Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton was an American painter and muralist, and one of the central figures associated with the Regionalist art movement of the 1930s. Together with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, he championed realist modern art that depicted rural scenes in the American South and Midwest. Born in 1889 in Neosho, Missouri, Benton belonged to an influential political family – his father Maecenas Eason Benton was a four-term U.S congressman. In 1906, Benton worked as a cartoonist at the Missouri paper Joplin American and later enrolled to study the Art Institute of Chicago. As part of his artistic education, he spent three years in Paris at the Académie Julian, where he was influenced by modern art movements such as Synchromism and Cubism.

In 1911, Benton returned to the United States and settled in New York. Benton’s early works, such as House in a Cubist Landscape (ca. 1915-1920) were largely painted in a modernist and often abstract style. However, by the early 1920s Benton abandoned this manner in favor of a naturalistic style influenced by old masters such as El Greco and Tintoretto. In 1924, he began to travel throughout the American South and Midwest, sketching and observing daily life in rural America. Inspired by his midwestern roots, Benton emerged as an advocate of Regionalist art, that focused on painting realist scenes of the rural South and Midwest. In 1930, he was commissioned to paint a mural by the New School of Social Research in New York. The result was the ten-panel mural America Today (1930-1931) that depicted the broad scope of American life throughout the 1920s. Painted in a dynamic figurative style, the monumental mural showed geographic diversity as well as the diversity of labor in the United States.

Benton became known as one of the most innovative mural painters at a time when the medium was greatly significant in America. In 1932, he painted The Arts of Life in America (1932), an eight-panel mural commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art. The mural represents the ‘arts’ of everyday life: music, games, dance, and sports. The panels provide a comprehensive survey of life in the 1930s, capturing both the excitement and the tensions that marked the turbulent decade. Panels such as Arts of the City (1932) and Unemployment, Radical Protest, Speed also referenced the political realities of crime and unemployment, that were induced by the Great Depression. In December 1934, his self-portrait was featured as one of the earliest color covers of Time magazine. During this period, Benton also taught at Art Students League in New York, where Jackson Pollock was one of his students.

In 1935, he left New York and moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he continued to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute. His first major commission was a mural for the Missouri State Capitol, A Social History of the State of Missouri (1936). Benton continued to emphasize the importance of rural American life in his art, in landscapes like Threshing Wheat (1939) and July Hay (1942). He was also fond of biblical and classical subjects, which he reimagined in a contemporary midwestern setting. Well-known examples include the allegorical nude Persephone (1939) and the mural Achelous and Hercules (1947). After World War II, Regionalism fell out of fashion and Abstract Expressionism became the dominant trend in American art. Over the next thirty years, Benton continued to produce paintings, lithographs, and murals that centered around rural subjects. He died of a heart attack on January 19, 1975, in his studio in Kansas City before completing The Sources of Country Music (1975), a mural for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee.