Thomas Hart Benton

At 85 years old, Thomas Hart Benton physical status not available right now. We will update Thomas Hart Benton's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Thomas Hart Benton, 1889 – January 19, 1975) was an American painter and muralist.

He was a participant in the regionalist art movement, alongside Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry.

His dynamic, sculpted figures in his paintings brought everyday people in scenes of life in the United States.

His career is strongly associated with the Midwestern United States, the state in which he was born and where he spent the majority of his life.

He studied in Paris, lived in New York City for more than 20 years, painted scores of works there, summered for 50 years on Martha's Vineyard off the coast of New England, and also created scenes of the American South and West.

Early life and education

Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, into a prominent family of politicians. Mary and Mildred's younger sister, as well as Nathaniel, were present in his younger brother. Elizabeth Wise Benton and his father, Colonel Maecenas Benton, were both lawyers and four-time candidates as US congressman, and he was elected as a lawyer and four times. Maecenas named his son after his own great-uncle, Thomas Hart Benton, one of the first two United States senators elected from Missouri, who is known as the Ozarks' "little giant." Benton spent his childhood shuttling between Washington, D.C., and Missouri, considering his father's political career. In 1905-06, his father took him to Western Military Academy in the hopes of preparing him for a political career. Benton protested against his father's wishes as he grew up in two world cultures. He wanted to pursue his passion in art, which his mother encouraged. He worked as a teenager for the Joplin American newspaper in Joplin, Missouri.

Benton enrolled at The Art Institute of Chicago in 1907, with his mother's help. In 1909, he returned to Paris to continue his art studies at Académie Julian. He didn't feel he was able to work at art until he married in his early 30s. "My mother was a big factor in his growth," Mildred's sister said. Benton met with other North American artists, such as the Mexican Diego Rivera and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, an advocate of Synchromism, in Paris. Benton later adopted a Synchromist style, having been influenced by the previous generation.

Later life

Benton created The Year of Peril, which portrayed the threat to American values by fascism and Nazism during World War II. The prints were widely distributed. Regionalism fell from favor after the war, only to be eclipsed by the rise of Abstract Expressionism. Benton lived for another 30 years, but his work included less recent sociology and depicted pre-industrial farmlands.

During the film The Long Voyage Home, a cinematic adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's plays, Benton was hired in 1940, as well as eight other leading American artists, to film dramatic scenes and characters. Benton was also a brilliant harmonica performer, recording an album for Decca Records in 1942 titled Saturday Night at Tom Benton's.

He continued to paint murals for Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri; Treasure at Westport Landing (1956), for Lincoln University in Kansas City; Father Hennepin at the turn of the century (1961) in Joplin; and the Opening of the West for the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence; His commission of the Truman Library mural resulted in his friendship with Harry S. Truman that lasted until the former president of the United States' demise.

Benton completed his final mural, The Sources of Country Music, in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1975, while at work in his studio.

Source

Early career and World War I

Benton began studying in Europe and then migrated to New York City in 1912 and resumed painting. He served in the United States Navy and was stationed at Norfolk, Virginia, during World War I. His war-related work had a long-term influence on his appearance. He was encouraged to make drawings and illustrations of shipyard life and work, and the need for clear documentation was also influential in his later designs. Benton drew the camouflaged ships that docked in Norfolk harbor later in the war, classed as a "camoufleur." His duties were required for several reasons: to help identify ships that might be lost, and to have documentation of other Allied navies' camouflage schemes. Benton later said that his service with the Navy "was the most significant thing I''ve ever done for myself as an artist."

Later career

Benton called himself a "enemy of modernism" upon his return to New York in the early 1920s; he began work today known as Regionalism. He toured America, drawing sketches and ink wash drawings of the items he saw. He'll revisit these sketches again and again as a reference for future paintings. He enlarged the scope of his Regionalist paintings, culminating in his America Today murals at the New School for Social Research in 1930 to 31. The murals were purchased and restored by AXA Equitable in 1984 and installed in the AXA Equitable Tower's lobby in New York City's lobby. In December 2012, AXA donated the murals to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "America Today" Mural Rediscovered" by The Met's exhibition "Thomas Hart Benton's "America Today" Mural Rediscovered" ran until April 19, 2015. The murals were described as showing how Benton absorbed and exploited El Greco's fame.

