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Great Plains Quarterly Great Plains Studies, Center for

1992

The Ambivalence of John Steuart Curry's Justice Defeating Mob Violence

Stephen C. Behrendt University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected]

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Behrendt, Stephen C., "The Ambivalence of John Steuart Curry's Justice Defeating Mob Violence" (1992). Great Plains Quarterly. 706. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/706

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Great Plains Studies, Center for at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Great Plains Quarterly by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. THE AMBIVALENCE OF JOHN STEUART CURRY'S JUSTICE DEFEATING MOB VIOLENCE

STEPHEN C. BEHRENDT

John Steuart Curry's mural Justice Defeating Mob control such disorder and the agents appointed Violence (Fig. 1), painted in 1936-37 for the to enforce that control. But in doing so he took United States Department of Justice, offers the unusual step of adopting the visual idiom viewers a revealing perspective on the cultural of American regionalism, in the process cre­ values inherent in then-current notions of law ating a mural that juxtaposes negatively charged and order. In approaching his mural, Curry as­ images of rural and western American life with sumed the traditional role of the history painter seemingly positive images of a more ordered and as it had been known in post-Renaissance Eu­ institutionally sanctioned component of Amer­ rope, especially in the eighteenth century; he ican society. The mural incorporates some of undertook to present for public approbation and the features that made regionalist art popular public edification a moralistic allegorical state­ among broad segments of the general public: ment about the relations between societal dis­ distinctively American subject matter, a dra­ order and both the institutions designed to matic narrative presentation, and a clearly de­ finable moral basis reflective of both American nationalism and traditional American values. Despite its apparently clear programmatic basis, however, Curry's mural elicits from the contem­ porary, late twentieth-century viewer some Stephen C. Behrendt is professor of English at the decidedly ambivalent responses and interpre­ University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is especially tations. I should like to explore some of the interested in the interdisciplinary study of literature, reasons why this may be so. art, and culture in general, as evidenced by his many At the heart of the phenomenon lies the articles and books, including Reading William perennial issue of how a painting (or any rep­ Blake (1992). resentational work of art) generates "meaning." The creation, perception, and cognition of works of art entails an intellectual and aesthetic trans­ action among artist, viewer, and the "vocabu­ [GPQ 12 (Winter 1992): 3-18) lary" of the medium. In a representational

3 4 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1992

FIG. \. John Steuart Curry, Justice Defeating Mob Violence. Photograph courtesy of U.S. Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.

