Murals, with Curry Sauce

One of the foremost U.S. painters puttered aimlessly about his studio in Madison, Wis., last week, smoking his pipe and gazing out the windows. He was at loose ends and liking it. He was John Steuart Curry, famed painter of his native Midwest, and his rest was well deserved. Painter Curry had just finished two of the biggest painting jobs of his life. Off & on for the past three years, in the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka, and in the University of Wisconsin's law school, he had been hard at work on the heroic figures and lowering backgrounds of a new set of murals.

For the University of Wisconsin, Curry had done a 37 by 14 ft. painting called The Emancipation Proclamation. For Topeka's Capitol he had attempted to picture the entire history of Kansas, beginning with Coronado's discovery. Painter Curry, who refers to himself without false modesty as "a picture painter, and a damned good one," was particularly proud of his work in Topeka. Said he: "It is the greatest painting I have yet done."

What Is a Mural? If Painter Curry had really succeeded in painting a good mural, his accomplishment had been great indeed. Generally speaking, a mural, once painted, is there to stay, to be looked at by people for a long time. It must be worth looking at for many generations and understandable to many people, not just a few.

With the close of the Renaissance, mural painting went into a decline from which it has only recently showed signs of recovery. Artists, like other people, tended to be individualists and paint for small groups rather than for society as a whole.

From 1600 to 1900 the western world produced many great painters, but very few of them expressed themselves in murals. Those who did usually contented themselves with mere decoration and illustration. If they attempted monumental subject matter they usually failed. Such failures, pretentious and sanctimonious, or cloying and trivial, adorned the walls of many a 19th-Century library and court house.

Renaissance II? Today, with individualism lost on the battlefields and society groping through crisis after crisis for a new set of values in which it can believe, mural painting, celebrating great ideals like freedom, equality, progress and national dignity, has certainly revived. Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco found a true mural subject in Mexico's groping and frustrated but passionate revolution.

Reflecting the misery and aspirations of an entire people, they succeeded in turning out some of the first powerful murals that had appeared since the Renaissance.

U.S. painters tried to do likewise. Patronized by WPA on a scale unequaled even by the Renaissance Church, they began earnestly plastering the walls of U.S. post offices and courthouses with attempts at monumentality. By 1940 they had created some 1,550 murals. Many sought heroic subject matter in modern industrialism; turning out acres of dynamos, steam presses, and blast furnaces. Because their ambition often outweighed the strength and clarity of their convictions, most of these murals were failures. Only a few have come close to striking the common man as embodiments of his ideals. High on the list of successful murals painted during this period are those of Kansan John Steuart Curry.

John Brown & Freedom. Aware that a successful mural must grandly tell a story that inspires a multitude, Painter Curry picked for his latest jobs two subjects that would be regarded by most Americans as noble episodes in the U.S. epic. At the University of Wisconsin he told the story of Negro emancipation, using the symbolic figures of slaves and soldiers marching toward the sunlight over the bodies of the Civil War's dead. For Topeka's State Capitol he laid out a series of panels that would recount the drama of Kansas' history in three big acts. Act I, dominated by the gigantic, furious figure of John Brown (see center cut, bottom p. 49), told the story of Kansas' early settlement. Act II (eight panels designed for the Capitol's rotunda) depicted the life of the Kansas homesteader, defending his tough, barbedwire-fenced farm from storms, plagues, erosion and dust, planting the newly cleared soil with corn and wheat, watching the great Texas cattle trains as they bellowed and shouldered their way to the roaring rail points of the West. Act III showed the pastoral prosperity of modern Kansas, the industry of the oilfields, the miles of waving wheat lit by the setting Kansas sun, the sturdy dignity of the Kansas farm.

In painting this gigantic panorama, Muralist Curry discovered that all his problems were not concerned with paint. The Kansas Capitol was thronged with crusty Kansans who complained about everything from the blood on John Brown's hands to the shape of Curry's Hereford bulls. Boosters objected to his realistic Kansas tornadoes. Informed that pigs' tails do not curl when they are eating, and that he had curled them the wrong way anyhow, patient Painter Curry took a day off to observe pigs' behinds.

Biggest controversy of all arose when Painter Curry asked permission to remove some expensive Italian marble from the capitol's rotunda to make way for the big panels of Act II. The Kansas State Executive Council seethed with debate on the relative value of marble v. murals, finally decided in favor of marble. Curry left out Act II entirely, refused to sign his mural and left for Madison in a huff. Whether Act II will ever be painted still remains for Kansas' officials to decide.

But even in its present incomplete form, John Steuart Curry's history of Kansas remains one of the most impressive murals to be seen anywhere in the U.S.

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