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The 1930s in America

Curry, John Steuart

by Thomas McGeary

Identification American Regionalist painter

Curry was one of the three major Regionalist painters who reacted against the style of internationalist modern art and painted rural subjects of the American Midwest in a dramatic, realistic style.

John Steuart Curry was born on his family farm and left home in 1916 to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. He admired the illustrator Harvey Dunn and in 1920 moved to Tenafly, New Jersey, to study with him. His training completed, he worked as a magazine illustrator in the New York area. He went to Paris in 1926 to perfect his drawing skills at the painter Vasily Shukhayev’s Russian Academy of Arts. He returned to the United States in 1927 and settled in the art colony at Westport, Connecticut, where he began to paint rural and farming scenes he recalled from his native Kansas. He began teaching in New York in 1932.

John Steuart Curry working below one of his own paintings in 1939.

ph_1930-Curry_John_Steuart.jpg

(Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Curry’s first fame came in 1928 with Baptism in Kansas, which shows a young woman being baptized in a cattle water trough. This painting attracted national attention and established Curry’s reputation as a chronicler of rural midwestern life. Along with Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, Curry was the subject of a December 24, 1934, Time magazine article praising the trio’s realistic, homegrown art as a replacement for the unintelligible modern and experimental art from France.

Curry’s paintings of the 1930’s responded to the Great Depression by celebrating the mythic rural and farm life of Midwest. In a sympathetic, melodramatic, sentimental, and folksy style, his paintings record the spirituality, hard work, and heroism of those who lived and worked the land. Rejecting the abstraction of international modernist art, Curry painted everyday subjects in a highly realistic yet dramatic manner intended to reach a broad, popular audience.

The relation of people to nature provides the subject and dramatic motivation for most of his paintings, murals, drawings, and lithographs. Paintings such as View of Madison with Rainbow (1937) show the beauty and divine harmony of life in the Midwest.

Curry’s paintings of floods, prairie fires, and storms show the struggle and conflict between people and the destructive forces of nature. His best-known painting, Tornado over Kansas (1929), shows a dramatic event on a Kansas farm: A heroic, protective father rushes his family into a storm cellar as a tornado approaches.

Curry did not shy away from showing the violence and brutality of life on a farm. Some of his scenes are of hogs killing a rattlesnake, a stallion and mule fighting in a corral, coyotes stealing a pig, and bulls fighting.

In 1936, Curry moved to Madison, where he was artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin. During that period, he painted numerous mural cycles about the westward migration for the Departments of Justice and the Interior as part of the New Deal’s Federal Arts Project program that sponsored artists to paint murals for public buildings.

Curry’s major commission, to paint murals for the Kansas State Capitol, came in 1937. Curry designed a series of murals to record the history of Kansas. One mural, Tragic Prelude, showed trappers, Spanish missionaries and conquistadors, and the abolitionist John Brown, whose raid on Harpers Ferry was a prelude to Kansas statehood and the Civil War. His depiction of John Brown, with wild eyes, flowing beard, and outstretched arms, allusions to the biblical Moses, is one of his best-known images. Kansas Pastorale showed the harmony and prosperity of a Kansas farmer and his family. The Tragic Prelude, with its towering figure of Brown, drew public objection for showing Kansas in a poor light. Disillusioned and frustrated by the reaction, Curry abandoned his ambitious cycle and returned to Wisconsin.

Impact

Curry was one of the three major Regionalist painters who portrayed the rural life of the Midwest. Reacting against the abstraction and experimentalism of European modern art, Curry used a realistic style to reach a broad popular audience. However, the realist and homespun subjects of the 1930’s soon appeared naive, sentimental, and isolated; as a result, his reputation, along with that of the other Regionalists, soon faded, as abstract art became the dominant international style favored by the art world.

Further Reading

1 

Bertels, Alice Sue. John Steuart Curry: The Road Home. Overland Park, Kans.: Leathers, 2006.

2 

Czestochowski, Joseph S. John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood: A Portrait of Rural America. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1981.

3 

Dennis, James M. Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

4 

Guedon, Mary Scholz. Regionalist Art: Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood: A Guide to the Literature. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982.

5 

Junker, Patricia A. John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1998.

6 

Kendall, M. Sue. Rethinking Regionalism: John Steuart Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986.

7 

Schmeckebier, Laurence E. John Steuart Curry’s Pageant of America. New York: American Artists Group, 1943.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
McGeary, Thomas. "Curry, John Steuart." The 1930s in America, edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1930_113140801131.
APA 7th
McGeary, T. (2011). Curry, John Steuart. In T. T. Lewis (Ed.), The 1930s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
McGeary, Thomas. "Curry, John Steuart." Edited by Thomas Tandy Lewis. The 1930s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.