sketch for the rotunda (Corn and Wheat), John Steuart Curry

Exhibition Label:
"John Steuart Curry: Agrarian Allegories," Aug-2006, Kate Meyer
Curry’s original plans for the Topeka Statehouse murals also included eight panels for the rotunda. These sketches suggest some of the potential themes Curry considered for the panels: agricultural abundance, as seen in Corn and Wheat, as well as agricultural strife, as indicated by scenes of soil erosion and the necessity for contour plowing. Other potential panel topics included images of cattle drives paired with a funeral scene memorializing lives lost on the Santa Fe Trail. The multi-panel sketch for the rotunda also includes Native Americans watching trains enter the landscape paired with men building the barbed wire fences that closed the prairies. By 1940, a maelstrom of controversy already surrounded content of the adjoining Tragic Prelude and Kansas Pastoral murals. Some Kansans were also concerned over the negative tone presented in several of the rotunda panel sketches that Curry intended to execute on site the following summer. In the spring of 1941, the Senate decided not to remove Italian marble that partially covered the rotunda walls, curtailing Curry’s plans to paint there. Without the rotunda panels, Curry considered the mural project unfinished and left the work unsigned.