堪萨斯上空的龙卷风

Curry painted this in 1929, but not in Kansas. He grew up on a farm there and had since moved east, working this storm up from memory in a studio in Westport, Connecticut. By his widow's account he had never actually seen a tornado. He built it from boyhood fear and, some believe, from newspaper photographs of a real twister that crossed Kansas that same year. A farm family scrambles for the cellar as the black funnel bears down, the father clutching a baby, a boy hauling the family dog by the collar. Curry became one of the leading Regionalist painters, alongside Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton, who turned away from Europe toward plain American scenes. This came just before the drought years that would empty farms across the plains.