painting like Curry's mural, this vocabulary in­ exists at the intersection of several roads: art­ cludes not just the narrative subject, the "story" historical convention; the artist's individual vi­ that the viewer derives from the visual repre­ sion, agenda, and abilities; the viewer's sophis­ sentation of a dramatic moment frozen in time tication and knowledge of convention; and the and space. It includes also the iconography, the belief systems that inform artist and viewer and tradition of posture, gesture, and physical and their respective cultural milieus, which may be thematic repetition in the arts that enables us discontinuous in any number of ways. The art­ to "read" or decode a gesture (like the judge's ist's contemporaries may read the painting as outstretched hand in Curry's mural) by consid­ the artist does, but the further removed one is, ering its occurrences elsewhere in art and cul­ chronologically or culturally, from the currency ture. of the artistic idiom and its intellectual and This act of reading is also subject to historical iconographic program, the more likely one is and cultural circumstances that may materially to read the images differently. Ambiguity (a affect how that act is carried on. Meaning and term more relative to the viewer than the artist, cultural significance may change dramatically since it is the viewer who is engaged in discov­ over time, as has happened in the twentieth ering meaning) arises in special ways when the century with a word like "gay" or a visual image viewer draws from the images suggestions that like the "V for Victory" hand gesture. Meaning were necessarily inaccessible to the artist and JOHN STEUART CURRY 5 then constructs a tissue of meaning or signifi­ of rural as opposed to urban life. They treated cation that depends as much upon the viewer's their subjects with a transparency that is at times personal, intellectual, and cultural condition­ flatly propagandistic in advancing their collec­ ing as upon the artist's. Precisely this sort of tive agenda. Theirs was an art for the people shift in the interpretation of both the formal in general rather than for the connoisseur, a and the programmatic cues may be observed in program graphically underscored in 1933 when the ways in which a late twentieth-century re­ Curry and Wood donned bib overalls for a much­ sponse to Justice Defeating Mob Violence may publicized photograph of themselves at Wood's differ from one grounded in the milieu of the art colony in Stone City, Iowa. The three artists late 1930s. represented remarkably diverse backgrounds: Historians of twentieth-century American Curry had begun as a commercial illustrator, art generally recognize three contemporaries as Wood as a neo-Impressionist dutifully turning the leading midwestern practitioners of what is out views of France, and Benton as a modernist usually called-slightingly, on the whole-"re­ experimenting with abstract painting.2 The very gional" art. Thomas Hart Benton was born in different formal and informal training each art­ Neosho, Missouri, in 1889; Grant Wood near ist undertook, however, was enlisted ultimately Anamosa, Iowa, in 1891; and John Steuart Curry in their joint program of returning American in Dunavant, Kansas, to Scottish Presbyterian art to American roots-and to an American farm parents in 1897. Of the three, Curry (1897- visual vocabulary. 1946) has fared the worst at the hands of the This strongly nationalistic impulse was of critics, perhaps owing at least in part to his course entirely in keeping with the new isola­ humble beginnings as a self-declared "illustra­ tionism in politics and middle-class culture gen­ tor" of "Wild West" tales in 1921-26, before he erally that followed America's involvement in grew serious about painting and embarked on a World War I. Inherent in this intellectual and course of study that included study with the cultural isolationism is a nostalgic view of a fast­ Russian academician Basil Schoukaieff in Paris fading past whose values and priorities---<.:ould in 1926. 1 There Curry's innate sense of region­ they be reasserted and reembraced in the mod­ alism, with its intense topicality and its ground­ em world-might yet save the American Eden ing in visual localisms-indeed in visual that was perceived to be fast becoming the mod­ colloquialisms--combined with the artist's en­ em Wilderness. Art of this sort is in any age thusiasm for the monumental forms of Rubens and location inherently political in that it chal­ and the energetic Romanticism of Delacroix and lenges both the status quo and the nature and Gericault, who formed the trinity of Curry's value system of the prevailing power establish­ favorite European models. ment. This political dimension is, as I will show, Like Benton and Wood, Curry sought in the very much a part of Curry's program-as it is rightist, isolationist program of his work to meld of Benton's and Wood's-and it bears signifi­ the distinctive features of a populist American cant relation to the work of an earlier regional agrarian culture with the monumentality and artist, the nineteenth-century Missouri artist high seriousness of the European "high art" tra­ George Caleb Bingham, whose own paintings dition. These three American painters epito­ are often political in nature even when their mize the regionalists' resistance to the standards, ostensible subject matter is not explicitly so. conventions, and audiences of the more con­ Curry's objective was to help shape an art ventional, Eurocentric painting that most in­ form that would not only be distinctively terested the East Coast art scene anchored in "American" but would also transcend the im­ New York. They echoed European artists like putation of inferiority implicit in the term "re­ Millet in their determined focus on the realities gional," which term was often invoked as a 6 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1992 pejorative, as the relative equivalent of "nar­ aesthetic factor. Thirdly, we had to find, and rowly provincial."3 In short, Curry pursued an think in, aesthetic terms applicable to the alternative course to the European neoclassical representation of a culture in a thousand ways impulse toward consensus---toward the gener­ different from that of Europe. 5 alized, the generic, and the genteel. To do so, even for an artist of superlative talent (which Curry's Justice Defeating Mob Violence is a Curry was not), was in the first half of this remarkable example of the artist's efforts to bring century a hazardous undertaking that subjected together these very different orientations and the artist to charges of eclecticism, eccentricity, their controlling impulses within a single pic­ or just plain mediocrity. The English Romantic ture, a picture replete with unmistakably di­ poets had some hundred and twenty years earlier dactic purposes appropriate to its location on faced withering criticism of their efforts to de­ the walls of the Department of Justice. As mocratize the arts---poetry in particular-when Thomas Hart Benton did in painting biblical they replaced the classical agenda with the Ro­ subjects like Susanna and the Elders and class­ mantic one that stressed the individual, the par­ ical ones like Persephone in rural midwestern ticular, and the distinctively local. The costume, Curry deliberately combined seem­ American regionalists encountered much the ingly disparate thematic, spatial, and chrono­ same sort of criticism from an artistic establish­ logical components in his works. A brief ment that in the 1920s and 1930s preferred comment in The Arts as early as 1930 observed more traditional European artistic models and that in this practice Curry was courageously por­ also from more avant-garde artists and critics traying "difficult dramatic American subjects who saw in regionalist representational art a for which there is no European receipt ready to retrogressive impulse. 4 hand."6 Thomas Hart Benton explained the situa­ But in fact Curry was working within the tion succinctly in terms of himself, Curry, and context of a well-established artistic tradition Wood: that had long engaged in just this sort of con­ trived artistic and intellectual matrimony. Cur­ Actually the three of us were pretty well ry's mural reflects the tradition of grand-style educated, pretty widely read, had had Eu­ history painting--or istoria-as it had reached ropean training, knew what was occurring its apogee in eighteenth-century Europe. Tra­ in modem French art circles, and were tied ditionally regarded as the highest form of paint­ in one way or another to the main traditions ing, istoria constituted the visual analogue to of Western painting. What distinguished us the literary epic. Like the epic poet, the history from so many other American painters of our painter was regarded as something of a national time was not a difference in training or aes­ treasure, as an artist with a clear and unavoid­ thetic background but a desire to redirect able moral duty to educate and edify his or her what we had found in the art of Europe to­ fellow citizens. The work of the history painter, ward an art specifically representative of like that of the epic poet, was understood to America. This involved first a dissolution of transcend mere temporal specificity and to speak the contemporary European ban on the to the ages. The history painter was a public stressing of subject matter. After we had made artist whose productions were by definition in­ the dissolution, we were forced to by-pass herently political, as well as moral, spiritual, contemporary European, or rather Parisian, and intellectual. Paradoxically, the American painting fashions and seek our technical re­ Social Realists and the Communists who fre­ sources further back in history where, as we quently backed them during the Depression years knew, subject matter had been an important advocated a variety of public art whose goal was JOHN STEUART CURRY 7

