American Gothic looks like it was carved from Iowa dirt, but the man who painted it was a closeted gay artist who spent his twenties absorbing bohemian Paris. This episode explores how Grant Wood invented a visual myth for the American Midwest while camouflaging his own identity, from a childhood disrupted by his father's death, through a metal-shop apprenticeship and silversmithing, to designing military camouflage during World War I.

We follow his four European trips between 1922 and 1928, his conversion from Impressionism to the microscopic clarity of Jan van Eyck, and the 1928 Munich trip that sent him home to put on overalls and champion Regionalism. Then we dissect American Gothic itself: the Carpenter Gothic house in Eldon, the dentist and sister who posed, Nan's objection to being read as the farmer's wife, and how critics swung fro ...