John Steuart Curry

Through his dramatic paintings, drawings, prints, and murals, John Steuart Curry asserted the importance of the rural American heartland as a wellspring of national identity. Curry's college-educated parents were farmers who supported his interest in an art career, allowing him to enroll in the Art Institute of Chicago's prestigious school in 1916, at the age of nineteen. Curry then studied with illustrator and mural painter Harvey Dunn (1884–1952) in Tenafly, New Jersey, and soon he was creating designs for such popular magazines as Boy's Life and Saturday Evening Post. He began painting, and on a several months' visit to Paris in 1926–27 studied in the drawing academy run by Russian painter and draftsman Vasily Shukhayev (1887–1973) and absorbed the great didactic works of old master painters in the Louvre museum. On his return to Westport, Connecticut, where he had settled with his wife in 1924, Curry worked on several decorative mural commissions; he also began to paint the Kansas scenes with which he soon was popularly associated.

Drawn from memory and from his observations during long visits home to Kansas, Curry's paintings were exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and attracted support from contemporary art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and subsequently from the museum she established in New York in 1931, the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1930, Curry received solo exhibitions and was hailed by the art press for his ability to express the essence of American life. He soon became associated with fellow midwesterners Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood as leaders of the so-called regionalist movement in American art. In 1932, Curry began teaching at two New York art schools. That year, after several months' travel with a circus company, he took up circus themes in his paintings. Curry's wide-ranging activities –as lecturer, illustrator, painter, and printmaker– were supplemented by mural commissions from the federal government as part of its depression-era artists' relief program popularly known as the WPA.

Growing interest in Curry's work in the Midwest itself led eventually to his appointment at the University of Wisconsin's College of Agriculture as artist-in-residence, the first such position in an American university. Among the important mural and illustration commissions he received in these years was a project to decorate the Kansas statehouse. Curry's designs proved controversial because they included what many Kansans regarded as unflattering images of their state, from tornadoes and dust-storms to references to the controversy over slavery that precipitated the Civil War. Although the artist was much honored in his later years, the furor over the murals is said to have hastened Curry's death from a heart attack, at the age of forty-eight. For the next quarter-century, his achievements, along with those of other regionalist artists, were eclipsed by new movements in art. Today, however, Curry is highly regarded for his portrayal of the American scene and dedication to social values in his art.