The Plainsman

Inscriptions

Signed, on stone, lower right: JSC 45; titled, in graphite, lower left margin: The Plainsman; signed, in graphite, lower right margin: John Steuart Curry; reverse, stamped, in black ink, lower left: DARTMOUTH COLLEGE / DEPT. OF ART AND / ARCHAEOLOGY; Watermark, upper left: Rives;

Label

Like many American artists active during the 1930s and early 1940s, Kansas-born John Steuart Curry largely rejected modernist abstraction, preferring instead to reach a broad audience via murals and prints of everyday life. The Plainsman portrays one of the social “types” associated with the West—a rugged white settler of the Great Plains. Here he adopts a heroic stance after having shot a bison—a species key to Native American lifeways. His buckskin outfit represents a style originally developed by Native Americans that trappers and plainsmen adopted, as often portrayed in Western movies. Fittingly, Curry borrowed this figure’s costume from a Hollywood studio.

From the 2022 exhibition This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, curated by Jami C. Powell, Curator of Indigenous Art; Barbara J. MacAdam, former Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of American Art; Thomas H. Price, former Curatorial Assistant; Morgan E. Freeman, former DAMLI Native American Art Fellow; and Michael Hartman, Jonathan Little Cohen Associate Curator of American Art

Course History

HIST 6, NAS 30, History of the American West, Ben Madley, Winter 2012

ANTH 7.05, Animals and Humans, Laura Ogden, Winter 2022

GEOG 31.01, Postcolonial Geographies, Erin Collins, Winter 2022

ANTH 50.05, Environmental Archaeology, Madeleine McLeester, Winter 2022

ANTH 50.05, Environmental Archaeology, Madeleine McLeester, Winter 2022

ARTH 5.01, Introduction to Contemporary Art, Mary Coffey and Chad Elias, Winter 2022

ANTH 3.01, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Chelsey Kivland, Summer 2022

ANTH 3.01, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, Chelsey Kivland, Summer 2022

SPAN 65.15, Wonderstruck: Archives and the Production of Knowledge in an Unequal World, Silvia Spitta and Barbara Goebel, Summer 2022

Exhibition History

Images of the West: Selections from the Permanent Collection, MALS 190, Harrington Gallery Teaching Exhibition, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, July 15-August 28, 1994.

Looking for America: Prints of Rural Life from the 1930's and 1940's, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, December 3, 1994-March 5, 1995.

This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World, Rush Family Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire, January 5–April 11, 2022.

Publication History

Barbara J. MacAdam, Looking for America: Prints of Rural Life from the 1930s and 1940s, Hanover, New Hampshire: Trustees of Dartmouth College, 1994, listed no. 17.

Provenance

Associated American Artists, New York; sold to present collection, 1945.

Catalogue Raisonne

Cole 40; Czestochowski C-42

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