John Steuart Curry and James Henry Daugherty were two artists in the Connecticut Federal Arts Project who were nationally and internationally celebrated. Curry was one of the three top regionalist artists in the country, Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton being the two others. He was born on November 14, 1897, near Dunavant, Kansas. He took his first art lessons at the age of 12. He went on to attend three years of art school, starting at the Kansas City Art Institute and transferring to the Art Institute of Chicago and then to Geneva College in Pennsylvania. He was soon working as a commercial artist, creating illustrations for the publications Country Gentleman, Boy’s Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. He married Clara Derrick in 1923 and the following year bought a studio in Westport, Connecticut.
Curry soon grew tired of commercial illustration and decided to return to school for further training in the fine arts. In 1926 he raised funds and moved to Paris to attend the Russian Academy Art School. After a year of study in Paris, he returned to the United States where he studied at the Art Students League in New York City. He returned to Westport in 1928. That same year his painting, Baptism in Kansas, was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to considerable acclaim. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bought the work for her museum and paid him a stipend of 50 dollars a week for two years.
In 1932 his wife died, and he relocated from his secluded Westport studio to a studio in New York City. In the city he taught at the Cooper Union and the Art Students League. Around this same time Curry toured New England painting studies of the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus. His reputation continued to grow, and he was soon considered one of the leaders in the art movement called “regionalism.” His artwork was bought and exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, University of Nebraska, and the St. Louis Museum.
In 1934, Curry wed Kathleen Shepard, and the couple returned to Westport. He was commissioned to create a double mural, Comedy and Tragedy, for Westport High School. Time Magazine described the whimsical mural as follows:
“In Comedy (and Tragedy) Artist Curry has included himself and his wife, has gaily jumbled Charlie Chaplin on roller skates, Mickey Mouse, Mutt, Jeff, Shakespeare’s Bottom, Will Rogers, Popeye the Sailor. In Tragedy Uncle Tom prays by the bedside of Little Eva, Hamlet sulks, Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O’Neill scowl, Aerialist Lillian Leitzel drops from her circus partner’s arms to death.”
Curry was also selected to paint murals for the Department of Justice and the Department of Interior buildings in Washington, D.C. He began work for the WPA Federal Arts Project in January of 1936 painting two murals for the new Norwalk High School in Connecticut: Ancient Industries of Norwalk and Hat Industry. He expressed his admiration of the WPA saying, “the present administration’s program of sponsoring painting, sculpture, music, and drama is of tremendous importance to the American art of the present and of the future.” Continue reading from CT State Library
