Kansan at the Circus

In the prairie States, first-class artists are as rare as mountains. Iowa has one: Grant Wood whose pictures of Iowa Iowans like (TIME, Sept. 5). Kansas has one too: John Steuart Curry whose pictures of Kansas Kansans do not like. If Kansans heard of his Manhattan exhibition last week, they did not much care.

In 1931 lively Publisher William Allen White sponsored a show of Curry's Kansas pictures in Wichita. Kansans found "drab" his best-known picture, Baptism in Kansas, which Manhattan's Whitney Museum will send to the Chicago Century of Progress. They found "unnecessary"' his wild Hogs Killing a Rattlesnake. They found uncivic his Tornado, showing Kansans scuttling into a cyclone cellar as a giant cornucopia of wind marches across the darkened prairie. Said Elsie J. Nuzman Allen, art-collecting wife of Kansas' onetime Governor Henry Justin Allen: ". . . Cyclones, gospel trains, the medicine man, the man hunt, are certainly to be found in Kansas but why must Mr. Curry paint these freakish subjects? His self-portrait shows . . . a boyhood that has only seen the most sordid conditions of life . . . [not] the glories of his home State, the beauties of the simple life of the farmers. I wonder whether this is not just a phase through which he will pass and will soon come to see something beautiful in life, and particularly life in Kansas." No Kansan bought Curry's "freaks" and downcast was Artist Curry who, though his apple-face looks cheerful, is actually a hypersensitive, self-doubting man who has decided half a dozen times he is no painter. Not a Kansas hog or tornado was to be seen last week on the walls of Manhattan's Ferargil Galleries. Kansas' Curry had now gone, not back to Kansas, but to the circus.

Last April John Ringling had given him the run of his "Greatest Show on Earth" for a month. His subjects now were the Flying Codonas, Baby Ruth the fat girl, trapezists, clowns, elephants. He likes best the Codonas' famed Passing Leap, a feat in which Vera Bruce Codona lets go of Lala Codona's hands at the end of the swing, catapults to a trapeze which her husband, the great Alfredo, has just left.* Alfredo, leaving without kicking back the trapeze, plunges over her and catches his brother's hands at the dizzy instant of pause before the backswing. Painter Curry liked second best the wise-eyed Riding Clown (Orrin Davenport) waiting for his turn in the ring in orange derby, tie and wig, his red putty nose outlined against a blue night sky. Critics last week admired Curry's feat (as difficult as the Passing Leap) of getting the circus' gaudy, pastel colors in oils. Circus action gave play to his potent, compact drawing, his flair for packing a lot of disorganized life into a close-knit composition.

With their show about to open on the other side of Manhattan, the circus people went last week to see their pictures. Unlike Kansans, they like Curry, call his pictures "wonderful" despite a few little technical mistakes. The Codonas like the exact muscular timing of their Passing Leap. Baby Ruth likes the baby blue of her eyes against her light pink dress, the orange-red tent curtains and blue sky.

John Steuart Curry, 35 and 187 lb., is the son of a Kansas stock farmer who fattened Herefords for market "so that the rain set in the middle of their backs," and a mother who early told him about Rubens' paintings in London's National Gallery. After one month at Kansas City's Art Institute, two years at Chicago's, a failure at magazine illustrating, he was staked in 1926 by Manhattan Banker Seward Prosser to two years in Paris where he found his mother had been right about Rubens. His wife worked in the Paris branch of Mr. Prosser's Bankers Trust Co. For two more years Sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney supported him. Last year his sick wife died of heart trouble and a nervous breakdown. Looking for life and gaudy color, Curry has found solace and success in the circus. Last week critics bracketed his pictures with those of other U. S. circus painters, Gifford Beal and Walt Kuhn, not far below the circus pictures of the late great French painter, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

* Alfredo Codona married Vera Bruce last year (TIME, Sept. 12) after his wife & partner, famed Lillian Leitzel, had been killed in a fall from the rings.

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