John Brown, John Steuart Curry; Associated American Artists

Exhibition Label: "A Kansas Arts Sampler," Oct-2004, Kate Meyer Curry depicts John Brown in a cruciform pose, his visage echoing Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses. Beecher Bible in one outstretched hand, the actual Bible in the other, Curry describes the panel The Tragic Prelude from which this lithograph is derived as "the fratricidal fury that first flamed in the plains of Kansas, the tragic prelude to the last bloody feud of English-speaking people." Beyond Brown, a tornado rips through the prairie that represents both his reputation as the "Cyclone of Kansas," and the turmoil of the era. Archive Label 1999: Curry's John Brown is arguably the most familiar Kansas icon. Although prized now, Curry's choice of subject for the Statehouse murals in Topeka was not popular with Kansans in the 1930s. Some complained that the abolitionist Brown was an outsider, a native of Connecticut. More significantly, perhaps, they saw him as an inappropriate symbol of the kind, law-abiding citizens of Kansas. Curry himself was ambivalent in regard to John Brown. While he sympathized with the abolitionist cause, Curry deplored the methods of the man whom he called a "bloodthirsty, godfearing fanatic." It was this zeal, however misguided in Brown's case, that Curry felt captured the essence of his fellow Kansans.