One of the best-known and most-parodied works of American art, Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930), is leaving the Art Institute of Chicago for Europe this month. The Depression-era painting of a Midwestern farmer and his daughter has only left the US once before. It will appear at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris (12 October-30 January 2017) and the Royal Academy of Arts in London (25 February-4 June 2017) as part of the exhibition America After the Fall: Painting in the 1930s. “It is important that American masterpieces be seen by our European audiences, who know very little about the quality and diversity of American art,” says the exhibition’s curator Judith Barter.