Biography from Altermann Galleries and Auctioneers, Santa Fe I:
| Thomas Hart Benton
Born: Neosho, Missouri 1889
Died: Kansas City, Missouri 1975
Important realist painter of the regional school, muralist, printmaker, teacher, writer
A member of the famous Missouri political family, Tom Benton grew up near the Ozarks. He left at 17 to study at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1906-07 and in Paris at the Julien Academy 1908-11. Back in New York City, he was a professional painter beginning 1912, but unable to sell his painting based on European modernism. In WWI, Benton was an architectural draftsman fro the Navy, forced into realism. At his first postwar exhibition, some of his new paintings sold. He taught at the Art Students League from 1926-35. During this period, Benton traveled all over the US, sketching in the industrial centers, the South, the Far West, Texas, and New Mexico.
After 20 years in New York City, Benton left what he termed an intellectually diseased lot of painters to return to Missouri as director of painting at Kansas City Art Institute. He has become famous when he painted the Contemporary America mural called “tabloid art” for the New School in New York City. When he painted the 45,000 sq. ft. mural for the Missouri State Capital in 1935-36, he rejected customary heroic figures for Boss Prendergast, Jesse James, and Frankie and Johnny. With Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, Benton realistically portrayed the essence of an American region.
Resource: SAMUELS’ Encyclopedia of ARTISTS of THE AMERICAN WEST,
Peggy and Harold Samuels, 1985, Castle Publishing
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Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia:
| The son of a U.S. Congressman and the grandson of a U.S. Senator, it is
no surprise that Thomas Hart Benton was influenced by American politics
and the American scene. He was born in Neosho, Missouri in 1889,
studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to Paris to study
at the Academie Julian for three years.
After working as a naval draftsman in World War I, Benton returned to
New York and started capturing the American scene on his canvases, a
movement that would later be called “Regionalism.” Benton’s work
shows elements of the Synchronist movement that advocated that art of
form through color as well as the influence of Michelangelo and El
Greco with his statuesque figures.
Benton and his wife moved to Kansas City in 1935 (where Benton taught his most famous pupil, Jackson Pollock).
Source: Staff, Columbus Museum |
Biography from AskART:
| BENTON, THOMAS HART
Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri on April 15, 1889. Even as a boy, he was no stranger to the "art of the deal" or to the smoke-filled rooms in which such deals were often consummated. His grandfather, for whom he was named, had been Missouri's first United States senator and has served in Washington for thirty years. His father, Maecenas Benton, was United States attorney for the Western District of Missouri under Cleveland and served in the United States House of Representatives during the McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt administrations. Benton's brother, Nat, was prosecutor for Greene County, Missouri, during the 1930s.
As soon as he could walk, Benton traveled with his father on political tours. There he learned the arts of chewing and smoking, and while the men were involved in their heated discussions, Benton delighted in finding new creamcolored wallpaper on the staircase wall, at the age of six or seven, and drew in charcoal his first mural, a long multicar freight train.
As soon as he was eighteen, even though his father wanted him to study law, Benton left for Chicago where he studied at the Art Institute during the years 1907 and 1908. He continued his studies in Paris, where he learned delicious wickedness, aesthetic and otherwise. Once back home, he became the leader of the Regionalist School, the most theatrical and gifted of the 1930s muralists and as Harry Truman described him,"the best damned painter in America." Detractors said that Benton was "a fascist, a communist, a racist and a bigot"; the ingenious structure, powerful use of modeling and scale and the high-colored humanity of the murals and easel paintings are retort enough. He was a dark, active dynamo, only 5 ft., 3 1/2 in. tall. He was outspoken, open, charmingly profane; he had a great mane of hair and a face the texture of oak bark. He wore rumpled corduroy and flannel, and walked with the unsteady swagger of a sailor just ashore. He poured a salwart drink, chewed on small black cigars and spat in the fire.
Benton was once described as the "churlish dean of regionalist art". If you listened to a variety of art authorities, you would find them equally divided between Harry Truman's assessment of Benton as "the best damned painter in America."and Hilton Kramer who proclaimed Benton "a failed artist." .The East Coast art establishment tended to regard Benton as memorable for one reason only: he was the teacher of Jackson Pollock.
Benton was married in 1922 to Rita, a gregarious Italian lady, and they had a daughter and a son. At the height of his fame in the 1940s, Benton bungled the buy-out he was offered by Walt Disney and went his own way, completing his last mural in 1971, at age eighty-five, in acrylics.
He died in 1975.
Sources:
LA Times, Book Review section of Sunday, November 26, 1989
M.Therese Southgate, MD in the Journal of the American Medical Association;
John Garriety in Connoisseur Magazine, April 1989
Jules Loh, "Unforgettable Thomas Hart Benton", in Reader's Digest
Compiled and written by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
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Biography from AskART:
| Likely the most important painter of the American Scene Movement,
Thomas Hart Benton created a style and addressed subject matter that
was uniquely American as well as specific to his state of Missouri, and
that combined elements of modernism and realism. His signature
painting was regionalist genre, especially laboring figures. In
addition to many murals, he also painted landscapes and portraits.