to incite revolution among the masses, but whose of "good old days" context in their works, if vehicles were frequently very much in the mode only to lament its passing (as, for instance, Willa of those used by the regionalists and the still Cather routinely eulogized a faded pioneer her­ more traditional history painters who preceded itage in her fiction). Given the growing anxiety them. The objective of the Social Realists and inherent in the complex modem global world their Communist allies was an art that would view on the eve of World War II, it is no surprise be "executed in an aggressive, declamatory that regional art draws upon vaguely old-fash­ manner, painted on a large scale, and placed ioned localisms, for its fundamental quest is for where it could be widely seen."7 Curry's mural the nationalistic memorializing-if not the out­ follows this program, but with apparently the right recovery--{)f the seemingly simple, clear opposite objective: to reinforce the social and values and the moral security of those earlier, political status quo against the twin threats of uncomplicated times. This is in many ways the anarchy and fascism. conservative view that· arises in all periods of Curry's Justice Defeating Mob Violence invites nationalistic anxiety: reinstate "traditional val­ a programmatic reading that affirms institu­ ues" (the conservative politician's by-phrase) tional (and institutionalized) justice. All the and all will be well again. That most popular signals are there, both in the simple composi­ of the popular arts, the movie, was in these tional structure and in the elaborate set of visual years, after all, producing its own nostalgic my­ allusions that help us to "read" the text of the thology of the Old West, replete with dungless painting. Curry seems on first glance to have streets and handsome, singing cowboys. This done his work well and to have served his gov­ would seem to be very much the rosy world view ernmental and judicial masters. Ironically, the into which Curry invites us to peer. And yet finished picture stands almost as a repudiation Curry's view possesses a harder, darker quality. of the artist's own geographical and cultural Curry himself provided the program for his roots, for it includes among its cast of social painting when he addressed the Madison Art "villains" an assemblage of rural and distinc­ Association on 19 January 1937, soon after his tively western persons. This frankness in por­ appointment as Artist in Residence at the Uni­ traying the dark side of American-and versity of Wisconsin. His description of his sub­ specifically Kansas-history and culture along ject is worth quoting in full: with the bright side cost Curry severely, as is best demonstrated by the controversy over his In ... Justice Defeating Mob Violence, I have plans for murals in the Kansas state capitol used for the properties of my theme the mob, building. 8 Perhaps Curry's mural is, at least in vicious death with the rope, the projecting part, a repudiation of both the frontier and fron­ limb of the tree, the glaring auto light, the tier justice: Wyatt Earp had, after all, died less hysterical women, the bloodhound, the clubs, than ten years earlier, in 1929. In an era in the guns, the horses, the upraised clenched which the cultural consciousness of criminal vi­ fists of the bloodthirsty. Opposite these is olence was dominated in America by images of the black-robed figure of the Justice, at his urban gangs and internationally by the resur­ feet the fugitive, behind him the arm of the gence of organized political thugs under the Fas­ law, the Department of Justice man, the mi­ cist and Nazi banners, Curry's painting seems litia; and behind them the pillars of the remarkably old-fashioned: both an anomaly and Court-with these properties I have en­ an anachronism. deavored to give a dramatic story with the Indeed, that is typical of political art of this reality of the day, and at the same time so sort, and it is characteristic of American re­ organized that they will fit in an art form gionalists in all the arts to fall back upon a sort that will give them authority and so that they 8 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1992

