Jay Sigmund and Grant Wood

The names of Grant Wood and Jay Sigmund go together like bread and butter, like bacon and eggs, or like the poet William Cullen Bryant and the painter Thomas Cole. These two Iowa artists may be viewed in an artistic linkage that is perhaps a unique example of symbiosis, the living together of two distinct organisms in an association that is mutually beneficial. If poetry is painting a picture with words, and art is in a sense writing a poem with paints, then the symbiotic nature of Grant Wood’s paintings and Jay Sigmund’s poems comes about quite naturally. Both artists were born in east central Iowa near the Wapsipinicon River. They both knew and loved this rural area of the state and used their particular talents to immortalize its beauty and realism. They were good friends, neighboring back and forth between Waubeek, Stone City, and 5 Turner Alley, Cedar Rapids.

Jay Sigmund was born on a farm south of Waubeek, Iowa, in 1885. Before his death in a hunting accident in 1937, he had published more than 1,200 poems, 125 short stories, and 25 one-act plays, some of the latter coauthored with Betty Smith of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn fame.

Like the poet Wallace Stevens, he became vice-president of an insurance company. His work days were spent largely in the city of Cedar Rapids, but he never lost his love of nature, spending his weekends and summers roaming the hills near Waubeek and the banks of the Wapsipinicon River. As Clyde Tull of Cornell College once observed, “Mr. Sigmund’s work is characterized by a fine sincerity and a sympathetic understanding of the small town and country folks whom he portrays so vividly in his stories and poems, and by a quiet mastery of technique that attracts little attention to itself but which gives pleasure to the discriminating reader.”¹ His work was appreciated by such readers as the Irish poet “A.E.” (George Russell), by Robinson Jeffers, George Sterling, Carl Sandburg, H. L. Mencken, and Edmund Blunden. Count Ilia Tolstoi, son of the great Tolstoi, hailed Mr. Sigmund as an “American Chekhov.”² As a patron of the arts in Cedar Rapids, he gave aid and encouragement to many, including the young Paul Engle, when Paul was his paper boy, and of course Grant Wood.

Grant and Jay were both regionalists. Jay Sigmund, who always was an advocate of regionalism, encouraged Grant Wood in this direction. It was in 1928 at Waubeek that Jay convinced Grant that he should quit running to France, that he should stay home and paint the Iowa scene that he knew best. That is what he did after his trip to Munich, Germany, in 1928 to supervise the stained-glass window which is now in the Veterans Memorial Building in Cedar Rapids. That was Wood’s last trip abroad. Thereafter he stayed home and painted Iowa—Woman with Plants, Stone City, American Gothic, Daughters of Revolution among others—and then later his notable lithographs of the Iowa scene.

Let us consider here, in a brief comparison of four poems and paintings, the symbolic mirrorings of two different art forms, the paintings of Grant Wood and the poetry of Jay Sigmund.

I

The painting entitled Stone City, presently in the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, is an excellent example of Grant Wood’s composition. He created a symmetry of motion by relocating the actual hills and trees and roads. Paul Engle said of Grant Wood, “He did not move mountains. There are no mountains in Iowa, but he did move hills to give a better artistic effect.”

Here is Jay Sigmund’s complementary poem entitled “Stone City.”

Stone City, Iowa

In Jay’s poem we can visualize the prehistoric beginnings of the valley of the Wapsipinicon, the sojourn of the Indians, and then the settlement by white people. “The Master’s vision is sustained” because today we still see the scene preserved for us by Jay Sigmund and Grant Wood.

II

Jay Sigmund rarely drove a car. His son Jim drove him most of the time. One Sunday Jim was driving his father, mother, and two sisters from Waubeek to Stone City, where Jay was to be master of ceremonies for one of the Sunday variety shows at Grant Wood’s Stone City Art School. Trying to dodge a truck, they were sideswiped by another car. The Sigmund car rolled over twice, and Jay’s right hand was mangled. In the Anamosa hospital, it was necessary to amputate his index finger, which made writing very difficult for him. He was accustomed to do all his writing in scribbled longhand. Grant rushed out to the scene of the accident and later expressed his memory of the event in picture, as Jay did in poetry:

III

Jay died in a hunting accident in October 1937 and his death had a profound effect on Grant Wood. When Wood turned to lithographs in the later years of his life, he drew heavily on Jay’s poems for ideas and inspirations. This may be illustrated by another poem-painting combination.

In my master’s thesis at The University of Iowa I have matched about 70 paintings and poems that seem to me clearly to complement each other in a symbiotic relationship. People have asked me if Wood and Sigmund painted and wrote together. Who influenced whom? Jay wrote “Winter Pastoral” sometime before 1937, the year he died. Grant painted February in 1941. He likewise painted Death on the Ridgeroad after Jay’s death. Jay Sigmund would appear to be the inspiration for Grant Wood.

IV

Many of Grant Wood’s works seem almost to be illustrations for Jay’s poems, somewhat in the way Grant illustrated Sinclair Lewis’s book Main Street.³

In Wood’s self-portrait, he clearly dominates the picture, but the details in the background are indeed typical of his expression of regionalism: the almost ever-present windmill, the cornstalks, and the rolling quiltlike pattern of Iowa fields.

Jay’s poem is a glowing tribute to his friend who possessed a discerning eye and a master’s touch which enabled him to portray what other men usually overlooked. Both poet and artist gave to Iowans, and to the world, an appreciative revelation of beauty in the ordinary things of life.