Benton
was a highly intelligent, energetic, flamboyant, pugnacious and hard
drinking fellow, who quite often found himself in the center of
controversy. As a student, he was unruly and alienated many of
his peers and teachers.
Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho,
Missouri, and named for a great uncle and early United States
Senator. His father, Colonel M.E. Benton, was a Congressman for
eight years, and during the winter, the family lived in Washington D.C.
and in Neosho in the summer. At age 17, after the family had
returned to Missouri, he took a summer job as cartoonist on The Joplin American. Determined to pursue his talent, he later said he had to run away from home to become an artist.
In
1907-1908, he studied with Frederick Oswald at the Art Institute of
Chicago and then studied in Paris for three years including briefly at
the Academie Julian under Jean-Paul Laurens and for a longer period at
the Academie Collarossi, where he could work independently.
In
1911, Colonel Benton decided he could no longer support his son in
Paris, so Tom went to New York. Between 1910 and 1920, he
experimented with Impressionist, Neo-Impressionist, Post-Impressionist,
and Synchromist styles, the last influenced by his friend, Stanton
MacDonald-Wright. For much of this time, he was a dedicated
modernist, but a fire destroyed most of the examples of his painting
from this time period.
His draftsman experience in the Navy, 1918-19, led to his American Scene realist style beginning with a mural, The American Historical Epic
for the New School of Social Research in New York City. This work
earned much respect for mural painting and was key to the support of
artists in the Federal Art Projects.
His murals at the
Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City are major American Scene
murals, and in 1957, he was commissioned by Robert Moses, chairman of
the board of the Power Authority of the State of New York to paint a
mural for the Power Authority at Massena. For this work at the
site, he did extensive research on the theme, which was the Canadian
expedition of Jacques Cartier in the mid 1500s.
The early part
of his career he lived in New York City where he taught at the Art
Students League and became a major influence on the style of gestural
painter, Jackson Pollock. But increasingly Benton grew to believe
that art should express one's surroundings rather than abstract ideas
and that the ordinary person most exemplified American life. Many
of these ideas he inherited from his Populist father who served as a
Congressman from Missouri from 1897 to 1905.
From 1935, he established a studio in Kansas City from where he painted for the next forty years until his death at age 85.
He
was both a prolific lithographer, completing 80 lithographs between
1929 and 1945, and writer including two autobiographies, "An Artist in
America," and "An American Art." Fellow Missourian and former United
States President Harry Truman said that Benton was "the best damned
painter in America."
Source:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art and Thomas Hart Benton
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Biography from AskART:
| Dorothy Miller Remembers Thomas Hart Benton (1985)
Interviewed by Jessie Benton Evans
Copyright by Jessie Benton Evans
In
a recent interview with Dorothy Miller, affiliated with the Museum of
Modern Art as assistant to Alfred Barr, and curator of painting and
sculpture during its formative years, Miller offered another view of
Thomas Hart Benton.
"During a brief period in the early
thirties my husband and I used to visit Thomas Hart Benton in New York
City. He lived on 13th St. in a big studio with a very nice Italian
wife (Rita). He was a friendly, nice guy. They would have 16-20 people
over, feed us, while he played the harmonica and his wife played the
guitar and sang, everyone having a jolly time. He was terribly nice and
amusing.
"My husband, Holger Cahill, ran the W.P.A. eight years
during the Roosevelt administration. He knew Benton very well and
hundreds of other artists. In 1932-33, Holger ran the Museum of Modern
Art during Alfred Barr's illness... he was so overworked he couldn't
sleep. My husband finished a big American art show with work from
1862-1932. It was the only time Whistler's Mother came back from the
Louvre. Holger put Benton in the show. I remember Benton saying, "Look,
you don't have to put me in this show just because we're friends." But
he deserved to be in it. He was becoming famous.
"We were going
to New Mexico and said, 'Let's stop off in Kansas City and see Benton'
(the artist had left New York City in 1935). It must have been the
early 30's (sic). He was living in a very contemporary suburban-type
house. His wife was just as nice as before. She said, 'Come on over for
dinner.'
"He was a totally changed man, totally a nasty guy,
apparently because of his early success then being forgotten. His
paintings were the same in style, only bigger. We stayed for dinner and
his wife did all she could to make it a success. He was so
disagreeable. I think my position at the Museum of Modern Art had a lot
to do with his attitude; and Holger had sponsored modern art for the
W.P.A. (Benton had questioned the validity of modern art and been
severely criticized for doing so, in addition to losing his leading
position in the art world with the rise of modernism.)
Source:
Jessie Benton Evans (the younger)
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