One of the foremost U.S. painters puttered aimlessly about his studio in Madison, Wis., last week, smoking his pipe and gazing out the windows. He was at loose ends and liking it. He was John Steuart Curry, famed painter of his native Midwest, and his rest was well deserved. Painter Curry had just finished two of the biggest painting jobs of his life. Off & on for the past three years, in the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka, and in the University of Wisconsin's law school, he had been hard at work on the heroic figures and lowering backgrounds of a new set of murals.
For the University of Wisconsin, Curry had done a 37 by 14 ft. painting called The Emancipation Proclamation. For Topeka's Capitol he had attempted to picture the entire history of Kansas, beginning with Coronado's discovery. Painter Curry, who refers to himself without false modesty as "a picture painter, and a damned good one," was particularly proud of his work in Topeka. Said he: "It is the greatest painting I have yet done."
What Is a Mural? If Painter Curry had really succeeded in painting a good mural, his accomplishment had been great indeed. Generally speaking, a mural, once painted, is there to stay, to be looked at by people for a long time. It must be worth looking at for many generations and understandable to many people, not just a few.
With the close of the Renaissance, mural painting went into a decline from which it has only recently showed signs of recovery. Artists, like other people, tended to be individualists and paint for small groups rather than for society as a whole.
From 1600 to 1900 the western world produced many great painters, but very few of them expressed themselves in murals. Those who did usually contented themselves with mere decoration and illustration. If they attempted monumental subject matter they usually failed. Such failures, pretentious and sanctimonious, or cloying and trivial, adorned the walls of many a 19th-Century library and court house.
Renaissance II? Today, with individualism lost on the battlefields and society groping through crisis after crisis for a new set of values in which it can believe, mural painting, celebrating great ideals like freedom, equality, progress and national dignity, has certainly revived. Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco found a true mural subject in Mexico's groping and frustrated but passionate revolution.
Reflecting the misery and aspirations of an entire people, they succeeded in turning out some of the first powerful murals that had appeared since the Renaissance.
U.S. painters tried to do likewise. Patronized by WPA on a scale unequaled even by the Renaissance Church, they began earnestly plastering the walls of U.S. post offices and courthouses with attempts at monumentality. By 1940 they had created some 1,550 murals. Many sought heroic subject matter in modern industrialism; turning out acres of dynamos, steam presses, and blast furnaces. Because their ambition often outweighed the strength and clarity of their convictions, most of these murals were failures. Only a few have come close to striking the common man as embodiments of his ideals. High on the list of successful murals painted during this period are those of Kansan John Steuart Curry.