‘American Gothic’, classic Depression-era painting, heads to London

American Gothic, one of the best-known images of 20th century US art, will leave North America for the first time next year as part of an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London exploring the clash of artistic ideas during the Great Depression.

Showing a stern-faced couple in front of a modest Iowan home — a farmer gripping a pitchfork alongside his frowning daughter dressed in a simple printed pinafore — American Gothic was a work that “has always split opinions”, said Tim Marlow, RA artistic director, at an event setting out the RA’s plans for 2017.

Painted by Grant Wood in 1930, the much-reproduced evocation of rural America appeared during a grim period of economic hardship. Some saw it as a celebration of strong working-class traditions at a time of national crisis; others detected a parody of Midwestern mores and naive nostalgia for a pre-industrial way of life that had long since disappeared.

The RA hopes the show, featuring 45 works by artists including Jackson Pollock, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe and Thomas Hart Benton, will throw new light on a formative period in American art, when artists were attempting to capture the changes forced on the country by urbanisation and immigration.

“It was a period of intense debate about the nature of American art, largely fought on the lines of a tussle between abstraction and realism, but also different forms of realism,” said Andrea Tarsia, RA head of exhibitions.

“America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s”, due to open in February, is the latest in a series of shows at big UK institutions to focus on American artists, with Tate Modern featuring exhibitions on Georgia O’Keeffe and, later this year, Robert Rauschenberg, and the RA’s “Abstract Expressionism” set to open in three weeks. The Piccadilly gallery also announced a show for September 2017 looking at the work of US artist Jasper Johns.

Historical resonances will also be prominent at the RA in February as it marks the centenary of the Russian Revolution and the flowering of a 15-year period of artistic vitality from 1917, when avant-garde artists such as Kandinsky and Malevich produced groundbreaking work alongside adherents of “socialist realism” including Brodsky, Deineka and Mukhina.

Their innovations spanned painting, sculpture, photography, film and ceramics, but the explosion of experimentation came to a brutal end in the early 1930s after Joseph Stalin suppressed the avant-garde movement and its practitioners were among those sent to the Gulag as part of a wider crackdown on dissent. With loans from the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the show includes 200 works, many not seen before in the UK.

“Matisse in the Studio”, opening in August, will look at the inspiration drawn by the 20th century French artist from his large collection of objects and sculptures, assembled from as far afield as Thailand, Mali and China. A source of fascination for Matisse, they found their way into his many of his paintings, drawings and prints.

The RA, which is undergoing a £50m redevelopment of its Burlington House home, pointed to strong visitor numbers in the year to August, drawing 1.2m visitors for exhibitions including Ai Weiwei’s retrospective and David Hockney’s portrait show. “Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse”, featuring some of the biggest names from the Impressionist era, drew 418,000 visitors, making it the RA’s fourth most popular exhibition of the past 40 years.