Calendar: April 15

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.

Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton, “Achelous and Hercules”, Detail, Egg Tempera and Oil on Canvas on Board, 1947

Achelous and Hercules is displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The painting was executed in egg tempera and oil on canvas, and affixed to a plywood panel measuring 62⅞ by 264⅛ inches.

The central figure is the muscular, shirtless “Hercules” grappling with the horns of the bull. A second man, also wearing bluejeans and no shirt, stands by the bull’s haunch and holds the end of a rope that swirls into another man’s hand in the foreground, where the work of woodchopping has been interrupted. The bull’s tail points into the surging, wavelike woods that rise out of the distance; a barn and silo emerge from the woods to the right. The undulating line of the rope and tail visually connect the woodlands and the timber produced from it.

Achelous and Hercules was painted for display at Harzfeld’s department store in Kansas City. The store specialized in ready to wear clothing for women, and Benton later acknowledged that it was strange to see his work “in an atmosphere of silk nighties, pink slips and perfume.” It was his first mural commission since his historical murals for the Missouri State Capital ten years before.

In light of controversies over that project, Benton sought reassurance that Harzfeld’s corporate president, Lester Siegel, would refrain from trying to exercise artistic control. Siegel in turn asked that Benton observe a certain degree of decorum. After the store closed in 1984, its parent company Allied Stores Corporation made a gift of it to the Smithsonian through the institution’s Collections Acquisition Program.

Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton, “People of Chilmark (Figure Composition)”, 1920, Oil on Canvas, 166.5 x 197.3 cm, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.

Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, Thomas Hart Benton was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His fluid, sculpted figures in his paintings showed everyday people in scenes of life in the United States. Though his work is strongly associated with the Midwestern United States, he studied in Paris, lived in New York City for more than 20 years and painted scores of works there, summered for 50 years on Martha’s Vineyard off the New England coast, and also painted scenes of the American South and West.

In ”The People of Chilmark”, one of his earliest paintings, Benton posed his wife, her brother and friends for the figure composition. He explained that the swirling assemblage of figures was a continuation of his Renaissance studies.