will as decorations give an added luster to ployed both particularizing details and formal the building, and to their setting. 9 compositional devices in engineering this pro­ grammatic reading, a reading that would seem Curry's description would seem to layout the to be virtually propagandistic in the apparent painting's program clearly, in terms of its nar­ blatancy of its system of references. The group rative content, of its allegorical structure, and at the right represents the forces of order, of of the public function of the painting itself in law both in the abstract (the judge) and in its the context of its presence on the walls of the practical application (the armed officers), ele­ Department of Justice building. vated to moral supremacy, even as they are phys­ I am not certain, however, that things are ically and visually elevated by the steps upon quite so clear-cut at all, especially when we look which they stand. The combination of these at both the painting and Curry's statements with two forces of order is a powerful one indeed, for late twentieth-century eyes. Curry's mural in merely in raising his hand-his right hand, note, fact elicits a much less clearly programmatic the same one the Creator raises on the ceiling reading of the opposition between "frontier jus­ of the Sistine Chapel in bringing order out of tice" and the institutionalized American legal chaos, and the one that both God the Creator system than we-and Curry's contemporary au­ and Jesus Christ use frequently in western Chris­ dience-might at first think. The painting seems tian art to quiet disturbances or to vanquish on first consideration to be a straightforward demonic challengers-the judge halts and re­ visual essay on the superiority-and thus the verses the advance of the far more numerous desirability-of the system of justice epitomized mob, whose principal figures recoil from the in the judicial branch of government and backed center of the picture and his gesture as from up by the various agencies of law enforcement. electric shock. The implicit strength of The Curry represents this two-tiered judicial system Law, though it is reserved rather than executed, in the figure group at the right of his mural, a is greater than that of The Mob, whose violent group consisting of a formally-robed judge ac­ exertions are thus checked. The judge's gesture companied by uniformed law enforcement of­ is, moreover, a classical convention most often ficials. Positioned both on steps and at the right, associated with sculpted images of the Roman this group visually dominates the "mob" at the emperors. It is an assertive oratorical stance that left. The figures at the right reflect no sense of calls, first, for silence and, second, for assent, being threatened; they are at rest, relaxed and fealty, and solidarity. The judge's gesture recalls confident in the "rightness" of political and so­ artistic precedents observable in paintings like cial order embodied in their orderly deployment David's Oath of the Horatii, as well as more im­ and emblematized in their uniforms. The "mob" mediately contemporary political parallels in the at the left, on the other hand, is composed of gestures associated with Mussolini and Hitler. "cowboys" (including the urban outlaw denoted Curry may have known a significant prece­ by his light suit and rakish mobster's hat) and dent for his own use of the figure. George Caleb other rural and proletarian types bent on lynch­ Bingham completed two versions of a powerful ing a shirtless male figure whose partially fallen painting of political protest, Martial Law, or, position at the feet of the judge places him just Order No. II (c. 1865-70; Fig. 2), both of which to the right of the picture's center. were well enough known for Curry to have seen These two figure groups function as emblems one or the other either in the original or in of the two key terms, "justice" and "mob rule," reproduction. The historical event recorded in and all of the visual signals appear to underscore Bingham's paintings is directly relevant to Cur­ the ostensible superiority of the "justice" group. ry's interests: the devastation brought about by Like any effective history painter, Curry em- the fierce clashes along the Missouri-Kansas JOHN STEUART CURRY 9 border arising from the passage in 1854 of the the military officer whose hand is on his service Kansas-Nebraska Act and the repeal of the Mis­ pistol and who is apparently responsible for the souri Compromise. The order attacked in scene of death and misery that surrounds the Bingham's powerful painting had commanded older civilian. What is of special importance the entire population of three counties (and a here is that it is the official representatives of portion of a fourth) to leave their homes within law and order-the military-who are the per­ fifteen days or face forcible expulsion; it had petrators of the violence that in these paintings wrought great misery on innocent people who devastates the most sacred of social institutions, had been victimized by the outlaw activities of the family. The implications of this ironic re­ others. According to the leading Bingham versal of the roles of outlaw and peacekeeper scholar, the painter had declared to the officer within the context of sanctioned military force responsible for the order, "If God spares my life, grow even stronger to the sensibilities of a late with pen and pencil I will make this order in­ twentieth-century viewer, but the context of famous in history."IO In Bingham's paintings a urban and international violence in the 1930s dignified older man who stands at the left in a suggests that Curry was probably as aware of the ray of light extends his arm to the right against fine line he was walking in his mural as Bingham

FIG. 2. George Caleb Bingham, Order No. 11. Photograph courtesy of Cincinnati Art Museum. The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial. 10 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1992

FIG. 3. Nicholas Poussin, Rape of the Sabine Women. Photograph courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Harris Brisbane Dick Fund.

was in his pictures, painted in the immediate quently in western art in contexts in which it wake of the Civil War. It is worth noting that serves to legitimize rather than to forestall vio­ although they are not among his best-known lence. For instance, presiding over the violent works, Bingham took up overtly political sub­ scene in Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women (c. jects on several occasions. In this we may dis­ 1636-37; Fig. 3) is a figure who stands on a cern at work in his painting a line of socio­ terrace at the left, in front of classical columns politically committed visual art whose lines ex­ among which stand his followers; his arm is tend back most importantly through William raised and extended in a gesture that itself is Hogarth in eighteenth-century England and copied from a Roman sculpture of Augustus of forward into the works of both the Regionalists the Prima Porta. Given the picture's great fame and, paradoxically, their Socialist and Com­ and Curry's own sophisticated art history train­ munist critics of the twentieth century. ing, it is likely that Poussin's painting figures Adding to the ambiguity that arises when we into Curry's mural at some level, even if only consider further still the iconography involved in terms of a compositional precedent. That this in the commanding gesture of Curry's judge fig­ same sort of physical gesture occurs also in bib­ ure is the fact that this same gesture recurs fre- lical subjects like Moses parting the waters or JOHN STEUART CURRY 11

