Thomas Hart Benton was an American painter, muralist, educator and writer. He was associated with the American Regionalism and Synchromism movements. He was known for his impressive use of colour in realistic paintings that depicted people at work, play or in repose in various habitats, often in rural settings.
Background
Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, United States, on April 15, 1889, into an influential family of politicians. He was the son of Elizabeth Wise Benton and Maecenas Eason Benton, a lawyer and four times a congressman from 1897 until 1905.
His father was known as the "little giant of the Ozarks". Maecenas Benton named his son after his own great-uncle, Thomas Hart Benton, one of the first two United States Senators elected from Missouri. Thomas Benton later recalled that "politics was the core of our family life."
Thomas Benton had two younger sisters, Mary and Mildred, and a younger brother, Nathaniel.
Education
Benton spent his childhood years constantly moving from Washington, D.C., to Missouri and vice versa. His father sent him to Western Military Academy, where the boy studied from 1905 till 1906. Benton was expected to follow his family's path and to start a political career. Growing up in two different cultures, Thomas Benton rebelled against his father's plans.
With his mother's encouragement, Thomas Benton chose to study art. Starting at age seventeen he worked as a cartoonist for a local paper, Joplin American. Escaping the limitations of small-town life, Benton moved to Chicago where he enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1907, studying under the direction of Frederick Oswald.
After two years at the Art Institute, in 1909, he relocated to Paris to study at the famed Academie Julian (now part of ESAG Penninghen). His mother supported him financially and emotionally to work at art. While in Paris, Benton got acquainted with the great North American artists, including Diego Rivera and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, the founder of Synchromism. Thomas Benton was so influenced by the latter, that subsequently adopted a Synchromist style. He finished his studies there in 1912.
Benton settled in New York City in 1912 and resumed painting. In the 1910s the artist experimented with several modern styles including Synchromism, which stressed the musical qualities of colour. He was greatly influenced by the compositional strategies of Paul Cézanne. A fire that broke out in his studio destroyed a lot of his early experimental artworks.
During the First World War, Thomas Benton served in the U.S. Navy and was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. He served as an architectural draftsman and painted camouflage for the Navy. When he had free time, Benton read American history and sketched local scenes of shipyard life. His war-related work had an enduring effect on his later style as he was required to produce realistic documentation.
Later in the war, Benton drew the camouflaged ships that entered Norfolk harbour. His work was required for a number of reasons, first of all, to ensure that U.S. ship painters were correctly applying the camouflage schemes, secondly, to aid in identifying U.S. ships that might later be lost, and, finally, to have records of the ship camouflage of other Allied navies. Thomas Benton later said that his work for the Navy "was the most important thing, so far, I had ever done for myself as an artist."
Up until this time Benton had struggled to find his artistic identity. It was Thomas Benton's turn to depictions of the everyday life of America and its people in a representational style that heralded Benton's emergence as a mature artist. Due to his interest in the history of America and his family's deep roots in Missouri, Thomas Benton soon chose the American Historical Epic as his major theme. His artworks of this period were highly influenced by El Greco, a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance.
In the early 1920s, he returned to New York, announcing himself to be an "enemy of modernism," while simultaneously incorporating modernist aesthetics into his oeuvre. He began the naturalistic and representational work today known as Regionalism.
In 1926 the New York Art Students League appointed Thomas Benton as an instructor. This post he had held for nine years. While there, Benton taught some of the early practitioners of Abstract Expressionism. Among his students was Jackson Pollock, who stayed in contact with Benton for many years despite their aesthetic differences. Benton schooled Pollock in the rudiments of drawing and also, about the importance of the Old Masters. Benton's expansive murals, along with those of José Clemente Orozco, may have influenced the large scale of Pollock's later drip paintings. The undulating rhythm within Pollock's early abstract works, emanating from a central vortex, relates back to lessons taught by Benton.
Thomas Benton's early artworks as a muralist attracted the public attention. In 1930 New York's famed New School of Social Research commissioned him to create a series of murals titled American Today. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, Benton became one of the leaders of the Regionalist movement.
