List of artwork by John Steuart Curry

Curry's murals at the Stewart Lee Udall Department of the Interior Building in Washington D.C. — The Homestead and The Oklahoma Land Rush — were commissioned by the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture.

Early sketches of figures and ideas are held by archives located at the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University.

[19] It represents a homestead with the typical features that make up its ideal of blessed peace, happiness, and potential prosperity of ensuring rural life.

[21] Near the bottom left of the mural, roosters, chicks, and chickens peck and feed near the foreground garden as bountiful reminders of their capacity to provide this frontier family with eggs.

[24][page needed] Anxious but looking forward to eventual security, an 1889 pioneer mother, sunbonnet intact, is of greatest importance to the far left foreground of Curry's westward-moving mural.

Perched on a broken-down wagon, she clutches her small son while waving and calling out to her certificate-holding husband, who, astride their rearing horse, is to ride on to claim a new farm site.

His hellbent competition includes a cyclist riding a high, "ordinary" safety bicycle from the 1880s and an overweight, overdressed lady in a rocking chair.

She rolls back in an open wagon driven frantically by her balding husband, and, if nothing else, lends comic relief to balance the anxious sincerity of the mother on the ground.

[25][page needed] John Steuart Curry's Oklahoma Land Rush repeated an important theme of the time: history told through the actions of common people.

In June 1937, newspaper editors raised money to commission John Steuart Curry (who was the most famous artist in Kansas) to paint murals in the statehouse.

Expensive Italian marble slabs covered the spot in the rotunda where the eight panels depicting scenes from the Life of the Kansas Homesteader were to be painted.

However, with the next issue the committee had an even stronger objection; and that was the image of Kansan abolitionist John Brown, in front of a crowd of people and a tornado.

These inclusions were thought by some to show the state in a negative light because Brown, who was executed in 1859 for treason (leading an abolitionist raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia), was considered by some to be a traitor and a murderer.

Curry tried to explain that while the blood on Brown's hands was not literal, his acts caused bloodshed, and that the tornado was a symbol of the abolitionist's passion.

Since Curry's death, his murals have come to be regarded as on par with similar works done by his contemporary Thomas Hart Benton.

[32] His last illustrations can be found in John Brown’s Body: A Poem by Stephen Vincent Benét, published by Limited Editions Club in 1948.

[38] Since the magazine never intended to purchase Curry's painting there has been little success finding documentation regarding the financial aspects of the commission.

[39] John Steuart Curry's work often supported the mentalities of the African American population that were common during the first half of the twentieth century.

[39] His use of a centrally positioned African American male figure appears in other works including Freeing of the Slaves (1936), The Fugitive (1924-1936), and Mississippi Noah (1932).

Moreover, artists were told to use objects that could stand for a whole, like a flag signifying a nation or a bomb meaning war, so that they would not require any text on the poster.

[45] Matthew Biagell once wrote that "subject matter of an important group of paintings[...]as well as statements that he made, suggest strongly that his interests lay in a liberalism of one sort or another.

It wasn't until after the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, which caused the shift in American opinion, that inspired a change in Curry's support of the war.

When commissioned to do war art, Reeves Lewenthal, director of Associated American Artists gallery, tried suggesting possible subjects for John Steuart Curry's new sponsorship: "Perhaps you can do a heroic figure of a soldier guarding over or fighting for the preservation of all those benefits and advantages we enjoy in our democracy; or perhaps, could be fighting for the preservation of our peaceful, fertile farmlands, can be effectively portrayed in the background; or, perhaps, shadows of out former hero soldiers can drift into the distance behind this forceful foreground figure.... Then again, you might do a nurse-or a flyer-or a marine-or a sailor-in some symbolic composition.

Our Good Earth shows a farmer standing in his field of wheat, flanked on either side by children as wind gusts through the scene.

In October 1942, shortly after he finished Our Good Earth, Curry received an official request from the Office of War Information to make another poster.

[53] He is quoted in a letter to his dealer, Reeves Lewenthal, as saying, “Farmers are exerting all-out effort and working 70 and 80 hours a week.

There is no problem as we see it out here in getting farmers to work as hard as they can, for they are doing exactly this.” Curry then requested that the board consider developing a more positive rural theme and offered to help think of one, too.

[60] Additional efforts to document World War II came from private companies with a history in supporting both military and civilian artists.

Curry spent most of his time sketching training battalion units during bivouac problems, as well as following teams through their levels of field medical evacuation.

While at the camp, Curry produced nearly a hundred sketches covering virtually all training exercises, a crayon portrait of Lieut.