Stallion and Jack Fighting

Baring its teeth and glaring ferociously from beneath a wildly whipping mane, a massive stallion rears in combat with a smaller donkey (colloquially called a jackass, or jack). The animals' upper bodies tangle in frenzied blows; clouds of dust swirl about their hind hooves. At right, by a barn, a farmer holding a pitchfork is a stunned, helpless witness to this aggressive equine confrontation. While battling horses are featured in antique relief sculpture, old master European paintings, and nineteenth-century prints, John Steuart Curry's lithograph presents this subject in the setting of a typical American farm. Raised in the Kansas heartland, the artist had experienced rural life first hand.

With Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, Curry was acclaimed as a so-called regionalist artist whose art idealized the strength and values of Midwestern rural life. He often portrayed themes of vigorous action in response to a threat or challenge. The subject of a stallion and donkey fighting seems to have particularly appealed to him, for beginning in 1930 he made versions in several media—oil painting, drawing, and watercolor—before interpreting it in a lithograph, one of more than forty such prints he made in the course of his career. The theme of the horse manifesting its unrestrained animal nature also inspired Thomas Hart Benton, in his lithograph The Race (Homeward Bound) (TF 1995.25).

On Process: The American Print, Technique Examined, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 13–March 2, 2001.

Cole, Jr., Sylvan. The Lithographs of John Steuart Curry, A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Associated American Artists, 1976. No. 37.

Carey, Frances and Antony Griffiths. American Prints, 1879–1979: Catalogue of an Exhibition at the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. (exh. cat., British Museum). London, England: Trustees of the British Museum, 1980. No. 108, p. 41.

Madonia, Ann C. Prairie Visions: Circus Wonders; The Complete Lithographic Suite of John Steuart Curry. (exh. cat., Davenport Art Gallery). Davenport, Iowa: Davenport Art Gallery, 1980. Fig. 30, p. 26.

Czestochowski, Joseph S. and Sue Kendall. John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood: A Portrait of Rural America. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press with Cedar Rapids Art Association, 1981. Fig. 88, p. 112; C-39, p. 124.

A Handbook of the Prints in the Permanent Collection [University of Arizona Museum of Art]. Tucson, Arizona: The Museum, 1990. Text and ill. p. 91.