Wanda M. Corn – författare

Richly illustrated with images of her art and views of the two homes she designed and furnished in New Mexico, the book also includes never before published photographs of O'Keeffe's clothes. The author has attributed some of the most exquisite of these garments to O'Keeffe, a skilled seamstress who understood fabric and design, and who has become an icon in today's fashion world as much for her personal style as for her art. As one of her friends stated, O'Keeffe "never allowed her life to be one thing and her painting another." This fresh and carefully researched study brings O'Keeffe's style to life, illuminating how this beloved American artist purposefully proclaimed her modernity in the way she dressed and posed for photographers, from Alfred Stieglitz to Bruce Weber. This beautiful book accompanies the first museum exhibition to bring together photographs, clothes, and art to explore O'Keeffe's unified modernist aesthetic.Published in association with the Brooklyn Museum

A rich, evolving history of one of the most recognized couples in the worldIn this abundantly illustrated book, award-winning art historian Wanda Corn tracks the fortunes and vicissitudes of Grant Wood's American Gothic, his realist painting of a rural man and woman posed stiffly before a modest white house with a gothic-styled window, made in 1930. She explores Wood's scrappy formation as a disadvantaged midwestern artist and his unexpected, overnight fame when American Gothic premiered at the Art Institute of Chicago and was purchased for the museum's collection. After a close look at the painting's volatile reputation over its first thirty years, Corn turns to that historic moment in the 1960s when the couple with their pitchfork left the museum and journeyed into the streets. Shedding their preciousness as art, they became a versatile, free-floating image open to reuse and reinterpretation. That moment also found Corn beginning her long career in art history, and she interweaves her story with that of the couple's evolving appearances in pop art, cartoons, advertisements, and grassroots reenactments. She offers compelling explanations for the painting's entry into the pantheon of cult visual images. Today, Wood's couple stands alongside other art icons: Whistler's mother, Rodin's thinker, Hokusai's wave, Munch's screamer, and the enigmatic beauty in Leonardo's Mona Lisa.A highly readable and personalized study of a painter and the work he would forever be tied to, The Couple with the Pitchfork: American Gothic from Easel to Icon sheds critical light on the cultural forces that transformed an image with humble roots into a global icon whose reach and charisma extends far beyond the world of art.