• U.S.

Art: Professor Curry

3 minute read
TIME

An ill-starred venture in progressive education was University of Wisconsin’s Experimental College, which flared and flickered between 1927 and 1932 under famed Educator Alexander Meiklejohn. A more modest effort in the same line was the importation a year ago of John Steuart Curry to be resident artist at the University. Nominally under the jurisdiction of the College of Agriculture, Artist Curry was given a five-year contract at $4,000 a year, a studio and the right to the title “Professor Curry,” which he promptly painted on his garbage can.

By last autumn round-domed, genial Artist Curry and his English wife were comfortably settled and accepted in Madison. Year ago, in his first public speech, he had pleasantly stirred up the town by pointing out how silly the State Capitol murals looked, a criticism to which the State Assembly stiffly replied: “It is deemed that such mural paintings truly depict and symbolize the history of the State. . . .” He gave a show at the College Union, lectured on art to farm boys in agriculture courses, went on field trips with Dean Chris Christensen of the College. His face-cracking, cherubic grin and piping voice made him popular with Wisconsin students. Question: How did all this affect the painting of a Kansan who six years ago put Kansas on the U. S. artistic map?

Last week at Manhattan’s Walker Galleries six new paintings and half-a-dozen drawings by Curry encouraged head-shaking by detractors. The healthy springiness and sweep of the artist’s well-known Kansas pictures appeared only in an oil-and-tempera panel of a prancing, black Percheron stallion painted at the Wisconsin stock show a year ago. A landscape View of Madison painted last spring had an unaccustomed air of old-fashioned dewiness. A still life, Spring Flowers, had an even stranger touch of Renoir. For action subjects the artist had apparently confined himself to football games in Wisconsin’s Camp Randall stadium producing a series of sketches and one big canvas, Goal Line Play, which looked like a monument to a lost opportunity.

But to most gallery-goers Curry’s new Self Portrait (see cut) was not only an honest and successful job but the likeness of a more mature if not a more professorial artist. And thepossibility that Curry critics might soon have to shake their heads up & down instead of from side to side was evident in a few rough sketches for the murals he has been commissioned to paint for the Kansas State Capitol at Topeka.

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