Happy 125th Birthday John Steuart Curry, Kansas Painter and Muralist

This Day in Kansas History

Kansas painter and muralist John Steuart Curry

John Steuart Curry was born on a farm just outside of the unincorporated town of Dunavant, Kansas on November 14, 1897, to Thomas and Margaret Curry. He was the oldest of five children and gained his love of art from his parents who, after their honeymoon in Europe, brought back prints of masterworks and hung them in the family home. He was enrolled by his mother in art classes at an early age and when he decided to drop out of high school in 1916 to study art his family supported him. Curry worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad and attended the Art Institute in Kansas City for a month before moving to Chicago. In Chicago he studied at the Art Institute for two years and in 1918 he enrolled at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, PA. There he decided to pursue commercial illustrations and in 1919 he started to study with illustrator Harvey Dunn in Tenafly, NJ. Between 1921 and 1926 Curry’s illustrations appeared in publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Boy’s Life. During this time, he met and married his first wife Clara Derrick on January 23, 1923, while living in New York City. After that he bought a studio at Otter Pond near the art colony in Westport, Connecticut.

In 1926 Curry stopped producing illustrations and traveled overseas to Paris, France. There, he studied drawing under Russian teacher Vasil Shuheav. While in Paris he also studied the old master paintings at the Louvre. Curry rejected both European academicism and Modernism as he believed that art should appeal to the common man. So, he began to represent midwestern American subjects, drawing on his experiences in Kansas. He returned to Westport in 1927 and his first major painting “Baptism in Kansas” was met with critical acclaim upon its exhibition in 1928 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art biennial. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney took notice and would provide financial support to Curry for the next two years. She would later purchase Baptism in Kansas for her newly established Whitney Museum of American Art where it is still located today. In 1929 Curry finished Tornado over Kansas which today is housed at the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan. In 1930 he finished Hogs Killing a Rattlesnake now housed at the Art Institute of Chicago and had his first solo exhibition at the Whitney Studio Club which was a huge success. By this time Curry was an established painter of American regionalist scenes and he had also found a tireless proponent of his work in the owner of Ferargil Gallery Maynard Walker who would represent Curry’s art for the next ten years.

‘Tornado Over Kansas’ painting by John Steuart Curry

Beginning in April 1932 he traveled with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for ten weeks and created a series of paintings on circus life. In July of the same year his wife passed away and shortly after he moved to New York City and taught at the Cooper Union and Art Students League. During this same year he completed a Lithograph of a large wild bull entitled Ajax which would inspire a poem by Marianne Moore titled ‘Buffalo’. The lithograph would become an oil on canvas painting completed in 1937. Both the lithograph and the painting are housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum but only the painting is on public display. Two years later he married his second wife Kathleen Gould Shepherd and moved back to Westport. In 1935 the Federal Arts Project commissioned him to paint murals in the Department of Justice and Department of the Interior buildings in D.C. Then after nearly two decades Curry returned to the Midwest when he became an artist in residence at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.  In 1937, He was commissioned by the State of Kansas to paint a series of murals in the state Capital in Topeka. Unfortunately, his art had not been accepted in Kansas for most of his professional career and this would lead to a lot of criticism while he was working in the Capital building. Over the next four years he produced panels including Tragic Prelude which has an image of abolitionist John Brown at the forefront and Kansas Pastoral. The murals adorn the East and West second floor corridors. In March of 1941 state officials and other important figures had objected to Curry’s work so much that there was talk of removing the panels. The Kansas Council of Women protested stating: “The murals do not portray the true Kansas. Rather than revealing a law-abiding progressive state, the artist has emphasized the freaks in its history- the tornados and John Brown, who did not follow legal procedure.” After they refused to remove a marble slab that was impeding his work Curry abandoned the project and refused to sign the finished panels.

His dispute with officials in Kansas did not hinder his creative spirit and his Wisconsin Landscape won the purchase prize at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1942-1943 Artists for Victory exhibition. In 1943 Curry was elected an Academician of the National Academy of Design. During this period, he also painted numerous murals in various buildings on the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus. John Steuart Curry died of a heart attack on August 29, 1946, in Madison while he was in preparation for a retrospective exhibition at the Milwaukee Institute. He was 48 years old. Three days later he was buried in Winchester, KS.

The Topeka Star wrote “In the golden sunlight of a Sunday afternoon one of Kansas’s greatest artists, John Steuart Curry… came home to be buried in the churchyard of the Reformed Presbyterian Church here. While some 500 of his fellow Kansans looked on to pay him tribute, the noted artist was lowered into a simple grave marked by only a granite boulder, that overlooked the windmills, barns, and farm homes which he portrayed so often. A great Kansas artist who had painted boldly in vivid and often controversial fashion was home to stay.”

‘Tragic Prelude’ painting by John Steuart Curry.

Curry, along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, was at the forefront of the Regionalist Art movement of the 1930s and 1940s. It wouldn’t be until the 1990s that the artist was issued a formal apology by the State of Kansas. In 1992 the Kansas Legislature issued Resolution No. 1809 that officially recognized the legislatures poor treatment of the artist. Today the small preliminary sketches made by Curry in preparation of the larger murals at the Kansas Capital also known as Curry’s Statehouse Studies are housed at the Kansas Museum of History. In recent years critics and historians have reassessed Curry’s formal experimentation and use of multiple perspectives. In doing so they have begun to embrace his technical awkwardness as an important formal innovation. Today Curry’s mural Tragic Prelude with the image of John Brown is among the best-known public art works in the world. Though during his lifetime, he was unappreciated and criticized here in his home state, today he is considered one of the most noted and famed Kansans in the state’s history.