A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of April, Solar Year 2018

A Dash of Gray

Thomas Hart Benton, the American painter and muralist, was born on April 15, 1889, in Neosho, Missouri.

in 1907 Thomas Hart Benton enrolled at The School of The Art  Institute of Chicago. Two years later, he moved to Paris in 1909 to continue his art education at the Académie Julian. In Paris, Benton met other North American artists, such as the Mexican Diego Rivera and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, an advocate of Synchromism.

On Benton’s return to New York in the early 1920s, Benton declared himself an “enemy of modernism”; he began the naturalistic and representational work today known as Regionalism. He expanded the scale of his Regionalist works, culminating in his “America Today” murals at the New School for Social Research in 1930-31. In 1984 the murals were purchased and restored by AXA Equitable to hang in the lobby of the AXA Equitable Tower at 1290 Sixth Avenue in New York City; in 2012 the murals were donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1935, Benton settled in Kansas City, Missouri, and accepted a teaching job at the Kansas City Art Institute. This base afforded Benton greater access to rural America, which was changing rapidly. Because of his Populist political upbringing, Benton’s sympathy was with the working class and the small farmer, unable to gain material advantage despite the Industrial Revolution. His works often show the melancholy, desperation and beauty of small-town life.

In the late 1930s, he created some of his best-known work, including the allegorical nude “Persephone”. It was considered scandalous by the Kansas City Art Institute, and was borrowed by the showman Billy Rose, who hung it in his New York nightclub, the Diamond Horseshoe. It is now held by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

Benton taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1926 to 1935 and at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935 to 1941. His most famous student, Jackson Pollock, whom he mentored in the Art Students League, founded the Abstract Expressionist movement. Benton’s students in New York and Kansas City included many painters who contributed significantly to American art: Pollock’s brother Charles Pollock, Frederic James, Reginald Marsh, Margot Peet, Jackson Lee Nesbitt, and Glenn Gant.