John Steuart Curry Art

Plump or fleshy and voluptuous nude... you can describe it as you see it. Signed, titled and dated lower left: John Steuart Curry / 1934 "Hilda Nellis", John Steuart Curry is best ...

John Steuart Curry "Sketching Wisconsin," 1946 oil on canvas 31.13 x 28 inches, canvas 39.75 x 36.75 x 2.5 inches, frame Signed and dated lower right Overall excellent condition Presented in a 24-karat gold leaf hand-carved wood frame John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) was an American regionalist painter active during the Great Depression and into World War II. He was born in Kansas on his family’s farm but went on to study art in Chicago, Paris and New York as young man. In Paris, he was exposed to the work of masters such as Peter Paul Rubens, Eugène Delacroix and Jacques-Louis David. As he matured, his work showed the influence of these masters, especially in his compositional decisions. Like the two other Midwestern regionalist artists that are most often grouped with him, Grant Wood (American, 1891-1942) and Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889-1975), Curry was interested in representational works containing distinctly American subject matter. This was contrary to the popular art at the time, which was moving closer and closer to abstraction and individual expression. Sketching Wisconsin is an oil painting completed in 1946, the last year of John Steuart Curry’s life, during which time he was the artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The painting is significant in Curry’s body of work both as a very revealing self-portrait, and as a landscape that clearly and sensitively depicts the scenery of southern Wisconsin near Madison. It is also a portrait of the artist’s second wife, Kathleen Gould Curry, and is unique in that it contains a ‘picture within a picture,’ a compositional element that many early painting masters used to draw the eye of the viewer. This particular artwork adds a new twist to this theme: Curry’s wife is creating essentially the same painting the viewer is looking at when viewing Sketching Wisconsin. The triangular composition of the figures in the foreground immediately brings focus to a younger Curry, whose head penetrates the horizon line and whose gaze looks out towards the viewer. The eye then moves down to Mrs. Curry, who, seated on a folding stool and with her hand raised to paint the canvas on the easel before her, anchors the triangular composition. The shape is repeated in the legs of the stool and the easel. Behind the two figures, stripes of furrowed fields fall away gently down the hillside to a farmstead and small lake below. Beyond the lake, patches of field and forest rise and fall into the distance, and eventually give way to blue hills. Here, Curry has subverted the traditional artist’s self-portrait by portraying himself as a farmer first and an artist second. He rejects what he sees as an elitist art world of the East Coast and Europe. In this self-portrait he depicts himself without any pretense or the instruments of his profession and with a red tractor standing in the field behind him as if he was taking a break from the field work. Here, Curry’s wife symbolizes John Steuart Curry’s identity as an artist. Compared with a self-portrait of the artist completed a decade earlier, this work shows a marked departure from how the artist previously presented and viewed himself. In the earlier portrait, Curry depicted himself in the studio with brushes in hand, and with some of his more recognizable and successful canvases behind him. But in Sketching Wisconsin, Curry has taken himself out of the studio and into the field, indicating a shift in the artist’s self-conception. Sketching Wisconsin’s rural subject also expresses Curry’s populist ideals, that art could be relevant to anyone. This followed the broad educational objectives of UW’s artist-in-residence program. Curry was appointed to his position at the University of Wisconsin in 1937 and was the first person to hold any such position in the country, the purpose of which was to serve as an educational resource to the people of the state. He embraced his role at the University with zeal and not only opened the doors of his campus studio in the School of Agriculture to the community, but also spent a great deal of time traveling around the state of Wisconsin to visit rural artists who could benefit from his expertise. It was during his ten years in the program that Curry was able to put into practice his belief that art should be meaningful to the rural populace. However, during this time he also struggled with public criticism, as the dominant forces of the art market were moving away from representation. Perhaps it was Curry’s desire for public acceptance during the latter part of his career that caused him to portray himself as an Everyman in Sketching Wisconsin. Beyond its importance as a portrait of the artist, Sketching Wisconsin is also a detailed and sensitive landscape that shows us Curry’s deep personal connection to his environment. The landscape here can be compared to Wisconsin Landscape of 1938-39 (the Metropolitan Museum of Art), which presents a similar tableau of rolling hills with a patchwork of fields. Like Wisconsin Landscape, this is an incredibly detailed and expressive depiction of a place close to the artist’s heart. This expressive landscape is certainly the result of many hours spent sketching people, animals, weather conditions and topography of Wisconsin as Curry traveled around the state. The backdrop of undulating hills and the sweeping horizon, and the emotions evoked by it, are emphatically recognizable as the ‘driftless’ area of south-central Wisconsin. But while the Metropolitan’s Wisconsin Landscape conveys a sense of uncertainty or foreboding with its dramatic spring cloudscape and alternating bands of light and dark, Sketching Wisconsin has a warm and reflective mood. The colors of the foliage indicate that it is late summer and Curry seems to look out at the viewer approvingly, as if satisfied with the fertile ground surrounding him. The landscape in Sketching Wisconsin is also revealing of what became one of Curry’s passions while artist-in-residence at UW’s School of Agriculture – soil conservation. When Curry was a child in Kansas, he saw his father almost lose his farm and its soil to the erosion of The Dust Bowl. Therefore, he was very enthusiastic about ideas from UW’s School of Agriculture on soil conservation methods being used on Wisconsin farms. In Sketching Wisconsin, we see evidence of crop rotation methods in the terraced stripes of fields leading down the hillside away from the Curry’s and in how they alternate between cultivated and fallow fields. Overall, Sketching Wisconsin has a warm, reflective, and comfortably pastoral atmosphere, and the perceived shift in Curry’s self-image that is evident in the portrait is a positive one. After his rise to favor in the art world in the 1930’s, and then rejection from it due to the strong beliefs presented in his art, Curry is satisfied and proud to be farmer in this self-portrait. Curry suffered from high blood...