Jesus (or Michael, or God the Father) hurling and to opt instead for a more formal, even al­ the rebel angels into the abyss suggests that the legorical, presentation of the abstract qualities gesture may as easily be associated with the in­ and principles with which Curry was concerned stigation of violence as with its quelling. in his painting. It is worth noting that Curry's earliest sketches The mob is an appropriate emblem of dis­ for the mural reveal a more exaggeratedly dra­ order and violence. The group is visually con­ matic conception of the tableau at right and torted, writhing almost, in elaborately center. In these early sketches the judge inter­ implacable sinuous lines. One is reminded of acts more directly with the fugitive, bending Gericault's Raft of the Medusa(1818-19; Fig. 4), over him slightly and extending his left hand right up to the waving background figure at the down to him in a protective gesture. II In the apex of a leftward-rising compositional triangle. final version the judge has been made erect and The connection is fortuitous, to be sure, but­ his physical contact with the fugitive has been again recalling Curry's studies in Paris and his eliminated. The effect of these changes is to enthusiasm for Gericault-it is perhaps intel­ minimize the emotional, empathetic bond orig­ lectually significant as well. Gericault's figures inally created among judge, fugitive, and viewer, are survivors of a shipwreck, waving desperately

FIG. 4. Theodore Gerieau/t, Raft of the Medusa. Photograph courtesy of Musee du Louvre, Paris. 12 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1992 ih hope of salvation by the ship whose sails are (and the unofficial "law" of moral, ethical only barely visible in the extreme distance. Is standards of social behavior). In locating the it possible that Curry has engineered in his mob in Justice Defeating Mob Violence in a nat­ painting an argument by analogy, suggesting in ural setting (notice the tree branch just left of the judge's gesture the means of the mob's res­ upper center), Curry implicitly allied its mem­ cue: that Law and Justice serve to overcome the bers with the forces of unbridled nature (such violence and disorder that is given physical em­ as frontier and the wild), as opposed to the man­ bodiment in the disharmonious figures of the made order represented at the right by the class­ mob by literally saving the members of that mob ical pillars and angular steps (such as civilization from themselves? and the urbane). The mob is thus held in check Cementing the pejorative valuation of the not only by the presence of the armed law en­ mob is the face of its central figure, the cowboy forcement officers and the commanding gesture ("vicious death," Curry had called him) with of the judge, but also by the place in which the the rope: his face is skeletal, skull-like-a death's action occurs, for the whole visual arrangement head with a cowboy hat. Lit from the left by suggests the paradigm of the flight to sanctuary, the eerie light from a vehicle's headlamps, be­ with the classical structure at the right doubling fore whose light a fearsome dog lunges, this as secular "church." This paradigm carries an­ group embodies the barely restrained pack-in­ other contextually appropriate layer of signifi­ stinct forces of darkness and destruction. cation, or coding, in the myth that evil or death It is a theme Curry had explored more than cannot penetrate the sanctified space. once-the violence of vigilante justice, in which Central to a programmatic reading of Curry's the pack instincts of the primitive world erupt mural is the figure of the fallen fugitive. The grotesquely but no less violently in the civilized fugitive's fallen position and his bare torso signal world of twentieth-century society. Laurence weakness and vulnerability, his lowered head Schmeckebier observed of another of Curry's submission. He is also the fugitive who seeks paintings, The Man Hunt (1931), that paintings the shelter of sanctuary, having literally sought of this sort explore a theme whose connections out Justice for protection and having now cast lie nearer to personal, individual concepts of himself at the feet of the Law, in the physical justice than to any organized political scheme. 12 form of the feet of the judge and the lawmen. Schmeckebier is only partially correct, though, The fugitive has many predecessors in art, in­ in suggesting that a painting like The Man cluding one within Curry's own earlier work. Hunt-or even Justice Defeating Mob Violence­ He strongly resembles the fallen boxer in the is primarily involved with exclusively personal artist's watercolor, Counted Out (1925; Fig. 5). experience, personal concepts of justice. For as Describing Counted Out, Schmeckebier says Schmeckebier further acknowledges, Curry knew what is equally apropos of the fugitive in Justice from his own experience that vigilante action Defeating Mob Violence: "Curry focuses his at­ was a reality in Kansas and elsewhere in Amer­ tention on the pathetic victim collapsing to the ica. And that brand of mob action was directly canvas with blood streaming from his face while related to the anarchy that had prevailed for the merciless crowd jeers at him. "13 many years among the criminal element in The two pictures share the subject of the American society and among much of the law­ fallen, brutalized individual whose only hope of and-order element that endeavored to control avoiding further physical abuse lies in the hands it. This is where precedents like the Poussin of a "referee"-in each instance the embodi­ and Bingham paintings fit in. ment of the principles of fair play, law, and Anarchy could exist--could function and order-who must intervene to put an end to flourish even-on either side of the official law the violence. In Counted Out, though, the fallen JOHN STEUART CURRY 13

FIG. 5. John Steuart Curry, Counted Out. Photograph courtesy of Mrs. John Steuart Curry.

