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254 Kansas History a New Chronology of the Development of John Steuart Curry’S Murals for the Rotunda of the Kansas State Capitol

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254 Kansas History a New Chronology of the Development of John Steuart Curry’S Murals for the Rotunda of the Kansas State Capitol John Steuart Curry, The Homestead and Building of the Barbed Wire Fence, 1937-1939, as depicted in a mural at the Interior Department in Washington D.C. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 43 (Winter 2020-21): 254–271 254 Kansas History A New Chronology of the Development of John Steuart Curry’s Murals for the Rotunda of the Kansas State Capitol by Julia R. Myers n May 1942, Kansan John Steuart Curry traveled to Topeka to put the “finishing touches on the [Tragic Prelude and Kansas Pastoral] murals,” which he had started painting on the Kansas State Capitol’s second floor in the summer of 1940.1 There he had intended to create, in his words, a “historicalI allegory” that would tell the story of Kansas. The allegory begins in the east corridor with the Tragic Prelude, which depicts both the Spanish conquistador Francisco Coronado, who arrived in Kansas in 1541, and the abolitionist John Brown, who fought against proslavery forces in 1856 during the period known as Bleeding Kansas. The eight murals in the rotunda, which were never painted, would have told the history of Kansas in more detail with scenes from both before and after 1856, including references to early settlement by whites and the Dust Bowl. In the west corridor, Kansas Pastoral (Fig. 1) portrays, in Curry’s words, “the ideal unmortgaged farm home,” a hopeful vision at a time when many Kansas family farms were in foreclosure or on the edge of it, as was the Curry family farm in 1938–1939.2 Curry scholar Patricia Junker considers the statehouse mural cycle, even in its incomplete state, one of the “crowning Julia R. Myers, professor emerita of Art History at Eastern Michigan University, was formerly the curator of collection and exhibitions at the Mulvane Art Museum, Washburn University. With Barbara Thompson, she authored the catalogue raisonnée Charles M. Capps, 1898–1981: Etching, Aquatints, Lithographs and Block Prints. She thanks Elizabeth Seaton, curator at the Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University, for reading an early draft of this article. 1.“To Finish Kansas Murals,” Kansas City (MO) Times, May 5, 1942, John Steuart Curry (hereafter JSC) vertical file, MF256, State Archives, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka, KS (hereafter State Archives, KHS, MF256). See also Carl Bodmer, “Gleanings from the Field of Art,” Topeka State Journal, June 15, 1940, State Archives, KHS, MF256, and “Curry Resumes Work on Murals Today,” Topeka Capital, July 23, 1940, State Archives, KHS, MF256. 2. JSC, “Description of Murals for Kansas State Capital” (hereafter Description I), John Steuart Curry and Curry Family Papers, 1848–1999 (here- after Curry Family Papers), Series 3: Correspondence and Project Files, box 2 (hereafter Series 3, box 2), folder 47, Kansas State House Murals, Nar- rative Description and Contract (hereafter folder 47), 8–13, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (hereafter AAA). The foreclosure and sale of Curry’s parents’ farm took place in 1938–1939. After the sale of the farm, his parents moved permanently to their ranch near Scottsdale, Arizona, which they had owned since 1910 and where they had wintered for many years. See M. Sue Kendall, Rethinking Regional- ism: John Steuart Curry and the Kansas Mural Controversy (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986), 102; and Frank N. Ownings, Jr., and Elizabeth G. Seaton, John Steuart Curry: The Cowboy Within (Manhattan, KS: Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Kansas State University, 2019), 13, 16–17, 50 and 64n40. Swann and Tsutsui have suggested that the elder Currys were “unperturbed” about losing their farm, citing a 1938 letter by Curry’s mother in which she says, “We are getting on comfortably here [Arizona]. So we hate to throw good money into the gap,” apparently describing their reluctance to try to save the farm. See Marjorie Swann and William M. Tsutsui, “John Steuart Curry: A Portrait of the Artist as a Kansan,” in John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History, ed. Virgil Dean (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 246. Rather than being “unperturbed,” it seems to me that the Currys were simply making a practical business decision. Surely, they had an emotional invest- ment in the farm since Smith Curry’s father had settled his family there in 1869. See Conwill Carlson, “Curry and Kansas: A Story of Heroic Life,” Kansas City (MO) Star, August 22, 1937, State Archives, KHS, MF256. A New Chronology of the Development of John Steuart Curry’s Murals for the Rotunda of the Kansas State Capitol 255 came in 1928 when his Baptism in Kansas became a sensation at a Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition. Soon