In 1932, Benton came to the mainstream. He won a commission to paint the murals of Indiana life envisioned by the state in the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, and he was a relative unknown. The Indiana Murals sparked controversy; Benton painted everyday people and included a recreation of events in the state's past that some people did not want to see. Critics also chastised his work for displaying Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members in full regalia. In 1925, the KKK attained its highest level. In Indiana, 30% of adult males were predicted to be members of the Klan, and 1924 KKK members were elected governor and other political positions.

These mural panels are now on display at Indiana University in Bloomington, with the majority of them hanging in the Auditorium's "Hall of Murals." Four new panels are on display in the former University Theatre (now the Indiana Cinema) attached to the Auditorium. Two panels, including the one with pictures of the KKK, are located in a lecture hall at Woodburn Hall.

Benton created The Arts of Life in America in 1932, a series of large murals for a young Whitney Museum of American Art's beginning. Arts of the City, Arts of the West, Arts of the South, and Indian Arts are among the major panels. Five of the panels were purchased by the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut in 1953 and have since been on display there.

Benton was featured on Time magazine's first color covers on December 24, 1934. In an article titled "The United States," Benton's work was included alongside that of fellow Midwesterners Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. Scene: The three children were portrayed as the next great American artists, and Regionalism was dubbed a significant art movement.

Benton left New York's cultural debates in 1935 after he "alienated both the left-leaning community of artists with his disregard for politics and the wider New York-Paris art movement with what was described as his folksy style." In Jefferson City, he was hired to create a mural for the Missouri State Capitol. Perhaps Benton's best work is A Sociogeography of Missouri. "I have every right to make decisions, I would say the Missouri mural was my best work," the poet said in a 1973 interview. As with his earlier work, controversy arose over his portrayal of the state's past, including slaves in Missouri's history, including Missouri's outlaw Jesse James and political boss Tom Pendergast. Benton embraced the Regionalist art movement upon returning to Missouri.

He settled in Kansas City and accepted a teaching position at the Kansas City Art Institute. This base gave Benton more access to rural America, which was rapidly evolving. Benton's sympathy with the working class and the small farmer, who were unable to gain market advantage amid the Industrial Revolution was due to his Populist political upbringing. His paintings often reflect the melancholy, desperation, and beauty of small-town life. He created some of his best-known artwork in the late 1930s, including the allegorical nude Persephone. The Kansas City Art Institute deemed it scandalous, and the Diamond Horseshoe was borrowed by showman Billy Rose, who hung it in his New York nightclub. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City now holds it. It's "one of the finest works of American pornography," Karal Ann Marling, an art historian, says.

Benton's autobiography An Artist in America, which was critically acclaimed, was published in 1937. "Here's a rare thing, a painter who can write," writer Sinclair Lewis said of it. Benton also began to produce signed, limited-edition lithographs, which were then available at $5.00 each through the Associated American Artists Galleries, based in New York.

According to Benton's autobiography, his son was enrolled from age 3 to nine at the City and Country School in New York in exchange for his teaching art. In "City Activities with Dance Hall," one of America Today's top ten panels, he included the school's founder, Caroline Pratt.

Benton lived at the Art Students League of New York from 1926 to 1935, and at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935 to 1941. Jackson Pollock, his mentor in the Art Students League, founded the Abstract Expressionist movement in New York. Pollock has often said that Benton's traditional teachings gave him something to protest against. Benton spent a summer in the Western United States with another of his students, Glen Rounds, who went on to become a prolific author and illustrator of children's books. Benton taught at the Ste. Benton in the 1930s. Genevieve Art Colony in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, is located in the United States.

Many painters who contributed significantly to American art were among Benton's students in New York and Kansas City. They included Pollock's brother, Eric Bransby, Charles Banks Wilson, Frederic James, Reginald Dodd, Reginald Marsh, Richard Nesbitt, Roger Medearis, Glenn Gant, Fuller Potter, and Delmer J. Yoakum. Dennis Hopper was also taught at the Kansas City Art Institute for a short time; Hopper was later known for his work as an independent actor, filmmaker, and photographer.

Source