Much like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz, the life of artist and native Kansan John Steuart Curry was transformed by a tornado. But instead of conveying him to Oz, Curry’s Tornado (Tornado Over Kansas) won a prestigious art prize (at the Carnegie Institute’s annual exhibition in 1933) and catapulted him to prominence. This masterpiece and other Great Plains subjects he painted are now on display together for the first time in more than twenty-five years. But this collection of art is not in Kansas anymore. It is on view hundreds of miles north on the shores of Lake Michigan in the exhibition John Steuart Curry: Weathering the Storm at the Muskegon Museum of Art.
Considered one of the pillars (alongside Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood) of American regionalism, Curry specialized in emotional and sometimes tragic paintings that illustrated the highs and lows of life in the American interior. Much of his best work homes in on the people and landscape of Kansas, subjects that the artist carefully observed throughout the 1920s and 1930s, when he made multiple trips to the state from his adopted home on the East Coast. According to Art Martin, director of collections and exhibitions at the Muskegon Museum of Art, Curry was “driven by a desire to make art, and struggling to find the stories and skills that would bring him recognition and financial success.” He found it in the trials and tribulations of Kansans, who were trudging through the Great Depression and Dust Bowl storms, droughts, and general uncertainty.
Committing to canvas both childhood memories and sights seen on his journeys, Curry recorded important public events like baptisms as well as quieter moments, such as the restful accord of a husband and wife in The Old Folks (Mother and Father). Curry also portrayed the dangerous realities of bad weather in America’s heartland. The Mississippi documents a devastating moment for a Black family and their cat, who perch on a roof as dark flood waters surround their home. This painting was sourced from a disastrous 1927 flood in the Mississippi River valley that displaced nearly three-quarters of a million Americans, over two hundred thousand of them Black.
Curry’s life and career took a tortuous path before depositing him back in Kansas. Born on a farm in Dunavant, a small rural community near Kansas City, Curry grew up surrounded by art prints, explaining to the New York Herald Tribune years later that, “instead of grain and feed calendars in our house . . . we had Rubens, Bellini, and Millet,” souvenirs of his parents’ honeymoon in Europe. As a young adult, he left the family farm to study art at the Kansas City Art Institute and later at the Art Institute of Chicago. Subsequent years took him farther afield, first to New Jersey, where Curry worked in the studio of commercial illustrator Harvey Dunn, and finally to Paris, where he studied drawing with the Russian artist Vasili Shukhaev and immersed himself in the work of the Old Masters at the Louvre.
The art he saw abroad, particularly that of Rubens, greatly influenced his style. In The Tornado, the sense of energetic movement captured by the figures, the contrasting expanses of light from the sky and the white-painted barn, and the scene’s overall emotional pitch all bear the stamp of the Flemish master. Curry’s devotion to what American art historian Patricia Junker, who contributed supporting research to Weathering the Storm, has called the “‘big picture,’ art as powerful and heroic as possible,” put him at odds with European modernism, even if his regressiveness has traditionally been exaggerated. Curry’s creative handling of space and scale in paintings such as The Bathers have as much in common with Cézanne as with Tintoretto.
Weathering the Storm is supported by loans from institutions in the Midwest and beyond, including the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, to supplement the holdings of the Muskegon Museum of Art. It isn’t quite a merry reunion—Curry’s work recalls some of the darkest days in twentieth-century Kansas. But among these visions of human suffering, perseverance and even pleasure shine through—as in a study of road menders kicking back in communal leisure. Such was the redeeming reality on display in the hinterlands even at the worst of times, for any painter willing to recognize, appreciate, and record it. For Curry, as for other regionalists, there really was “no place like home.”
John Steuart Curry: Weathering the Storm • Muskegon Museum of Art, Michigan • to September 29 • muskegonartmuseum.org
