Curry's favor to Kansas.(Flashback: to know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero)(John Steuart Curry)(Biography)

In 1897, back when the Jayhawk state still raged with the prairie fires of agrarian revolt, painter John Steuart Curry was born outside Dunavant, Kansas. By the 1930s, Curry had become, along with Iowa's Grant Wood and Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton, one of the trinity of Regionalist painters whose explorations of rural culture had sent into a tizzy the neurotic and neurasthenic Manhattanites who--then and now--set themselves up as the hall monitors of the art world.

A farm boy and fine halfback on his high school football team (he was one of the few noted American artists to treat football as a serious subject), Curry lived for much of his early adulthood in New York City. In 1936, he took the novel position of Artist in Residence at the Agricultural College of the University of Wisconsin. The painter was "bald, jolly, pipe smoking, and liked to wear overalls," recalled his Wisconsin colleague Robert Gard, but Curry's affability was sorely tried when he learned that fundamental Scriptural truth: A prophet is ever without honor in his home town. Or in this case, his home state.

For in 1937, one of those gangs of Leading Citizens Who Get Things Done raised the money to commission from Curry three murals for the Kansas state capitol in Topeka. "I want to paint the things I feel as a native of Kansas," said Curry--and those things ranged from covered wagons to John Brown to sunflowers to the menacing tornadoes that seem always to spiral in Curry's skies. The artist's early sketches for the project attracted statewide publicity and invited the sort of nitpicking that sorely vexed Curry, who his friend Benton described as "oversensitive to criticism."

According to art historian Laurence Schmeckebier, Curry's Kansas critics "contended that pigs' tails do not curl when they eat; skunks' tails curl up over their backs when they walk and are not straight as he had painted them; or the red color of Curry's Hereford bull was too red and not 'natural-like.'" The conscientious Curry betook himself to a ...