“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

(Originally posted January 10th, 2009)

The painting is John Steuart Curry's "Tragic Prelude," finished in 1940. The original hangs in the Kansas State Capitol (Topeka). Technically, it is a "mural," a painting on a wall. It is one of the most widely reproduced paintings about the American Civil War.

A great deal can be said about the work - for instance, it is interesting because of its comparative political neutrality (one must remember that when the painting was finished there were still a great many people in Kansas whose parents remembered the Civil War). But the content and political aspects of the painting are not quite what interest me here.

I am instead struck by how much this work, by an artist not particularly famous and working outside the major "scenes" of high art in his time, is an example of art moderne. The exaggerated figures, the superficially smooth surfaces, and the simplified lighting all speak of the modern art of the 1930's. To me, the defining characteristic of theart moderne movement (or perhaps we should say, movements) is the overt suppression of representational detail in favor of an emphasis on the interplay of shapes and colors.

This strong tendency in the art that was most fashionable from roughly 1920 to 1970 in its turn reflects a widespread belief in the supremacy, the desirability, of simple, uncomplicated surfaces, somewhat in the same way that science, through the use of equations and other abstractions, presented to the intellect a simplified, clear picture of the World. I am not, when I say this, in any way attacking science; abstractions such as Newton's Theory of Gravitation were (and still are) an extremely powerful, well-supported tool for an encounter with the complexity, the disorder, of the World.

Overall, however, "Tragic Prelude" shows clearly a complexity - the tangle of themes that the artist saw as leading to the Civil War. Curry met the chaos and mastered it in this triumphant synthesis.

After the turbulence of the 1960's, the world of painting lost the decisive, forceful abstractions of the art moderne period; artists tended to head off in their own highly individual directions. I suppose that the defining characteristics of the "post-modern" period are something like the following:

• A lack of belief in the existence or value of a comprehensive whole;
• Treatment of expression as if it were entirely devoid of meaning, or as if meaning were merely the plaything of the mind;
• Exaltation of technical mastery of local detail at the expense of global composition.

Thus the post-modern artist abandons exactly what we see in Curry's painting - whatever else Curry did, he surely believed that there was such a thing as a comprehensive view of his subject and that the view had value. Again, he plainly believed that his work had meaning and was not arbitrary. Finally, his technical mastery of detail is really not very impressive - the painting draws its force from its overall composition.

It is hard for me to believe that post-modernism has much value; modern art, however, especially as seen in works like Curry's, had great value. Perhaps the reason for the greatness of modernism lay in its deep and widely shared conviction that meaning was no mere toy.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me