John Steuart Curry
John Steuart Curry
1897 - 1946
American painter and illustrator. As one of the ‘Regionalist triumvirate’, with THOMAS HART BENTON and GRANT WOOD, he has been most often characterized as a faithful chronicler of rural life in Kansas. From 1916 to 1918 he was at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1919 he began study in the studio of Harvey Dunn (1884–1952) in Tenafly, NJ. After seven years as an illustrator in and around New York, he went to Paris in 1926 to study with the Russian Academician VASILY SHUKHAYEV. Ironically, it was on Curry’s return to the East Coast the following year that he began to earn his reputation as a Regionalist by painting memories of Kansas from his studio in the fashionable art colony of Westport, CT. Baptism in Kansas (1928; New York, Whitney, see AMERICAN SCENE PAINTING) shows a country child being baptized in a cattle trough. Such paintings of early American life appealed to certain East Coast urban viewers seeking to recover a lost past.
From 1936 to 1946 Curry was artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. From 1936 to 1938 he executed mural cycles for the Departments of Justice and of the Interior (Washington, DC) under New Deal patronage. In 1937 he was commissioned to paint murals for the Kansas State Capitol building, but Kansas gave its truant Regionalist such a hostile reception that the ambitious cycle (featuring John Brown and the history of settlement on the plains) was never fully completed. [M. Sue Kendall. "Curry, John Steuart." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T020707.]
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