thereafter he was taken up by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who began to finance his painting career. By 1934, Curry had received widespread national recognition as a Regionalist artist along with Grant Wood of Iowa and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri.5 Kansans, however, did not generally share the nation’s elevated estimation of Curry. His 1931 one- person exhibition that toured Kansas was not well received.6 For Fig. 1. John Steuart Curry, Kansas Pastoral, detail of farm and farmer, 1937-1942, oil example, Mrs. Henry J. Allen, wife and tempera on canvas, Kansas Statehouse, Topeka, Kansas. of the former governor, asked in a letter published in the Kansas City achievements of his career.”3 With the rotunda Times why Curry had to “paint outstanding friekish murals, the cycle would have been Curry’s most [sic] subjects and call them the ‘spirit’ of Kansas.”7 conceptually complex mural series, which the Such subjects included tornados, Pentecostal artist pondered and worked on for six years (1937 worship services, and hunts for Black fugitives.8 to 1943), the longest gestation period of any of his However, by 1935, Curry’s fame as a Regionalist works of art. was such that Curry himself and his supporters, Born in 1897 near Dunavant, Kansas, John Steuart such as renowned Kansas newspaperman Curry studied at the School of the Art Institute William Allen White, tried to find commissions or of Chicago from 1916 to 1918 and, beginning in a position for him in Kansas. Failing that, in 1936, 1919, with well-known illustrator Herbert Dunn he became the artist-in-residence at the University in Tenafly, New Jersey. He spent the majority of of Wisconsin College of Agriculture.9 the 1920s illustrating popular weekly magazines Smarting from their loss of Curry to Wisconsin, while living in New York and later in Westport, a number of Kansas newspaper editors and Connecticut.4 Curry’s breakthrough as an artist publishers came up with the idea of having Curry paint murals in the statehouse. They formed the 3. Patricia Junker, “Twilight of Americanism’s Golden Age: Curry’s Kansas Mural Commission, which on July 19, Wisconsin Years,” in Patricia Junker et al., John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1998), 5. Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism, 22 and 36. 196. Junker considers Curry’s other “crowning achievement” to be 6. Ibid., 26–27 and 31–33; and Swann and Tsutsui, “John Steuart Wisconsin Landscape in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Laurence E. Curry,” 240 and 244. Schmeckebier went even further. In 1943, he wrote that “from every 7. The letter is published in Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism, 31 and 138n68. point of view, [the Kansas State Capitol murals] . are without ques- 8. For example, Tornado over Kansas, 1929, Muskegon Museum of tion the greatest mural achievements in America today.” Laurence Art; Manhunt, 1931, Joslyn Museum of Art; and Gospel Train, 1929, Eli Schmeckebier, John Steuart Curry’s Pageant of America (New York: Syracuse University Art Collection, which depicts a Pentecostal wor- American Artists Group, 1943), 354. ship service. See Robert L. Gambone, “The Use of Religious Motifs in 4. Ownings and Seaton, John Steuart Curry, 20–29; and Kendall, Curry’s Art” in Junker et al., John Steuart Curry, 143–44. Rethinking Regionalism, 21–22. 9. Kendall, Rethinking Regionalism, 18–19. 256 Kansas History 1937, commissioned Curry to do just that.10 The project.15 But in fact, one Curry supporter, State Sen. artist submitted his initial plan for the murals, Albert Cole of Holton, Jackson County, wanted to which was approved by the Mural Commission try again. Cole had been the only dissenter to the on November 12, 1937.11 This plan called for the aforementioned resolution. During the debate on removal of the Italian marble above the rotunda’s the measure, he defended the murals, saying, “I wainscoting to allow the murals there to be the think the paintings are real art.”16 On November same height as the corridor paintings.12 But 24, 1942, Cole wrote to Curry that he planned unfortunately, almost from the time Curry received to introduce legislation to remove the marble in the commission, the murals were embroiled in the rotunda so that the artist could complete his controversy. On March 31, 1941, the Kansas State work. He asked Curry to resubmit his sketches Senate, responding to the controversy, passed a for the rotunda with “an explanatory statement to resolution refusing to remove the marble panels accompany them (which should be so elementary in the rotunda. This made it impossible for Curry that even a Senator could understand it).”17 Curry to paint the planned murals and thus ruined the responded favorably, and on February 10, 1943, continuity of the “historical allegory.”13 As noted he sent Cole not his initial 1937 sketches and above, Curry finished his work on Tragic Prelude description but new sketches and a new text.
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