Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1992
Abstract
John Steuart Curry's mural Justice Defeating Mob Violence (Fig. 1), painted in 1936-37 for the United States Department of Justice, offers viewers a revealing perspective on the cultural values inherent in then-current notions of law and order. In approaching his mural, Curry assumed the traditional role of the history painter as it had been known in post-Renaissance Europe, especially in the eighteenth century; he undertook to present for public approbation and public edification a moralistic allegorical statement about the relations between societal disorder and both the institutions designed to control such disorder and the agents appointed to enforce that control. But in doing so he took the unusual step of adopting the visual idiom of American regionalism, in the process creating a mural that juxtaposes negatively charged images of rural and western American life with seemingly positive images of a more ordered and institutionally sanctioned component of American society. The mural incorporates some of the features that made regionalist art popular among broad segments of the general public: distinctively American subject matter, a dramatic narrative presentation, and a clearly definable moral basis reflective of both American nationalism and traditional American values. Despite its apparently clear programmatic basis, however, Curry's mural elicits from the contemporary, late twentieth-century viewer some decidedly ambivalent responses and interpretations. I should like to explore some of the reasons why this may be so.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 12:1 (Winter 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.