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for JOHN STEUART CURRY
JOHN STEUART CURRY
1897-1946
Curry, the son of Scottish-Presbyterian farmers, was born in Dunavant, Kansas in 1897. His mother fostered his drawing talent.
His education art was thorough, starting at the Art Institute of Kansas. Then, from 1916 to 1918, he attended the Chicago Art Institute School, studying under E.J. Timmons and John W. Norton. He finished by attending Geneva College in Pennsylvania, from 1918 to 1919, and then studying with the illustrator Harvey Dunn.
Though he became a successful magazine illustrator from 1919 to 1924, Curry's work was too original to confine to illustration, and he left this career in 1926 to go to Paris, where he studied in Bail Schoukhaieff's Russian Academy.
The series of paintings of rural American life that he began soon after his return in 1927 firmly established his reputation, and remain among his best works. In 1932, he traveled with the Ringling Brothers Circus on its New England tour, producing a group of circus paintings.
Curry also painted murals for the federal government in Norwalk, Connecticut and in Washington, D.C., and for the Kansas State House. Though these huge murals received great acclaim when they were painted, they are now regarded as overblown and idealistic. Curry taught at Cooper Union and at the Art Students League. In 1936 he was appointed artist-in-residence at the Agricultural College of the University of Wisconsin, where he taught until his death in Madison, Wisconsin in 1946.
By then, World War II had jolted America out of its isolationist cocoon and brought about an excessive reaction against the "American Scene" painters. Because of this repudiation, Curry's robust, painterly work has been consistently underrated.
Curry's most enduring paintings sprang form his Kansas farming roots: he excelled at depicting the raging of the weather and the plight of the common man confronted by the elements.
--American Art Analog, p. 915
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