Arts and letters united

Magazine Antiques, April, 2004 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Great works of literature have inspired artists for centuries. These collaborations, beginning with the anonymous manuscript illuminators of the Middle Ages, embody the merging of two creative minds. A case in point is the pairing of Sinclair Lewis and Grant Wood. In 1920 Lewis published his remarkable satire of rural life in the fictional Midwestern town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, which he entitled Main Street. In it, he created two disparate groups of people: the worldly but unhappy professionals who inhabit Main Street, and the immigrant and native-born blue-collar workers who live more fulfilling lives in the slums on the other side of town. In 1935 George Macy, the owner of the Limited Editions Club in New York City, wrote to Lewis seeking his permission to publish a limited edition of fifteen hundred copies of the novel with illustrations by the regional artist Grant Wood. Wood had recently exhibited his now legendary painting American Gothic (1930) at the Art Institute of Chicago to great acclaim. Lewis was delighted by the idea and agreed to write a new introduction for this edition. In addition to supplying nine large illustrations Wood helped choose the paper and select the linen used for the book's binding. The volume was issued in 1937.

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An exhibition that gathers the nine original drawings for Main Street along with a few other works by Wood and a Limited Editions Club copy of the book is on view through August 6 at the Brunnier Art Museum of Iowa State University in Ames. Entitled Grant Wood's Main Street, it is the first exhibition to assemble all nine drawings, which are now in private and public collections across the United States, since their creation.

Wood made the drawings (variously executed in charcoal, graphite, colored pencil, conte crayon, and chalk) on brown wrapping paper: Seven were evocative of the central figures in the novel. Rather than depict the individuals exactly as they had been described by Lewis, Wood chose to generalize each character and create a more generic type. The other two illustrations were of places described in the book.

The pairing of Wood and Lewis, both raised in the Midwest, was an interesting one because each held different opinions of the region. With few exceptions Wood championed the virtues of rural life, painting farmers, small-town residents, and the landscape, while Lewis disdained those who were successful in small-town America. As Wanda M. Corn succinctly stated in Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983): "What Lewis was apt to indict, Wood was likely to enjoy. Lewis belonged to that generation which had revolted against the village, Wood to the one that had returned to it."

Neither man had lived an isolated existence. By the mid-1930s Lewis had completed his studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, traveled throughout Europe, and won both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Nobel Prize for literature. Wood was teaching at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, having studied art at the Academie Julian in Paris, traveled on the Continent, and met many of the famous artists of his time. Perhaps it is the mens different outlooks expressed in different mediums that make this edition such an important one in the history of illustrated books.

The exhibition catalogue is written by Lea Rosson DeLong, the guest curator, along with contributions by Henry Adams, Sally E. Parry, Kent C. Ryden. It may be obtained from the museum by telephoning 515-294-3342.