The Kansas State Capitol: Thirty-Seven Years and a Raging John Brown

The Kansas State Capitol in Topeka took thirty-seven years to build, from eighteen sixty-six to nineteen oh three. The state kept running out of money. Architects changed. Plans were revised. The building rose piece by piece across four decades, modeled loosely on the United States Capitol in Washington. What emerged was a structure whose dome tops out at three hundred four feet, taller than the national Capitol by about sixteen feet, a fact Kansans have not been shy about mentioning.

The building's defining artwork arrived in the nineteen thirties, when the state hired a painter from Wisconsin named John Steuart Curry to decorate the second floor. Curry was one of the leading figures in American Regionalism, a movement that tried to paint the American Midwest on its own terms rather than through European artistic conventions. He accepted the Kansas commission as a homecoming. He had grown up on a farm near Dunavant, Kansas, and he conceived an ambitious mural program to portray the state's history.

The centerpiece became a painting called Tragic Prelude. It depicts the abolitionist John Brown at the center of a swirling, violent canvas. Brown is enormous, almost superhuman in scale, holding a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other, a tornado spinning behind him and Kansas prairies burning on both sides. Union and Confederate soldiers lie dead at his feet. Brown's expression is one of absolute conviction bordering on madness.

The mural outraged Kansas legislators. There were complaints that Brown was portrayed too sympathetically, that the violence was too raw, that the painting did not reflect well on the state. In nineteen forty-two, the legislature passed a resolution stopping Curry from completing his work. He left Kansas without finishing the murals and without signing the ones he had completed. He died in nineteen forty-six, still feeling the sting of the rejection.

Curry never got to sign his Kansas work. But Tragic Prelude now hangs in the rotunda of one of the state's most visited buildings, and it is widely regarded as one of the masterworks of American public art. The man Kansas could not accept in his lifetime became the defining image of the state.