Benton Thomas Hart
(1889-1975)
Thomas Hart Benton was born in
Neosha, Missouri, the great-nephew of the American politician and
statesman after whom he was named. He studied at the Art Institute
of Chicago from 1907 to 1908; and he then went to Paris, where he
studied at the Academie Julian until 1911. While in Paris, through
his friendship with the painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright, he became
strongly influence by the "Synchronist" school of painting. The
Synchromists took an abstract approach to color, which they used to
express emotion and mood rather than to depict reality. He continued
to work in the Synchromist manner, even after his return to the
United States in 1912. Despite having participated in the Forum
Exhibition of Modern American Painters in 1916, he broke with
modernism and with the avant-garde in the early 1920's, and adopted
an approach that he, and others, called "Regionalism", in which
familiar scenes and characters from small-town life in the American
Midwest are painted in a popular (even nostalgic), yet neither slick
nor pandering, style.
The approach had roots in the
populist socialism that had gained many adherents among idealistic
young people in the late 1920's and early 1930's. Benton's figure
drawing was accessible, often cartoon-like; his compositions were
energetic and active; and his colors were rich. He painted mural
scenes of American life in the early 1930's, including a well-known
work for the New School for Social Research in New York City. He
taught at the Art Students League of New York, where his students
included Jackson Pollack, who would later become an important
abstract expressionist. In 1934, when a Benton portrait was featured
on the cover of "Time" magazine, both Benton and his Regionalism
started catching the attention of a much larger public. In 1935, he
became the director of the City Art Institute and School of Design
in Kansas City, Missouri, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Throughout his career, Benton
continued to reject the orthodoxies of modernism, which he saw as
elitist, neurotic, and obscurantist. He hoped to produce a
particularly American visual art, steeped in North American folk
traditions and free of what he saw as the decadence of European high
culture. One of his innovations was the representation of
Mythological and Biblical narratives in American types. He worked in
both mural and easel forms and wrote many articles on art, as well
as two autobiographies.
