In 1929, John Steuart Curry painted The Tornado, recalling the frequent and furious storms of his youth. Though he was born in Kansas and later returned to the Midwest, Curry painted this rural farm scene in his studio in Westport, Connecticut. In 1931, Michigan-born real estate broker H. Tracy Kneeland, who had recently moved to Hartford, Connecticut, offered to purchase the painting as it stirred memories of his own childhood in St. Louis, Gratiot County. In a letter to Curry, Kneeland wrote: "I find … a certain native quality which interests me because I was born and brought up in Michigan and while I have never seen a tornado of this kind I can well remember school being let out and running for dear life for home, with the branches torn off the trees … the whole picture seems to strike a home chord in me."
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The “home chord” that Curry awakened in Kneeland reflected a growing desire among American artists to picture a simpler time in the wake of World War I and at the onset of the Great Depression. Rejecting European-bred modernism and abstraction, many artists sought to create, in realistic terms, an art inspired by what they believed were the virtues of the nation’s heartland. John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton became the most influential of these American Scene painters.
When the Hackley Art Gallery (now the Muskegon Museum of Art) purchased the work from Ferargil Galleries in 1935, The Tornado was already extensively published and exhibited, including winning the second prize award at the Carnegie International in 1933 and having been reproduced in full color in the December 24, 1934 issue of Time magazine. A major entry in Curry’s “Kansas Paintings,” The Tornado was quickly becoming an iconic vision of the American Midwest in popular media. Since its premiere in an exhibition at Whitney Studio Galleries in 1930, the painting has appeared in nearly 30 exhibitions and 100 publications over its lifetime.