boxer is still in a "game" or "sport," however work to the fugitive in Justice Defeating Mob violent its nature; he will be able to recover Violence, there is another fallen figure whose and fight again another day. In Justice Defeating presence and role in western Christian art and Mob Violence, on the other hand, the gladia­ thought is far more significant. It is not unrea­ torial "game" is in dead-and deadly--earnest, sonable to recognize in Curry's fallen fugitive a and the stakes are infinitely higher. In the mural successor to numerous depictions of Jesus fallen Curry ingeniously introduces the parallel figure beneath his Cross, a frequent subject both in of the bloodhound at the left (also present in western paintings and in the art of Roman The Man Hunt) to drive home the point that Catholic churches, where the scene occurs the hunted fugitive has been literally "hounded" among the fourteen "stations of the Cross" that to his collapse and in the process reduced not were often painted, sculpted, or otherwise rep­ just to an animal but to a hopeless, defeated resented around the interior perimeter of the animal, visibly unequal to the mob or, more church for devotional purposes. Moreover, one pointedly, to the curbed hound whose energetic of Curry's favorite artists-Rubens-painted posture parallels his own exhausted one. several versions of this subject, several of While the figure in Counted Out supplies a which-like the version of The Road to Calvary relevant counterpart from within Curry's own reproduced as Fig. 6 (c. 1631-32) and from which 14 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1992 engraved versions were made-render the figure of Jesus in a posture very much like the one Curry has employed for his fugitive. If we see in this fugitive figure-however briefly-a visual reminder of the fallen Jesus, we become aware of a series of associations that run in the opposite direction to the central pro­ grammatic reading I have been outlining here. For instance, associating this figure with Jesus in a scene in which a judge and a clamoring lynching party are prominent suggests to the perceptive viewer a link between the judge and Pontius Pilate-a figure neither noble nor ju­ dicious in western Christian belief, however un­ willing a part he played in his drama. The lynching party translates easily, in this reading, to the unruly mob who clamored for the cru­ cifixion of Jesus as the penalty for his own dis­ obedience. In this context of the sanctioned violation of an innocent victim, the mural again discloses its connections with Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women, and by extension with a myr­ iad of representations of the slaughter of the FIG. 6. Peter Paul Rubens, The Bearing of the Innocents, an event also associated with the Cross. Photograph courtesy of University Art Mu­ life of Jesus. seum, University of California, Berkeley. Suddenly, even relatively small details con­ tribute to this growing web of ambiguity and ambivalence. The cowboys, for instance, wear open-necked shirts, and their apparent leader holds a rope noose which signifies death by certain death which both the heavily armed hanging, the apparent object of their exertions. officers and the black-shrouded judge may im­ The neck of the judge is closed by the (presum­ ply. His end is not altered in this reading, but ably slip-knotted) necktie which is a sort of only delayed and formalized, ritualized within bizarre costume equivalent of the hangman's the larger ritual of the Law. Indeed, if one cares noose. More important is the paradoxical pre­ to pursue the implications of identifying the dicament of the fugitive. His face hidden from fugitive with the fallen Jesus, one might project view, he is a generic rather than a particular beyond the inevitable death also the acquisition fugitive, which is entirely appropriate to Curry's of martyr status, a phenomenon often associated allegorical design. Presumably innocent until with victims of the political use of the forces of proven guilty, he flees from the lynchers to the law and justice. protection of the judge and his uniformed, armed Still further, the picture's visual structures backing. But suppose he is not just a fugitive are themselves capable of being read in different but in reality also a guilty criminal? Then his fashion. Our cultural conditioning encourages fate is no less firmly decided; only the formal­ us to see in the strong verticality of the picture's ities of a trial stand between him and the equally right side, and in the formally attired and (again) JOHN STEUART CURRY 15 strongly vertical positioning and gestures of the at once both timeless and time-bound, both group on the right, the signs especially of order, relative and reversible, depending upon one's rationality, conformity, and repose, signs that own orientation. That is, if in the scheme of counterbalance those of disorder, passion, diver­ things in the 1930s it appeared that the social sity, and activity that are implied by the dy­ and political order were threatened by bands of namic, sinuous, asymmetrical arrangement of lawless thugs, there was, as there always is, some the figures on the left. Indeed, that same cul­ risk that it might also seem that the world would tural conditioning prompts us unquestioningly have to be protected-and Justice served-by to assign precedence to right over left and thus bands of musclemen whose violence is sanc­ to valorize the seeming superiority of the judi­ tioned by law. In that case violence and bru­ cial group. Yet these signals are potentially re­ tality become constants, and right and wrong versible. What seems order and rationality may become merely relative to which side one (or be interpreted also as inflexibility and regimen­ one's society) has elected to be aligned with. tation, the coercion of the individual will into In mob actions, of course, individuals and in­ bland conformity. By this same standard, the dividual acts lose their particularizing charac­ enthusiastic group on the left may even be seen teristics. In Curry's mural there are no specific to assume a connotation of vitality and indi­ identities: the faceless fugitive flees the generic vidualism. mob and appeals not to individuals but to an It is worth remembering that on 11 June institution, Justice, whose servants we see in 1963, within thirty years of the completion of judge and lawmen and upon whose departmen­ Curry's mural, the nation witnessed an all-too­ tal walls Curry's mural is painted. The fugitive similar scene when Governor George Wallace is rendered powerless in either case, stripped of and the official state representatives of law en­ dignity and independent action as he has been forcement stood on the steps of Foster Audi­ stripped of his shirt. torium in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to block the Curry painted his mural in a cultural and entrance of two black students, Vivian Malone political climate vastly different from that of and James A. Hood, accompanied by United the later twentieth century, and the viewer in States Assistant Attorney General Nicholas 1938 surveyed the painting with eyes informed Katzenbach, to the University of Alabama. The by different experiences and expectations than New York Times' description of the theatrically our own are in 1992. The destabilizing-even engineered confrontation is uncannily like the subversive-suggestions I have explored here scene at the right of Curry's mural: were undoubtedly less troubling for Curry's first viewers than they are for today's viewers, de­ The Governor, flanked by state troopers, had spite Curry's choices of ambiguous iconography staged a carefully planned show of defying a and visual convention that cannot have been Federal Court desegregation order. . . . The entirely innocent and unintentional on his part. long-awaited confrontation between Gov­ Curry was working within a historically and cul­ ernor Wallace and the Federal officials came turally defined framework in which the pro­ shortly after 11 o'clock on the sun-baked grammatic parading in public of allegories of north steps of Foster Auditorium, a three­ native national values and aspirations served a story building of red brick with six limestone particular purpose in lending cohesiveness to a columns. 