The 1930s were prolific for Benton. In 1932 he completed the Arts of Life in America, a set of large murals for an early site of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Major panels include Arts of the West, Arts of the City, Arts of the South and Indian Arts. Today they are displayed at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut.
The artist completed a series of twenty-two mural panels titled the Cultural and Industrial History of Indiana in 1933, for the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago; they are now housed at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. In one panel, Thomas Benton portrayed the KKK's prominence in Indiana, which caused abrupt criticism aimed at Benton.
Thomas Benton was featured on the cover of the December 24, 1934 issue of Time magazine. Benton's artwork was featured along with that of fellow artists Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry in an article which had the title "The U.S. Scene". The trio was described as the new heroes of American art, and Regionalism was named to be a significant art movement.
A year later, Benton left New York for his native Missouri, occupying a teaching position at the Kansas City Art Institute. This base afforded Benton greater access to rural America, which was changing quickly. His artworks of this time often show the melancholy, desperation and beauty of small-town life. The same year, the artist was commissioned to create a mural for the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City. A Social History of Missouri is considered to be Benton’s greatest work.
Benton's most famous student, Jackson Pollock, whom he trained at the Art Students League, founded the Abstract Expressionist movement. Pollock later said that Thomas Benton's traditional teachings gave him something to rebel against. With another of his students, Glen Rounds, who became a prolific author and illustrator of children's books, the artist spent a summer touring the Western United States in the early 1930s.
Benton's students in New York and Kansas City included many significant artists who contributed to American art. Among them were Pollock’s brother Charles Pollock, Jackson Lee Nesbitt, Roger Medearis, Frederic James, Lamar Dodd, Charles Green Shaw, Margot Peet, Eric Bransby, Charles Banks Wilson, Reginald Marsh, Glenn Gant, Fuller Potter, and Delmer J. Yoakum. Thomas Benton also briefly trained Dennis Hopper at the Kansas City Art Institute.
In the late 1930s, Thomas Benton produced numerous murals and individual canvases for various institutions across the United States. He executed some of his best-known work, including the allegorical nude Persephone. It was counted scandalous by the Kansas City Art Institute and was taken by the showman Billy Rose, who hung it in his New York nightclub, the Diamond Horseshoe.
Benton published his autobiography, An Artist in America, in 1937. The book was critically acclaimed. The writer Sinclair Lewis said of it: "Here’s a rare thing, a painter who can write." During this period of time, Thomas Benton also started to create signed, limited edition lithographs, which were sold at $5.00 each through the Associated American Artists Galleries based in New York.
Benton, along with eight other prominent American artists, was commissioned to document dramatic scenes and characters during the production of the film The Long Voyage Home in 1940. It was a cinematic adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's plays.
In 1941 Benton was fired from the Art Institute after he said the typical art museum was "a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait." In addition, he made humiliating references to what he said was the redundant influence of homosexuals (which he called "the third sex") in the art world.
By the close of the Second World War, interest in Regionalism had decreased and Benton could no longer claim to be one of America's vanguard artists. Abstract Expressionism became a brand-new force in the American art world.
He produced numerous works during the last decades of his life. He continued to paint murals, including Lincoln (1953), for Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri; Trading At Westport Landing (1956), for The River Club in Kansas City; Father Hennepin at Niagara Falls (1961) for the Power Authority of the State of New York; Joplin at the Turn of the Century (1972) in Joplin; and Independence and the Opening of the West, for the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence. His subject matter soon shifted from large, epic narrative artworks, to simple landscapes and rural scenes.
Thomas Benton received commissions even during his eighties. His commission for the Truman Library mural led to his friendship with the former American President that lasted for the rest of their lives. The artist died in 1975 at work in his studio, as he finished his last mural, The Sources of Country Music, for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee.
Thomas Hart Benton was one of the leading representatives of the Regionalist art movement, and his murals were especially acclaimed. He was among the first American artists who combined modern aesthetic principles with long-held academic constructs.
Benton's major contribution to 20th-century American art might be his thematic emphasis on images of simple people and common lore. His expressive realism stands out for its hyperbolical curvilinear forms and shapes, and the use of basic colours. By shifting his attention away from New York and towards the Midwest, Thomas Benton expanded both the scope of possible artistic subject matter and the potential public for American art.
