This land is our land
Exhibit honors the painter who helped define the Middle West
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John Steuart Curry’s “The Plainsman,” a 1945 lithograph. |
You know this place.
You’ve never actually visited, but once you saw an image that captured it so precisely you knew down to the detail what it was like to live there.
It’s possible that the place etched into your memory was one you had seen a John Steuart Curry painting.
An impressive selection of Curry’s paintings, all evoking scenes that seem quintessentially Midwestern, is on display at “John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West,” on exhibition through May 17 at the Elvehjem Museum of Art.
Fifty drawings and paintings, many unseen for 25 years, will offer the first critical evaluation of Curry and his work in over half a century, according to Elvehjem director Russell Panczenko.
“This is undoubtedly the most important show the Elvehjem has ever originated,” he says. When the exhibition closes in Madison it will travel to San Francisco and Kansas City.
Curry’s work has come to define our notion of the Middle West.
“When geographers speak of a sense of place, they mean everything that makes a particular place special: physical terrain, vegetation and wild creatures, the landscapes where people earning their livings and make their homes, and, not least, the stories invested in the place,” says William Cronon, UW–Madison’s Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies.. “John Steuart Curry and his paintings were among the crucial makers of meaning for the Middle West.”
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Curry, the nice guy Every now and then, Jim Watrous was kind of a naughty kid growing up in the Kansas town of Winfield. “There would be revival meetings on the outskirts. I thought those were pretty intriguing — I used to like to sneak into the tent to see what was going on in there,” he recalls. Consequently, Watrous, now an emeritus professor of art history at UW–Madison, responded immediately to the grassroots subjects favored by UW–Madison’s first artist-in-residence and fellow Kansan John Steuart Curry. Like Curry, Watrous has added his work to campus buildings including Vilas and Ingraham Halls, the Sociology Building, Memorial Union and Memorial Library. Watrous worked on campus during much of Curry’s tenure here, but found the extremely shy artist’s paths hard to cross. “Curry was tucked away in a studio on Lorch Street, near the old University High School. I was in the area that is now Helen C. White Hall.” Still, the emeritus professor regards Curry as an essentially nice guy. “I had entered a competition to do murals in the San Antonio post office. I didn’t win, but Curry saw the designs and recommended me for a federal commission for the U.S. Treasury Building. “I guess he liked my work. I know I certainly liked his.” |
Curry’s appointment as artist-in-residence at UW–Madison in 1936 marked a pivotal juncture not only in UW history but also in the annals of higher education. Under the auspices of the College of Agriculture, Curry assumed the country’s first artist-in-residency and held the position until he succumbed to a heart attack in 1946.
“He simply was to be himself practicing his art in a community where there normally were no artists,” Panczenko says. “He was the perfect choice for this experiment; his art, his ideas and his personality were such that he profoundly influenced many in rural Wisconsin not only to become interested in the visual arts but to practice them.”
Indeed, Curry was instrumental in developing the Wisconsin Regional Arts Program, still operating today in the Division of Continuing Studies in the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea.
Despite his predilection for populist just-folks themes, Curry left his family’s Kansas farm 1916 to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Later. he apprenticed with illustrator Harvey Dunn and began a career drawing for such periodicals as Saturday Evening Post. In 1926 he left for Paris and its celebrated Russian Academy. Two years later, his Baptism in Kansas caught the attention of powerful New York critics after its display in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Curry’s influence is still visible in buildings across campus. His recently conserved mural The Freeing of the Slaves (1942) hangs in the UW Law School library; The Social Benefits of Biochemical Research (1941-43) decorates the Biochemistry Building; and his memorial painting to Wisconsin All-American David Nathan Schreiner, killed on Okinawa, graces the National W Club room in Camp Randall.
The Elvehjem exhibition draws on Curry works held in both public and private collections. The museum also is showing prints by Curry and his American Regionalist colleagues Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton in an exhibition that will run through March 29.
In conjunction with these exhibitions, the Elvehjem will host a number of special lectures, films and family programs to put into context the art, artists and the historical period. For particulars, check Wisconsin Week calendar listings or call the Elvehjem at 263-2246.