14 nation struggling out of the Great Depression and into yet another world war. Given the plain The conclusions about the use and misuse of social, political, and economic facts of the later force implied in Curry's painting are themselves 1930s, Curry's viewers would inevitably have 16 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1992 found in the mural (because it seemed to re­ this case, what would appear to be a distinctly spond to their own deeply-felt needs) an affir­ pejorative view of the western/rural/proletarian mation of order and stability, and a championing figure group and what they represent) become of the social and civil structures that existed encoded in works of public art. In an age that ostensibly for the redress of perceived injustice, claims to embrace standards of "law and order" of perceived threats of disorder and ultimate even in the face of societal lawlessness (as was cosmic chaos. the case in America in the period in which Curry's work reflects the flourishing in the Curry finished his mural), the visual and con­ 1930s of regional art in conjunction with proj­ textual signs that form the work of art may be ects like those undertaken first under the Public read quite differently from how they are read in Works of Art Project (initiated by Franklin De­ another age (such as the present) in which both lano Roosevelt in December 1933) and subse­ standards of "law and order" and the institutions quently under the Federal Art Project which that supposedly uphold them are viewed with absorbed and superseded it in 1935-a combi­ less confidence and less general respect. nation of old-fashioned artistic patronage and Further evidence of the significantly differ­ a national program of work relief. 15 In the period ent ways in which art objects are interpreted during which it was composed, Justice Defeating variously depending upon cultural context-the Mob Violence served many purposes, not the particulars of time, place, status, and experi­ least among which were the propagandistic, the ence or orientation-may be discerned in the nationalistic, and the morally didactic. It must elaborate hyperbole of Laurence Schmecke­ have been easy for the contemporary viewer to bier's re-presentation of Curry's mural in his read Curry's mural and draw from its simplistic book, John Steuart Curry's Pageant of America. polar juxtaposition of moral categories-formal Both the book's publication date-1943-and justice and mob violence-a thoroughly ortho­ the presence in its title of the loaded term "pag­ dox celebration of the civilizing, even humane eant" ought to prepare us for the rhetorical and spirit of justice and "the American way." By intellectual glorifications that follow: depicting his mob surging in from the back of the picture Curry indicated that the viewer is Justice Defeating Mob Violence is not merely not a part of the mob. Indeed, the viewers are a protest against lynching or any contem­ not part of the picture at all, but are in the porary phase of injustice that might be prev­ building on whose walls the scene appears. They alent at a given moment. It is rather an are observing from the sidelines, as it were, their idealization of justice-the character and physical detachment from the picture painted composition of the judge group is evidence high above them promoting a corresponding enough to prove the point-which every­ intellectual and emotional detachment that one, regardless of political creed or social helps them to read and interpret the picture standing cannot help but recognize. It is not correctly. a symbol, then, but a universal situation, What Curry produced in 1936-37, however, valid in the past as it will be in the future. presents to more modem eyes the interesting It is an encouragement to a present gener­ phenomenon of a public painting that osten­ ation to keep striving toward that ideal which sibly encourages one reading but that in fact is has motivated legal procedure through ages susceptible to quite contrary readings. It seems of the past. 16 to me that this painting, which is only one of many that one might seize upon, offers an oc­ Schmeckebier's own agenda is baldly visible casion to consider how cultural values and as­ here, and it is an agenda that fails to acknowl­ sumptions (not the least of which involves, in edge openly and honestly the ambivalent nature JOHN STEUART CURRY 17 of both legal institutions and the "justice" they (the fallen fugitive) change, until we regard that administer. His words are entirely in keeping victim-as we often view the victims of violent with the national mood of a mid-war America crime today-as trapped between the Scylla of actively engaged in idealization, in reductivist the perpetrator and the Charybdis of the legal hero-worship, and in a yearning for absolute system. This victim is brought finally to his or values as a means of countering present anx­ her knees in the middle of a system in which ieties over real domestic and international crises. all too often it appears that the most one can That he conveniently omits to mention all those hope for is justice very much delayed-and pro­ individuals, classes, and races who have in 1943 cured at devastating financial and emotional still failed to be enfranchised by the establish­ cost. And even that delayed and diluted satis­ ment or embraced by the society generally merely faction, in a society that has grown increasingly reflects the not surprising mindset of the times. cynical about the judicial and law enforcement But mindsets change, and with them the ways systems, seems less and less a reality and more of reading, ways of interpreting, ways of at­ and more an illusion. Complications and am­ taching signification to images, gestures, and biguities arise inevitably in the activity of per­ conventions. ceiving and interpreting the work of art Curry's mural attests to the centrality to the whenever the set of governing conventions or artist's work of the intellectual programming to "codes" changes. The more profound those which Howard Devree pointed when he called changes are, the less completely will the audi­ Curry "one of our most purposeful and intelli­ ence share with the originating artist and his gent painters, sensitive alike to the life of his or her contemporary society either the mean­ time and to the inflexible demands of his craft." 17 ings or the significances of those original con­ Appropriately, what Devree says of Curry's art ventions. One wonders how today, more than in many ways approximates as well the agenda half a century later, Curry might approach the of the history painters of some three previous commission for this same subject. centuries. Whatever we may decide about the overall aesthetic value of Justice Defeating Mob NOTES Violence, the mural provides a good "case study" 1. Especially in the years following his death of for examining ways in which the public artist a heart attack in 1946, Curry's work was frequently steers the viewer's consciousness by manipulat­ deprecated as "uneven," "inadequate to express his ing the formal conventions of the art object. ambitious ideas," or merely a grandiose but never­ Especially with an intentionally programmatic theless "stale" variety of illustration. "John Steuart art form like istoria, the art object depends for Curry," Art News 46, 2 (1947): 18, for instance, applies these comments to the retrospective exhi­ its effectiveness upon the viewer's familiarity bition of Curry's works mounted in 1947 at the As­ with the system of references-both topical and sociated American Artists Galleries in New York. iconographical-that inform and undergird the 2. Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An Amer­ work. ican Original (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. It depends, too, on a shared valorization of 216. 3. In fact, a favorable review of the 1947 retro­ those references and the belief system from which spective exhibition of Curry's works makes just this they emerge. That is, if society's attitudes to­ point, asserting that restrictive and generally pejor­ ward the physical forces of law (the armed of­ ative terms like "Regionalist" or "American scene ficers) or its symbolic authorities (the judge) painter" narrowly and incorrectly characterize the change over a period of time, so too will those artist's work. "Curry, American," Newsweek 7 (April 1947): 90. Curry himself resisted the "regionalist" attitudes likely change toward the ostensible label, claiming that he had never set out to be a figureheads for disorder (the mob). And so too regionalist, and that only after years of painting Kan­ may the attitudes toward the victims of each sas scenes had he learned that he was one; "Curry, 18 GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY, WINTER 1992

