01:00 AM EDT on Monday, August 15, 2005

BY TODD DVORAK
Associated Press

ELDON, Iowa

Just before the photographer counts three, John Bruce and his wife, Jennifer, glance over their shoulders, a final check on their alignment with the white farmhouse behind them and its unmistakable second-story window.

They stand side by side, straight-backed and stiff-shouldered. Neither offers the slightest crease of a smile -- until the camera's shutter has snapped.

Like many other art and pop culture buffs who venture to this far-flung Iowa town each year, the Bruces wanted their own shot at posing in front of the house that inspired one of the most familiar -- and lampooned -- paintings in America: Grant Wood's American Gothic.

The portrait of rural farmers turns 75 this year.

And as it did from its debut, the painting and its two characters -- the stern, balding and bespectacled farmer with pitchfork in hand, and the dour, strait-laced woman to his right -- remain as intriguing to art critics, advertisers and the public as ever.

Over the decades, the painting has been ridiculed as an indictment on rural life, hailed as a national symbol and cheered and jeered on its artistic merits.

To John Bruce, whose fascination dates to the first time he saw it on a cereal box in the 1960s, Wood's work conveys the beauty of wholesome, hardworking, no-frills Midwestern values.

"Being from the Midwest myself, I think it displays pretty well some of the character of the people," said Bruce, who traveled with his wife from Rochester, Minn., to make this town of 3,038 a must-see summer vacation destination. "It shows the kind of stern but hardworking people that had to struggle to make it in their day, especially during the Depression," he said.

But Wood's iconic painting proves, as it has since its unveiling in 1930, that interpretation is in the eye of the beholder.

Initially, the painting provoked hostility, particularly among Iowans who viewed it as an attack on simple, small town life and values. In letters to newspapers, Iowans reviled Wood and the painting. In a 1933 interview, Wood recalled one Iowa farm wife telling him "he should have his head bashed in," according to a new book on Wood and the painting by Harvard University professor Steven Biel.

"So many people saw it as far from a flattering portrait of rural farm life in the early years," Biel, author of American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting, said.

"Given what had happened in the Midwest at the time, with so much of America putting it under attack as a bunch of religious fanatics and proponents of ultraconservative politics, I think it's pretty understandable why people reacted that way," he said. "Although, he said later, he never meant to offend anyone or to portray a satire of any kind."

But American Gothic also has become a vehicle for poking fun at celebrities and peddling products from cereal to radios. Almost every modern president has been portrayed with pitchfork in hand, side-by-side with the first lady or juxtaposed with a chief political rival.

The image has been spoofed by Saturday Night Live, promoted by S & H Green Stamps as a symbol of thrift and appropriated recently by Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie to hype their reality show, The Simple Life.

"Over time, it has become sort of an emblem for the nation," Biel said. "It's always a status of a national symbol that it lends itself to repeated parody."

Long fascinated by the arched Gothic windows of Europe's cathedrals, Wood had told friends in 1930 that he was looking for a house with similar windows as a backdrop for his next painting. He spotted the small two-bedroom house that summer while driving with a student through Eldon, about 90 miles southeast of Des Moines, and sketched it that day.

Back at his studio in Cedar Rapids, Wood, then 39, took three months to finish the work, a 30-inch-by-35-inch oil painting on beaver board, a cheap product made from compressed wood pulp and used then to build walls. The figures were added separately. The model for the farmer was Wood's dentist, Byron McKeeby; the woman was Wood's sister, Nan.

"Grant assured us both that when he finished the painting, no one would ever recognize us," Nan Wood Graham said in her book, My Brother, Grant Wood.

"He told me to slick down my hair and part it in the middle, and asked me to make an apron trimmed with rickrack, a trim that was out of style and unavailable in the stores. After the painting made its debut, rickrack made a comeback," she said.

Wood submitted the painting to the 43rd Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture, sponsored by the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition chairman considered the work fluff, calling it a "comic valentine."

But a trustee with a different opinion stepped in to prevent the painting from being shipped back to Iowa, according to Biel. As a result, American Gothic was a hit and was awarded the bronze medal. A $300 purchase price ensured its spot among the museum's most prized acquisitions.

Some critics have panned American Gothic as simplistic portraiture, but Wanda Corn, a Stanford University art professor, believes it's important to look deeper.

Corn says Wood captured the fondness many artists of the era had for painting figures and exploring regional ideas with a solid grasp of modernist, artistic principles.

"There is a lot more going on than you would think," said Corn, who has written extensively about Wood's work. "If you take all those things together, this becomes a real fabulous painting."