John Steuart Curry

John Steuart Curry

CHIARA:  Presentation

SOPHIA:  John Steuart Curry born on November  14th  1897 in an American state called Kansas and died on August 29th 1946 was an American painter. He was the eldest of 5 children, and the parents were Thomas Smith Curry and Margaret Stuart Curry, who both were college educated.

The family lived on a farm and were very religious, as he was encouraged to paint animals there.

 He studied at Kansas City Art Institute, Art Institute of Chicago, and Geneva College in Pennsylvania.

His career spanned from the year 1924 until his death and was noted for his paintings depicting life in his home state, Kansas.

From 1921 to 1926 he worked  as an illustrator for the Pulp magazines.

He met and married Clara Derrick, who died in June 1932.

He then travelled with the Rigling Brother’s Circus where he created the Flying Cardonas.

In 1934, he remarried Kathleen Guld.

He travelled throught the State promoting Art in farming communities and subsequently was commissioned to paint a mural for the Department of Justice building and the Main interior building in Washington.

Curry worked at the University of Wisconsin until he died of a heart attack at the age of 48 in 1946.

Among his best known works are Baptism in Kansas(1928), Hogs killing a Rattlesnake(1930) and a series of painting of circus life.

His movement/ style was social realism and regionalism.

DESCRIPTION OF BAPTISM IN KANSAS (1928)

Painting recalls a scene that  Steuart Curry witnessed in 1915 in the devout religious community of his childhood: the local creeks were dried up, and the only suitable site for a full-submersion baptism was a water tank.

QUICK DESCRIPTION

When the painting was first exhibited in 1928 at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., critics hailed its assertive portrayal of rural American values. Curry’s vision of an idealized American heartland signaled the emergence of Regionalism, the movement that glorified grassroots rural values during the poverty-stricken years of the Great Depression.

CHIARA:  REGIONALISM

During the Great Depression, American Regionalists turned away from European modernism to return back to an ideal of art-as-storytelling, in precise detail. The American Regionalists celebrated familiar subjects in ways accessible for a general public, making their work popular.

John Steuart Curry and other Regionalist artists headed the call to paint rural and small town America. These often idealized, even nostalgic, paintings of the community, religious life and lifestyle of the population suffering the effects of a financial disaster from the period of the Great Depression.

John Steuart Curry devoted himself to painting sincere portrayals(representations) of the American heartland as well as American history, as seen in this painting named The Tragic Prelude (1938­–1940).

...