John Steuart Curry

Cock Fight in Cuba, 1946
Oil on canvas
38.25 x 46.25 in
SKU: 12845g
Price on Request
Inquire

John Steuart Curry (1897-1946), is best-known as one of the American Regionalist artists active during the Great Depression through the World War II era. The Regionalists (including artists Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton) distinguished themselves from the abstract art scene during the first part of the Twentieth century by painting typically American subject matter, although Curry’s themes were hardly limited to farms. While born in Kansas on his family’s farm, Curry went on to study art in Chicago, Paris and New York as a young man. In Paris, he was exposed to the work of some of the Old Masters, particularly Rubens, Delacroix, and David. Like these artists, Curry’s major themes and subject matter were the great struggles of life. 

One of Curry’s paintings that exemplify this theme of human struggle is Cock Fight in Cuba, which was completed in 1946, the year of his death. Curry spent a little over a month in Cuba in early 1946 in preparation for an advertising campaign for National City Bank, and undoubtedly sketched this scene, as was his method, while traveling in the country. The painting depicts a crowd of suited men in fedoras cheering on two fighting cocks in the foreground. While the men in the crowd gesticulate wildly behind a low wall indicating the barrier of the ring, three men are in the foreground of the painting, inside the ring with the roosters. The two on either side of the fighting animals have their arms extended out as if to hold the crowd back. The third man, in the lower right corner of the painting, is African and his hands reach towards the birds as if to save them, which has the effect of directing the viewer’s gaze at the action. Curry uses the lines created by the arm gestures of the men to bring focus on the drama of the fighting animals.

The colors with which Curry has painted Cockfight in Cuba are also a way that he directs the viewer’s attention and sets a mood for the piece. In the background of the painting, the crowd of men is painted en grisaille, or in shades of gray, which makes the dark brown skin of the African man in the foreground stand out. The bright red of the birds’ cockles and the blood on their feathers are about the only spots of color in the painting. This bit of contrast is very effective in drawing our gaze to the birds, who are themselves nearly a blur of flapping wings. Curry’s painting style in Cockfight is brushy, as if the way he applied the paint was also part of the rather frenzied, dramatic scene. This fact, along with the predominant use of gray in the background, probably led to the incorrect belief that this painting was unfinished at the time of Curry’s death, but we know it is a completed work because the artist’s conception is fully realized. The painting is also signed on reverse with the initials JSC on the lower right stretcher bar. More evidence of the finality of the painting can be found in the fact that preliminary drawings exist for Cockfight in Cuba that are in the collection of the Springfield Museum of Art in Missouri. The composition of the final painting directly reflects what the artist had worked out in the initial drawings.

The subject of fighting animals is one Curry used throughout his career, and most likely grew out of his experiences among animals in his youth on his parents’ farm. Curry witnessed the drama of life and death firsthand and this became to him a great allegory for human struggles. The image of two animals, even two of the same species, fighting to the death, was a symbol of humankind’s simultaneous innate violence and vulnerability. 

The more specific symbolism in Cockfight in Cuba, however, is the comparison made by the artist between animal violence and the racial violence of Curry’s time. The horror of seeing the cocks fight to the death is a metaphor for white oppression of and the violence towards blacks in the United States at that time. It was during this era that highly publicized lynching was occurring in the South and America saw resurgence in the Ku Klux Klan. This painting is important because Curry has revealed for the viewer his own moral beliefs. Curry’s social and political views were progressive – he was a member of the National Urban League and was a civil rights activist, whose friends included Wisconsin Governor Robert Lafollette (founder of the Progressive party) and Lloyd Garrison, the famously liberal Dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School while Curry was employed at the University as artist-in-residence. Curry had made political statements in his paintings many times before and some of his most important works centered on subject matter from the African American experience during the early part of the Twentieth century. Examples include The Fugitive (lithograph, 1934-36) and Manhunt (lithograph, 1934), which are both about lynching, and what is arguably Curry’s most important work on this theme, The Freeing of the Slaves (mural, 1942, University of Wisconsin Law Library).

In Cockfight in Cuba, Curry was able to express deeply held beliefs on a subject that was important to him and many other people of his time. Curry believed that, above all, art should have a social significance to the viewer, and the best artists were those that presented current social or ethical issues in their work. By that standard, he would certainly have been pleased with this painting, which uses the event of the cockfight to create a spectacle analogous to horror of a lynch mob. This painting is a wonderful demonstration of how John Steuart Curry used scenes that he observed from life and re-interpreted them on canvas to express a greater moral meaning. 

Essay by Monet C. Haskins and David J. Barnett

Loading...