“Twisters” roared in theaters July 19, 2024, smashing houses, cars, and windmills, thrilling audiences to the tune of nearly $80 million at the box office on its opening weekend. The movie is a standalone sequel to 1996’s “Twister,” another storm-chasing disaster blockbuster set in Oklahoma. The original generated almost $500 million in receipts–just shy of $1 billion in today’s money–and remains a cable TV staple and 90s nostalgia favorite.

In the 1930s, another sensational Pop culture twister gripped the American public: John Steuart Curry’s The Tornado (1929).

Twisters were on the brain at the time. On May 2, 1929, the Rye Cove tornado outbreak swept across the South, wreaking havoc from Oklahoma to Maryland. A schoolhouse in Rye Cove, VA was obliterated, killing 42.

Curry’s painting premiered at the Whitney Studio Galleries in New York in 1930. It then went on to the Art Institute of Chicago, exhibitions in St. Louis and Topeka, KS, and back to New York where it was displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting took second prize at the Carnegie International of 1933 in Pittsburgh.

The Tornado was extensively published, including in full color in the December 24, 1934, issue of “Time” magazine.

It was purchased by the Muskegon (MI) Museum of Art in 1935 where it has taken pride of place ever since. Curry and The Tornado–renamed Tornado Over Kansas in 1977–are picked up anew at the museum during the exhibition “John Steuart Curry: Weathering the Storm,” on view through September 2, 2024.

The exhibition highlights artwork that visually defined the Midwest and tells the captivating and tragic story behind the work and life of John Steuart Curry (1897–1946; Dunavant, KS). His paintings depicting picturesque rural landscapes, communal gatherings, and most famously, the devastating natural disasters that impacted the Midwest, influenced the national perception of life in the region through popular culture and media in the late 1920’s and beyond.

The Tornado establishes a dramatic narrative immediately–a shallow, stage-like setting with large, dynamic figures fleeing an unstoppable force of nature,” Art Martin, Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Muskegon Museum of Art, told Forbes.com. “The painting’s visual cues give us a specific era and place in the American Midwest and directly address our shared vulnerability as human beings to deadly weather events. The painting’s inherent story-telling qualities, coupled with its impression as an historical record, have given it an enduring appeal.”

Curry painted The Tornado after a brief trip home in 1929. No evidence exists suggesting he ever saw a tornado with his own eyes.

He had left Dunavant days before tornados hit there in spring of 1930. Curry’s mother recalled these events in detail, including a sketch of the twister, in a letter to Curry’s first wife shortly after. The artist dramatically reworked his original painting after reading his mother’s account.

Home Is Where the Heart Is

Growing up on a rural Midwestern farm in the middle of nowhere a thousand miles from the cultural centers of the east or the excitement of the “Old West” he romanticized, Curry feared for his artistic prospects. He dropped out of high school to study at the Kansas City Art Institute. He soon moved on to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Curry was going to overcome the geography of his upbringing come hell or high water. At this point, he couldn’t have imaged it was that very geography, and an American modern artistic movement later known as “Regionalism” dedicated to it, that would immortalize him.

In 1918, his art education was sidetracked by World War I and enlistment in the Student Army Training Corps. Part college, part boot camp, Curry went to Pennsylvania to prepare for an expected onslaught against the Germans in France being planned for 1919. Preparing, also, likely, to die in the effort.

Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary as an armistice was reached in November of 1918.

The artist next made his way to New Jersey for instruction as an illustrator. The reinternment of a boyhood friend killed in the Great War took him back to Kansas in 1921. Soldiers from Dunavant and nearby Winchester suffered an usually high number of casualties on the battlefields of Europe.

Curry returned east, living in New Jersey, Greenwich Village in New York, and Connecticut. He had illustrations published in leading periodicals. He’d make it all the way to Paris for more instruction before being called back home for another funeral, this one more tragic than the last.

His younger brother Paul succumbed to a long bout of rheumatic fever in 1927 aged 24. John Steuart Curry was wrecked by his passing, and on the cusp of a career breakthrough.

From Russia To Paris And Back To Kansas

Curry’s big professional breakout came in 1928 with Baptism in Kansas, a painting that caught the eye of millionaire arts patron Gertrude Whitney who would provide him a stipend.

“The canvases of 1928 through1930 are the most autobiographical of his career, informed directly by his memories of childhood and visits home, and are also some of the most widely traveled and seen,” Martin explained of why Curry’s production from 1926 through 1930 serves as the focus of the exhibition.

While the paintings feature Kansas subject matter familiar to Curry’s childhood, he couldn’t have painted them there.

“He had to leave Dunavant to see art and make art; he had a particular experience in Paris with Russian artists Vasili Shukhaev and Alexandre Yacovlev which focused him on the ‘homeland,’ and he had something of a mid-life crisis at the end of 1927 that forced him to confront the end of what I call ‘boyhood time’ and led to three pictures in 1928 that were an outpouring of grief,” Curry scholar Patricia Junker told Forbes.com.

Those three unprecedented Kansas paintings: Baptism in Kansas; The Bathers; and The Return of Private Davis from the Argonne.

Baptism in Kansas and The Bathers are on view in “Weathering the Storm.”

“The source of these paintings lies far outside the United States, not with the ‘regionalist’ sensibilities and manifestoes that came later, but with the Russian Romantic realist movement that contributed much to the modern art scene in Paris in the 1920s,” Junker explains, fresh insights into Curry’s artmaking she’s continuing to develop. “There is one Shukhaev landscape in particular, a reproduction of which Curry owned and kept close at hand, that I think is the source, maybe direct, or at least subliminally, for Baptism in Kansas, and I think now for The Tornado, too.”

The Muskegon Museum of Art partnered with Junker for the exhibition. Her new research challenges conventional understanding of Curry and reveals the deeply personal and emotionally tragic inspiration behind his breakthrough paintings. How circumstances, as much as place, led a Kansas farm boy to create artworks that became iconic visions of America’s Midwest.

Curry saw Chicago. He saw New York, and Paris, but it was Dunavant where he found his greatest artistic inspiration and the wellspring of his greatest artistic success. He was a visitor elsewhere; he was from Kansas. He communicated those Heartland scenes with unsurpassed sincerity.

“Curry’s work is strongly of its time, deeply personal, and intertwined with his sense of place and home,” Martin explains. “For modern artists and audiences, there is an authenticity here that is worth exploring and engaging with. The honesty of Curry’s storytelling hits a chord that made him a household name at the height of his career and has continued to resonate with subsequent generations.”



Source link

Shares:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *