In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, painter John Steuart Curry, having curtailed his periodic travels back to his native Kansas from his home in Westport, Connecticut, was nevertheless footloose, in search of subject matter for paintings. The Kansas scenes that had made Curry’s reputation in 1928, and that he continued to develop following his initial success with these novel subjects, were met with surprising derision when they were shown on his home turf in 1931, in exhibitions in Chicago, St. Louis, Topeka, and Kansas City. Curry’s New York dealer, Maynard Walker, had planned the circuit hoping to promote Curry in an untapped regional market but failed miserably at his effort, producing no sales in economic hard times and forcing the artist to endure the unexpected criticisms of his fellow Kansans.

Still reeling from the disappointments of the previous months, struggling, as he put it, to get “on my feet,” he made arrangements in April 1932 to follow the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus as the troupe embarked from Manhattan on its spring tour. [1] He would travel with it during the next two months, from Washington, D.C. through Pennsylvania and New Jersey, departing in mid-June, after the traveling circus finished its swing through southern Connecticut.

There was precedent for Curry’s fascination with the circus. His debut at the always lively and closely watched Whitney Studio Galleries in New York in April 1929 had been his entry in a much-talked about exhibition, The Circus in Paint. [2] The elaborate show—organized by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s impresario of new American art, Julianna Force—was staged as its own version of the Big Top, a clever installation created by the painter and interior designer Louis Bouché. Curry already knew from this earlier experience that the circus on canvas could charm patrons and critics, and he would draw upon it once again. The great trapeze artist, Alfredo Codona, the marquee name, made the arrangements for Curry to follow the company, his association with Curry’s endeavor securing for the artist unlimited access to the action at center ring, behind the scenes, and on the back lots.

Over these two months Curry would sketch in crayon, ink, and watercolor, the manifold scenes of circus life and especially of the death-defying feats of its magnificent aerial performers, creating an abundance of source material for subsequent paintings. Immediately upon his return to Westport, Curry embarked on what would be a pathbreaking work for him, a painting that would win him a place in the permanent collection of the new Whitney Museum of American Art for a second time. The Flying Codonas (Whitney Museum of American Art) was purchased by Whitney from the museum’s first survey exhibition of contemporary American painting in November 1932; a year earlier, his Baptism in Kansas of 1928 was acquired by Mrs. Whitney with much fanfare.

With the honor accorded The Flying Codonas, Walker’s promotion of Curry would now take a new tack: in April 1933 he ceremoniously opened an exhibition of his artist’s new circus paintings to coincide with the return of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Baily show to Madison Square Garden for another season—even the Codonas appeared alongside their friend Curry at the unveiling of the new work. [3] Circus themes henceforth would become as much a part of Curry’s artistic identity as Kansas subjects, and they would figure in his repertory for years.

The crowd scene was a departure from Curry’s usual focus on the circus performers, but the audience is, after all, the other side of the yin and yang of the spectacle. On the spot, presumably, Curry created a highly finished ink-and-watercolor illustration depicting the relatable moment of a child’s unbridled delight at the kaleidoscopic light show and the derring-do that was the Codona family’s trapeze act—Alfredo, his brother Lalo, and Alfredo’s wife, Vera, were famous for swinging to heights unmatched by any other aerialists. [4] Possibly Curry intended the watercolor for publication, titling it “Alfredo and Lalo,” making clear the focus of the little boy’s uncontainable excitement. This sweet vignette of a father’s caring embrace of his joyful child proved a powerful symbol: Curry employed it in other circus paintings, in ways that underscore what was poignant and discordant about the diverse assembly of people gathered together under the Big Top. It is the source of At the Circus. It is background as well for The Runway (1932, Swarthmore College Art Collection). There, the homogenous spectator group of wholesome American families is a dissonant backdrop to the plaintive note struck by the sober parade of exotic performers in the foreground as they exit the arena, men and women who have dropped their show faces and now appear drained of anything like the spirit that infuses their buoyant admirers, exhibiting the emotional toll taken by a performer’s way of life.

The cluster of circus itinerants, many of them immigrants, all of them uprooted, vagabonds for much of the year, ran counter to traditional views of the American family and community. Their condition resonated with Curry, who was himself struggling with loss and estrangement at this time. He was separated from his sickly wife, Clara, and drifting. He was also emotionally upended by the calamitous effects of the Dust Bowl on the Curry family’s Kansas homestead. The post office in his hometown of Dunavant, Kansas closed in 1932—the town literally disappeared off the map—and his parents were now isolated there among the fallen down houses and fields of weeds. [5] Curry in this year was himself without home and roots.

In the context of Curry’s life circumstances, At the Circus can be viewed as a deeply personal painting, born of reflection on his own boyhood, a pattern of rumination that emerged with his first Kansas paintings. [6] At center At the Circus shows us not one child, as in Curry’s original drawing, but three boys—the three Curry boys, perhaps—the two older boys reveling in the high spirits of their baby brother. Such was the attachment of the Curry siblings. The youngest of the Curry boys, the artist’s beloved “baby brother,” Paul Curry, had died an untimely death at age twenty-two in 1927, after years of physical suffering. The

tragedy of that loss haunted John Steuart Curry to the end of his life, destroyed what had been his deep spiritual faith and created fissures within the Curry family. Lifelong grief and middle-aged spiritual crisis brought forth from Curry paintings not simply of a place. “His art was something different from what was generally understood as Regionalism,” Curry’s friend and biographer Laurence Schmeckebier asserted, a radical claim in 1943, but an apt one, it seems, upon further study. Curry’s subjects we find time and again are rich with personal associations: they are the places, experiences, and people that filled his memories of home and of a golden age of boyhood time. [7]

— Patricia Junker

[1] For a full account of the episode with the circus see Patricia Junker, “John Steuart Curry and the Pathos of Modern Life: Paintings of the Outcast and the Dispossessed,” in John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West (New York: Hudson Hills, 1998), 151–64. Curry’s comments on his state of mind appear in a letter to Maynard Walker, August 1, 1932, Maynard Walker Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[2] See Junker, 156.

[3] See descriptions of the exhibition and reviews in Junker, “The Life and Career of John Steuart Curry: An Annotated Chronology,” in John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West, 222–23.

[4] The drawing, its present whereabouts unknown, is reproduced in Laurence E. Schmeckebier, John Steuart Curry’s Pageant of America (New York: American Artists Group, 1943), 216–17, no. 191.

[5] The Dunavant Post Office was closed in 1932 and Curry’s parents were eventually compelled to leave; see Patricia Junker, “John Steuart Curry: Homecoming,” in John Steuart Curry: Weathering the Storm, ed. Art Martin (Muskegon, MI: Muskegon Museum of Art, 2024), 15–16

[6] For an analysis of the genesis of the first Kansas paintings, see Junker, “John Steuart Curry: Homecoming,” 2–7. 

[7] For the impact of Paul Curry’s death on his artist brother, see Junker, “John Steuart Curry: Homecoming,” 4–7.