10 facts about John Steuart Curry

John Steuart Curry (November 14, 1897 – August 29, 1946) was an American painter whose career spanned the years from 1924 until his death. He was noted for his paintings depicting rural animatronics in his home state, Kansas. Along bearing in mind Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, he was hailed as one of the three great painters of American Regionalism of the first half of the twentieth century. Curry’s artistic production was varied, including paintings, book illustrations, prints, and posters.

Curry was Kansas’s best known painter, but his works were not popular subsequently Kansans, who felt that he did not picture the state favorably enough. Curry’s paintings often depicted farm vibrancy and animals, tornadoes, prairie fires, and the violent Bleeding Kansas period (featuring abolitionist John Brown, who at the mature was derided as a fanatical traitor) – subjects that Kansans did not desire to be representative of the state. Curry was commissioned to create murals for the Kansas State Capitol, and he completed two: Kansas Pastoral, and his most famous and controversial work, Tragic Prelude, which he considered his greatest. Reaction was correspondingly negative that the Kansas Legislature passed a perform to save them, or far along works of his, from beast hung upon the capitol walls. As a result, Curry did not sign the works, which were not hung during his lifetime. He left Topeka in disgust; his planned 8 smaller murals for the Capitol rotunda upon the first floor never went on peak of sketches, now held by the Kansas Museum of History.

Curry’s works were painted subsequent to movement, which was conveyed by the free brush conduct yourself and energized forms that characterized his style. His control greater than brushstrokes created excited emotions such as warning and despair in his paintings. His fellow Regionalists, who as well as painted proceed and movement, influenced Curry’s style.