Thomas Hart Benton
Thomas Hart Benton
1889 - 1975
American painter, illustrator and lithographer. He was the son of a congressman and first studied art in Washington, DC, where he saw the murals in the capital’s public buildings. In 1907 he enrolled for a year at the Art Institute School in Chicago, visiting Paris the following summer. He studied until early 1909 at the Académie Julian and thereafter independently. Benton rejected academic methods and was exposed to both the Louvre and modernist styles; his interests seem to have focused on Impressionism and Pointillism. In Paris he met Diego Rivera and a number of fellow American artists, such as John Marin and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who had a lasting influence on him. He also read and admired Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, whose thought countered modernist ‘art for art’s sake’ attitudes with a sense of the artist’s responsibility to the social milieu.
Early in 1912 Benton returned to Missouri, but, unable to find work, he moved to New York where he lived until 1935. Until 1920 he worked at resolving the conflict between modernist abstraction and art’s social function. Under the direct influence of SYNCHROMISM, he painted his only pure abstractions, which he showed in March 1916 at the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters. His Synchromist studies include Landscape (watercolour; priv. col., see 1981 exh. cat., no. 11). He had also come under the influence of Marxism and met many of the radicals of the Masses, a socialist journal, such as the writer Max Eastman and John Sloan. In 1918 he joined the Navy. The sketches of ordinary people and activities in which he participated, and his interest in radical historians such as Charles Beard (1874–1948), lured him from modernism. He became committed to art as an objective narrative of American themes and values. In order to stress the three-dimensional reality of the subject in its environment, he made sculptural prototypes for his figurative paintings and vehemently rejected abstraction.
During the 1920s Benton established a more settled life and produced his first major paintings. A typical work of this period is The Lord is My Shepherd (1926; New York, Whitney), an example of Benton’s American Scene painting. In 1922 he married Rita Placenza, with whom he had two children. Between 1923 and 1926 he completed his American Historical Epic (Kansas City, MO, Nelson–Atkins Mus. A.), a series of large history paintings that paralleled the realism described in his essays, some of which were written under the patronage of Albert C. Barnes. Benton’s denunciations of modernism are, however, belied by the style of his work at this time. Rejecting abstraction for a highly conceptual figuration, his overall designs are dependent on formal devices borrowed from the work of Francis Picabia and from Albert Gleizes’s large-scale paintings of c. 1911–13. Thus Benton’s superb People of Chilmark (Essay in Composition) (1922; Washington, DC, Hirshhorn) as well as the less successful Epic series, assimilate the Cubist treatment of shallow recessional space in terms of intersecting planes, and Renaissance chiaroscuro, to create a mannered but powerful personal style.
Benton was teaching at the Art Students League by 1926. He was aware of the growing reputation of the socially concerned Mexican muralists, particularly Diego Rivera, and was eager to paint such large-scale works himself. In fact, even before he did so he had been compared to Rivera by New York critics such as Thomas Craven. By 1930 Benton had won mural commissions, the first on the theme of America Today at the New School for Social Research (now The Equitable, New York), shortly afterwards, the Arts of Life in America at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1932; now New Britain, CT, Mus. Amer. A.) and in 1933 the Social History of the State of Indiana for its pavilion at the Chicago World Fair (now Bloomington, IN, U. Auditorium). These murals spurred violent controversy over their style and politics. Around this time he was also identified as an exponent of Regionalism, with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. His populist and Marxist sympathies were misunderstood by New York artists radicalized by the Depression, to whom Regionalism, with its sometimes ironic panoramas of rural America, did not appear sufficiently in step with the politics of the Popular Front. Disgusted, Benton left New York in 1935 to paint an anti-capitalist mural on the Social History of the State of Missouri in the State Capitol at Jefferson City in 1936. The main panels on the north and east walls show (from left to right): Pioneer Days, Huckleberry Finn, Early Settlers, Missouri Politics, Jesse James and Farming; the small panels flanking the doors show (from left to right): the Beating of Lead Mine Slaves, the Expulsion of the Mormons from Western Missouri, the Pony Express and Plantation Life. The remaining scenes (not illustrated) depict The Law and, on the south wall, the cities of St Louis and Kansas City. Above the south door is the story of Frankie and Johnny, with Prohibition and The Depression occupying the smaller flanking panels. On the west wall, tall panels between the windows show motifs of Cornstalks and Power Lines. The entire programme surrounds the viewer with a vibrant panorama that is Benton’s masterpiece as a muralist. During the late 1930s Benton devoted himself to teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute and to creating such easel paintings as Susanna and the Elders (1938; San Francisco, CA, Pal. Legion of Honor), and numerous lithographs (e.g. The Meeting, 1941; see Fath, p. 115) and book illustrations including those for J. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940). In 1941 he produced a series of propaganda paintings, Year of Peril (Columbia, MO, State Hist. Soc.), as part of the war effort.
In the years after World War II, and continuing until his death, Benton’s work was widely exhibited and collected in ‘heartland’ America, although it was disdained by the New York art world, which extolled his former student Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. Benton continued to paint murals, the most notable being Achelous and Hercules for the Harzfeld Department Store in Kansas City in 1947 (now Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.) and from 1959 to 1962, Independence and the Opening of the West for the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, MO. While his mature mural style retained the dynamism of his earlier work, it had become almost purely illustrative and decorative. His more satisfying later works included portraits, for example Jessie with Guitar (1957; Jessie Benton priv. col., see Baigell, 1973, pl. 133) of his daughter and landscapes, such as The Sheepherder (1955–60; Kansas, Mr and Mrs Fred McCraw priv. col., see Baigell, 1973, no. 134). [Francis V. O’Connor. "Benton, Thomas Hart." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T007989.]
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