scrapbooks now in the Iowa Digital Library, and became the caretaker of his legacy after his death in 1942. **And the brother ended it because it worked.** The first reception was hostile - there were critics who said she "looked like the missing link, that her face would turn milk sour" - and the following year Wood painted *Portrait of Nan*, which a biographer calls "really kind of a love letter from Grant to his sister" and one of the very few mature paintings he kept for himself. Then, reportedly: **"It's the last portrait I intend to paint, and it's the last time you will ever pose for me."** She was surprised - she had spent years posing - and asked for an explanation. **Wood said: "Your face is too well known."** That is the moment the figure leaves the model, and it is a brother who says so, plainly, as a piece of information about his own work rather than about her. **The cog is the afterlives.** The image "lent itself to countless parodies in popular culture as well as in the political arena, in advertisements, in television shows such as *The Simpsons*, in albums, in comic books, on magazine covers, and by Jim Henson's Muppets". Christie's puts its weight beside exactly one other painting: **"The only other modern painting to rival its weird multiplicity of afterlives in the fields of homage, parody, cartoon and caricature is Edvard Munch's *The Scream*."** That is the `cog` register in paint: a shared device with millions of remakes in it, every one of them made by somebody who never met Wood, Nan or McKeeby, and none of them built. **The pair are not the point; the machine of faces pointed at them is.** The 1977 *Hustler* topless version is the sharp end of it - Nan was afraid people would think she had authorised it, which is the exact shape of the problem this site is about: a parody attaching itself to a real woman's body. **And the authenticity was manufactured and shipped.** Wood described the pair as "tintypes from my old family album" and then ordered the prim colonial print apron and the spotless overalls from **a Chicago mail-order house** - Sears, Roebuck. The Gothic window that started the painting was no better: Eldon "had existed for barely a decade when that window was installed. It, too, was mail-ordered from Sears." **The national type was bought by post**, which is `the-figure-you-buy` arriving in paint and arriving first - a fictional figure is not needed when the rural American can be assembled from a mail-order catalogue and a dentist. **And an impresario invented the movement to sell it.** The Art Institute's **$300 prize and bronze medal** were quickly followed by the picture being "championed as the masterpiece of a new American art movement called 'Regionalism', **first invented, and then promoted, by an impresario and art dealer from Kansas named Maynard Walker**". Wood's response is the best detail in the entry: he "for the most part happily played along with the role of a stay-at-home Iowan rustic prescribed for him by the propaganda of the Regionalist movement. He even posed for photographs in his studio wearing overalls identical to those of his reluctantly disguised dentist." **The painter became a parasocial figure himself, playing a role a marketing movement had assigned him, and he played it in his model's costume** - one remove from `mickey-mouse`, where the drawing is licensed by a man whose job was policing what the figure could appear on. **Two honesty notes, because the entry is about a reading rather than about a fact.** The painting is not securely a satire: Wood "consistently rejected suggestions that the painting is a satire of the Midwest and its conservative values", and he said he meant sympathy - "Cities dominated culture, he wrote, yet they were 'far less typically American' than the rural places 'whose power they usurped'", which is the argument of *Revolt Against the City* (1935). And **it drew real hostility at the time**: a "storm of protest from Iowa farm wives", one of whom threatened to "smash my head". Wood did not paint a joke at them; he painted an assurance, and they took it as a mockery. That is why this is not filed `undemanded` on its own - the near side wanted nothing, but the subjects were not asked, and one of them spent five years refusing. **Why `visual_art` needed this entry rather than a refile.** The medium was added to the closed validated list and had nothing behind it. Moving an existing entry into a new bucket would have made the distribution tidier and the classification a lie - the move this site refuses - so the shelf was filled by writing the thing it was opened for. What that thing turned out to be is a picture with two real people in it, neither of whom consented, one of whom denied it, and a national attachment that outlasted both of their objections.