Why do you love Hogs Killing a Snake? Just curious.
Honestly the first time I saw it, I was just captivated by the sheer raw violence of the content. It was just such a weird painting to see in a gallery, a painting of pigs and death, and then I turned around to look at American Gothic and found that the woman in American Gothic, across the gallery, was staring directly at me, and through me at the pigs.
Probably I would have just laughed and gone on my way, but the wonderful positioning of the two paintings, so that a farmer was looking at livestock, was something that I wanted to share with anyone who was interested in seeing American Gothic. Which meant that I saw Hogs Killing A Snake a lot, and especially after it was one of the pieces in the amazing America After The Fall exhibit, I spent a lot of time contemplating it. It’s become like an old friend.
One time I was showing the painting to a friend and talking about it, and a tourist visiting the museum started listening in. Once I was done she very hesitantly asked me, “Are you a curator here?” and I have never been more flattered in my entire life.
Anyway, the main appeal is still that it’s just so weird. You don’t often see pigs in fine art and you really never see violent pigs. But it also strikes me now as a really interesting reaction to the pastorality of American painting at the time. Most portrayals of rural life have always struck me as a bit static -- that’s not a bad thing, there’s a lot of paintings of rural life that I love, but you almost never see a painting like Hogs Killing A Snake anywhere, where it both celebrates rural life and violates the serenity we expect of it. Pigs lived and died and killed snakes on American Gothic’s farm, behind Monet’s haystacks and next to Van Gogh’s olive orchards, but only in Curry’s painting do we ever see it.
