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Thomas Hart Benton, along with his contemporaries Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry, was one of the key chroniclers and interpreters of American life from the late 1920s through the mid-twentieth century. His compositions embody the rushing energy of America during the modern era, celebrating the country’s land, history, people, strength, and beauty.
The son of Congressman Colonel Maecenas Eason Benton and Elizabeth Wise of Neosho, Missouri, and the great-nephew and namesake of the celebrated U.S. Senator from Missouri, Benton was born and raised in the rural Ozark town of Neosho. From 1896 to 1904, the family lived in Washington, D.C., where his father represented Missouri in the United States Congress. Benton’s artistic preciousness was apparent by age five, when he began to draw Indians and railroad trains, subjects that he frequently included in his later works. As a young boy, he executed what he considered to be his first mural, drawing in crayon on a freshly papered staircase wall. Benton’s exposure to art during grade school visits to the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress encouraged him to enroll in formal art classes at Western High School in Georgetown and then, in 1907, to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. Determined to pursue art as a career, in 1908 Benton departed for Paris where he attended the Académie Julian. During his Parisian sojourn, Benton devoted time to studying art at The Louvre, where he was inspired by the work of the Italian Renaissance and Spanish Masters, El Greco in particular. Although he experimented with both academic and Pointillist styles, Benton fell under the spell of works by the French artists Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. He was also mesmerized by the art of his friend and fellow-American, the Synchronist artist Stanton MacDonald Wright. By the time of his return to Missouri in 1911, Benton was a fervent Modernist, painting in the Synchronist style.
After eleven months at home in Neosho, Benton moved to New York City. From 1912 to 1918 he worked as a commercial artist, ceramic painter, set designer, gallery director, and art teacher. In addition, Benton was engaged as an historical reference and portrait artist for the fledgling motion picture industry which was located across the Hudson River in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After enlisting in the U.S. Navy in 1918, Benton was stationed at the Norfolk Naval Base, Virginia, where he poured over books on American history, and sketched while off duty. Although some of these pencil drawings and watercolors were semi-abstract, most focused on the activities of the people in his immediate surroundings. These drawings, exhibited to acclaim in 1919 at the Daniel Galleries, New York, were seminal in his career; they were Benton’s first images focusing on the American scene. Motivated by his interest in the progression of American history, between 1919 and 1924 Benton created his first series of paintings, The American Historical Epic (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri). His signature style emerged in these works -- energizing figures with colors applied in a stipple-like manner, he portrayed pulsating forms personifying the constantly changing, dynamic experience of American life. The realistic subjects and motifs in these paintings reveal Benton’s break from Modernist
abstraction.
The decade from 1925 to 1935 was one of intense artistic activity for Benton. While teaching at the Art Students League in New York, he executed numerous murals, some portraying historical themes and others depicting contemporary urban and rural events. America Today, 1930, Benton’s first large-scale mural painted entirely in egg tempera, was produced for The New School for Social Research, New York; The Arts of Life in America, 1932, was commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its library (now, Collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut); A Social History of the State of Indiana was painted for the Indiana State Pavilion at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair (now, University of Indiana Auditorium, Bloomington); and A Social History of the State of Missouri, 1935-1936, was executed for the Missouri State Capitol Building, Jefferson. Benton returned to Missouri in 1935 to complete the State Capitol mural and to assume the helm of the Painting Department at the Kansas City Art Institute. He and his family continued to summer at Chilmark, on Martha’s Vineyard, where from the early 1920s he had maintained a home and studio. Benton also proceeded with his annual practice, begun during the late 1910s, of trekking through the backroads of America to create pencil sketches representing the various rural regions and people. Benton’s working method involved laying out his designs from pencil sketches created on his travels, and applying pen and ink over some of the details to define and preserve them. He next formed a three-dimensional clay model or maquette that resembled a stage set, and painted, arranged, and then studied its clay figures and adjunct details (such as trees, leaves, rocks, etc.). The completed maquette served as the prototype for oil and tempera studies, and for the subsequent fully realized compositions. Benton destroyed most of the maquettes after use, but of the few to survive is a model for Turn of the Century, Joplin (The Benton Trust), a mural Benton executed in 1971 for the Municipal Building in Joplin, Missouri.
It was during Benton’s participation in a 1934 exhibition with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry at Ferargil Galleries in New York, that critics coined the term “American Regionalism” or “American Regionalist School.” Although there was no such “school,” response to the show by art reviewer Thomas Craven and others catapulted the trio of midwestern artists to national attention. Time Magazine featured a Benton self portrait on its cover and included an article on the “New American Art.” Benton, however, felt the designation too confining since he “was after a picture of America in its entirety.”
Benton authored many books and articles on art and current events. In just one year, 1937-1938, he published Artist in America, his best-selling autobiography, and wrote and illustrated articles for Life Magazine, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Kansas City Star, and Scribner’s Magazine. In 1938 he also began a series of lithographs on the American scene for Associated American Artists of New York.
During his lifetime Benton produced over 4,000 works. The majority of his paintings are now in museum collections, including San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor and The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence; Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; St. Louis Museum of Art, Missouri; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; The Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York; Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery, New York; Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Tennessee; Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee; Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, The University of Texas, Austin; Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Lynchburg, Virginia; The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia. Benton’s works are also found in many other public and private collections.
SKF
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