Study for the Mural "Westward Movement" Graphite, watercolor, gouache and paint on paper, 1936 Signed in pencil lower center (see photo) A study leading up to his mural Justice of th...

Study for the Mural "Westward Movement" Graphite, watercolor, gouache and paint on paper, 1936 Signed in pencil lower center (see photo) A study leading up to his mural Justice of th...

Untitled (Study for The Aerialists) Graphite on paper, 1932 Signed lower right in pencil: "John Steuart Curry" Dated: 1932 in pencil Exhibited: Schroeder Romero & Shredder, NYC (label), Master Drawings, Oct. 13, 2011-Nov. 12, 2011 (see photo of label) Arkansas Arts Center (label), 44th Collector Show & Sale, Nov. 30-December 30, 2012, Offered at $22,000. (see photo of label) This drawing is closely related to a painting by Curry entitled The Aerialists, 1932, once in the Erskine Collection, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It is part of a group of preliminary drawings and three finished paintings executed by Curry around 1932 which were based on The Flying Cadonas. The painting The Flying Cadonas is an icon of American art purchased by the Whitney Museum of Art and now on permanent exhibition. There are other know studies for these works, nos. 199 through 222 and in John Steuart Curry: Rural America, page 32 (Mongerson Wunderlich, Chicago, 1990. Provenance: Mrs. Kathleen Curry (artist’s widow), included in the estate schedule of works Treadway Toomey Auction, Oak Park, Illinois, 2009 Don Joint, New York An important American Regionalist drawing. Like Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry was a major American scene painter of the 1930s. His subjects were taken from American history and his most famous mural, The Tragic Prelude...