U. W. 'Artist in Residence,' Here: Believes Plan (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1986). Great Step Forward," The [Madison, Wisconsin} Cap­ 9. Quoted in Laurence E. Schmeckebier, John ital Times, 4 December 1936. Steuart Curry's Pageant of America (New York: Amer­ 4. The leftist modernist Stuart Davis, for in­ ican Artists Group, 1943), p. 292. stance, blisteringly attacked Curry in 1935 for his 10. E. Maurice Bloch, The Paintings of George deliberate anti-aestheticism (Stuart Davis, "The New Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Raissone (Columbia: York American Scene in Art," Art Front 1, 3 [Feb­ University of Missouri Press, 1986), p. 223. ruary 1935]: 6). Davis conveniently ignores Curry's 11. Some of the most relevant sketches are re­ familiarity with the European tradition, from which produced in Schmeckebier, Pageant of America (note he borrowed freely even in works intended to strike 9 above), pp. 306-7. their audiences as distinctively American in content 12. Ibid., p. 267. and execution. 13. Schmeckebier, Ibid., points out the connec­ 5. Thomas Hart Benton, 1951; rpt. in Benton, tion between the two pictures on p. 306; quotation An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Au­ p.252. tobiography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 14. New York Times (12 June 1963), pp. 1,20. 1969), p. 151. 15. For an excellent example of this phenomenon 6. "Miscellany; John Curry," The Arts 16 (1930): on a state-wide basis, see Elizabeth Anderson, 425. "Depression Legacy: Nebraska's Post Office Art," Ne­ 7. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Paint­ braska History 71 (Spring 1990): 23-34. ing: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: 16. Schmeckebier, Pageant of America (note 9 Praeger, 1970), p. 8. above), p. 289. 8. M. Sue Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism: John 17. Howard Devree, "Curry Has a Show," Mag­ Steuart Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy azine of Art 31 (1938): 36.