In 1929, John Steuart Curry painted Tornado Over Kansas, recalling the frequent and furious storms of his youth. Though he was born in Kansas and later returned to the Midwest, Curry portrayed this rural farm scene from 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."
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 indigenous art, perceived in the American consciousness to thrive in the pioneer-spirit virtues of the nation’s heartland. John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton became the most influential of these American Scene painters.
Tornado Over Kansas found its ultimate home in Michigan, but not with Mr. Kneeland. In 1935, the MMA acquired what became one of the great icons of American Regionalism.