John Steuart Curry (American, 1897-1946) Wisconsin Twilight, 1934 Signed Lower Left Gold Leafed Frame with Silk Mat and Gold Leafed Fillet 29 x 36.5 inches 41 x 46.5 inches with frame Born in Dunavant, Kansas on November 14, 1897, John Steuart Curry became the youngest member of the famed "Benton-Wood-Curry trio" of Regional Painters of the early 20th-century American Scene movement. He gained national reputation for his Kansas rural scenes of people terrorized by natural phenomena such as tornadoes, drab farm-house living conditions, religious gatherings such as prayer meeting and baptisms, and spirited animals who got out of control. A good example of his weather-related painting was Tornado Over Kansas, 1929, in the collection of the Muskegon Museum of Art in Muskegon, Michigan. In this scene, a family scurries for shelter, trying to outrun a funnel cloud headed for their home. The mother carries her baby, and the children rescue pets and toys. It was later said that Curry never directly experienced a tornado but had many scares from them as a child when his family, faced with frightening skies, made frequent trips to their fruit cellar. In 1933, Tornado Over Kansas received second prize at the Carnegie International Exhibit. He was especially focused on people who were down-to-earth, plain spoken and who were self reliantly making a living through hard physical labor challenged by harsh weather. In many of his paintings, he showed his disdain for racial discrimination and hatred, something he believed was psychologically poisonous. He did many murals dealing with land settlement and these themes of racial justice, and his, reflecting these themes, murals are in the Capitol Building in Kansas, the University of Wisconsin, Department of the Interior, and Department of Justice in Washington D.C. Curry was a descendant of many generations of farmers, whose American ancestors originally were from Scotland. Some of them immigrated to South Carolina, and later followed "the line of the frontier into the Mississippi Valley." The first born of five children, Curry said of his childhood: "I was raised on hard work and the shorter catechism---Up at four o'clock the year round, doing half a day's work before we rode to town on horseback to our lessons." From a young age, he was constantly drawing, an activity encouraged by his mother, who arranged art lessons for him from age 12. She also gave him his first glimpse of the Old Master painters through reproductions of their work she had collected on her honeymoon. Never of the studious nature, Curry quit the county high school in Winchester, Kansas and spent that summer as a railroad section-hand. His earnings provided him with enough money to buy a suit of clothes so that he could go to Kansas City and attend the Art Institute. A month later he moved to the Art Institute of Chicago, and remained there for two years, supporting himself by sweeping floors and acting as a bus-boy in the cafeteria. Upon America's declaration of war, Curry went to training camp, only to be sent home when it was discovered that he was still under age. In 1918 he enrolled at Geneva College, played football for two seasons, and spent the following five years training to earn his money as an illustrator of "blood-and-thunder" scenes for a popular western story magazine. In this capacity, he worked for illustrator Harvey Dunn in New Jersey from 1919 to 1926. He married and then persuaded art patron Seward Prosser to loan him $1000. 00,, which he used for one year of study in Paris in 1927. The year in Europe, which included study at the Academy Julian, reinforced his independent nature. He was much more impressed by the paintings of Rembrandt and Rubens than by the modernist American painters, many whom were adopting the 'isms' of abstract styles of French contemporary artists such as Pablo Picasso's Cubism and Max Ernst's Surrealism. Curry determined to paint American subjects without European models and to celebrate American patriotism and regional pride rather than lofty, remote ideals espoused by the academics. He returned to America penniless, and settling in Westport, Connecticut, swore that he would turn out a worthwhile picture or give up painting entirely. There in 1928 from memory he painted his first picture that became famous, Baptism in Kansas. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bought it for her museum and subsidized him for two years at $50 a week. Baptism in Kansas was heralded nationally as work of a new American genre, but fellow Kansans were not impressed until much later when they realized the scope of his recognition. Purchased by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, one of his key benefactors, Baptism launched his career as a regionalist. In 1930, he had his first one-man exhibition, held at the Whitney Studio Club, and was received enthusiastically by critics. Although he lived primarily in the East, he returned often to Kansas where he stayed at his parents' farm and sketched rural-life scenes. His first wife died, and he gave up his studio in Westport, and secluded himself in a drab New York City studio. He taught at the Cooper Union and the Art Students' League, and held a show of circus studies after touring New England with Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus. This tour and the resulting circus sketches and watercolors were inspired from his attendance in Kansas at many rural county fairs. Reportedly the circus people said they liked Curry but "quibbled over minor technical errors in his series of circus paintings." In 1934 he married Kathleen Shepard, returned to Westport, recovered his old enthusiasm, and painted one of his most famous paintings, Line Storm. Westport beginning to appreciate him, commissioned him to do a double mural for the local high school. Additionally, the United States government selected him to paint murals for the Department of Justice and the Department of Interior buildings in Washington, D.C. He was appointed Artist-in-Residence in the College of Agriculture, University of Wisconsin, in 1936. At $4,000 a year he had his studio on the campus, where he could mingle with students, but he conducted no formal classes. Curry also traveled occasionally to Arizona where he visited his parents who had a second home there and spent their winters. The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas, is the repository of the Curry archives including many paintings. According to Bill North, the Museum's Senior Curator, Curry "did produce a number of paintings and watercolors with Arizona subjects, some, certainly prior to 1940. Relatively little is known about this aspect of his life and work. I assume that many, if not all of Curry's Arizona paintings...