In 1977 Benton's late-Victorian residence and carriage house studio in Kansas City was designated by Missouri as the Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site. This historic site has been preserved nearly unchanged from the time of his death. Furniture, clothing, and paint brushes are still in their place. Displaying 13 original artworks, the house museum is open for guided tours.
Thomas Benton became the subject of the eponymous 1988 documentary entitled Thomas Hart Benton, which was directed by Ken Burns.
Today, the artist's artworks are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Madison Square Park in New York, City in the Early 1920's
House in Cubist Landscape
People of Chilmark (figure Composition)
The Cliffs
Self-portrait with Rita
Chilmark Landscape
American Discovery Viewed by Native Americans
Louisiana Rice Fields
Instruments of Power
Cotton Pickers, Georgia
Prodigal Son
Spring Tryout
Poker Night (from a Streetcar Named Desire)
Achelous and Hercules
Untitled
Negro Boy
Arkansas Evening
Jessie and Jake
Mine Strike, Pittsburgh
Island Hay
Shallow Creek
Politics
Benton was active in leftist politics and was involved with leftist artists' groups such as the John Reed Club. Because of his Populist political upbringing, Thomas Benton's sympathy was with the working class and the small farmer, unable to gain material advantage because of the Industrial Revolution.
Views
Quotations:
"Art is not life, nor a reproduction of life, but a representation carried out within the specific terms, conversions and limitations of the particular art used. Hence, absolute truth, with reference to objective fact, is not to be found in the business. The most realistic art is considerably removed from reality. Art does not give real things or imitations of real things. The thing that art gives is strained first through the artist's selections and judgments, and then through the specific techniques which he used to present them. If you are to enjoy an art, you must first accept its terms."
"You can't change your mind up on a scaffold without the risk of everything going awry. You must solve your problems before you get up there."
"I have a sort of inner conviction that for all the possible limitations of my mind and the disturbing effects of my processes, for all the contradicting struggles and failures I have gone through, I have come to something that is in the image of America and the American people of my time."
"I paint every day. Sometimes I hate painting, but I keep at it, thinking always that before I croak I'll really learn how to do it – maybe as well as some of the old painters."
Membership
Benton was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1954 as an Associate member and received his full membership in 1956.
National Academy of Design
,
United States
1954
Personality
Thomas Benton was a bookworm, able to read in both French and Italian.
Quotes from others about the person
Karal Ann Marling: "[Benton's nude Persephone] one of the great works of American pornography."
Interests
Artists
El Greco, Paul Cézanne
Connections
At age 33, Thomas Benton married Rita Piacenza, an Italian immigrant, on February 19, 1922. They met while Benton was teaching art classes for a neighbourhood organization in New York City, where she was one of his students. She took an active role in the artist's career, handling all of his business affairs so he could focus on his oeuvre.
The marriage produced a son, Thomas Piacenza Benton, who was born in 1926, and a daughter, Jessie Benton, born in 1939. They were married for almost 53 years until Thomas Benton's death in 1975. Rita Piacenza died eleven weeks after her husband.
Father:
Maecenas Eason Benton
Mother:
Elizabeth Wise Benton
Spouse:
Rita Benton (Piacenza)
Sister:
Mary Elizabeth Benton
Brother:
Nathaniel Wise Benton
Sister:
Mildred Benton
Son:
Thomas Piacenza Benton
Daughter:
Jessie Benton
References
Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original
This illustrated volume reproduces hundreds of Benton's works, ranging from the most informal, initimate sketches to monumental mural cycles and noble nudes - works that reveal him as a major recorder and inerpreter of American scene.
1989
Thomas Hart Benton: Drawing from Life
Traces Benton's life and career shows how he used drawings and sketches to create his major paintings and murals, and assesses his place in American art.
1990
Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock
In an epic story that ranges from the cafés and salons of Gertrude Stein's Paris to the highways of the American West, Henry Adams, acclaimed author of Eakins Revealed, unfolds a poignant personal drama that provides new insights into two of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals
This book features a full-color gatefold which represents the flow of the murals along with a portfolio of color reproductions of the 22 existing panels.
