From: National Gallery, Washington D.C.
Named after his great-uncle, a five-term senator, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was born on April 15, 1889, in Neosho, Missouri.
His father, Maecenus Eason Benton, was a lawyer and a United States representative from 1896-1904, so the young Benton spent his early years in both Washington, DC, and southwest Missouri.
Benton dropped out of high school at 17 and started working as a cartoonist for the Joplin American newspaper.
His mother, Elizabeth Wise Benton, was supportive of his artistic ambitions, but Benton’s father enrolled him in the Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois, in 1906 before agreeing to allow him to attend the Art Institute of Chicago in 1907.
The following year Benton traveled to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian.
There he met California artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright (American, 1890-1973) and began to experiment with Macdonald-Wright’s synchromist style of abstract painting.
In 1911 he returned to the United States and settled in New York.
He taught briefly at the Chelsea Neighborhood Association, where he met his future wife, Rita Piacenza, one of his students.
During World War I Benton served at the naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, where he made illustrations for a catalog of ships and military equipment.
After the war Benton went back to New York, and in 1922 he married Piacenza.
The couple was married for 53 years and had two children.
They regularly spent summers on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Benton’s work until the early 1920s was generally modernist and often abstract.
In 1924, however, Benton traveled to Missouri to see his sick father.
Returning to his home state inspired him to reclaim his midwestern roots and break with modernism, focusing instead on American rural subjects such as life in steel mills, logging camps, coal mines, and cotton fields.
Because of his leftist political leanings he championed working class people and represented them as heroes in his paintings and murals.
Benton began to paint in a naturalistic style that was influenced by the Spanish master El Greco (Greek, 1541-1614), and he became known as the most innovative practitioner of mural painting in a decade of great importance for this medium in America.
He completed monumental mural cycles for the New School for Social Research (America Today, 1930–1931, Metropolitan Museum of Art), the Whitney Museum of American Art (The Arts of Life in America, 1932, New Britain Museum of American Art), and the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair (The Social History of Indiana, Indiana University), all of which aroused controversy because of their political content.
By December 24, 1934, when Benton became the first artist to have a work (a self-portrait) featured on the cover of Time magazine, he was regarded as one of the three leading American regionalist painters, along with Grant Wood (American, 1891-1942) and John Steuart Curry (American, 1897-1946).
Throughout this period Benton was an influential teacher at the Art Students League in New York, where Jackson Pollock (American, 1912-1956) was one of his students.
In 1935 Benton left New York and permanently settled in Kansas City, Missouri, where he taught at the Art Institute. His first major project there was a mural for the Missouri State Capitol, A Social History of the State of Missouri (1936).
During this period Benton also completed oil paintings, including two classical nudes in midwestern settings - Susanna and the Elders (1938, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and Persephone (1938–1939, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO) - and more traditional regionalist subjects such as July Hay (1943, The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
He published his autobiography, An Artist in America, in 1937. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Associated American Artists Gallery in New York held a successful retrospective of Benton’s work in 1939.
However, Benton’s frequent controversial statements and harsh criticisms of the Kansas City art establishment resulted in his being fired from the Art Institute in 1941, and enemies frequently attacked his work for being vulgar and unpatriotic.
After World War II regionalism fell out of fashion, but Benton continued to paint rural subjects for the next 30 years, including a number of mural commissions.
These later works generally lack social commentary and are nostalgic views of the preindustrial Midwest.
Benton died of a heart attack on January 19, 1975, in Kansas City, just after putting the finishing touches on a large mural for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee. | Source: Robert Torchia, Catherine Southwick - © National Gallery, Washington D.C.
Legacy and honors
Benton was elected into the National Academy of Design in 1954 as an Associate member and became a full member in 1956.
In 1961, Benton was chosen as one of 50 outstanding Americans of meritorious performance in the fields of endeavor, to be honored as a Guest of Honor to the first annual Banquet of the Golden Plate in Monterey, California.
Honor was awarded by vote of the National Panel of Distinguished Americans of the Academy of Achievement.
In 1977, Benton's story late-Victorian residence and carriage house studio in Kansas City was designated by Missouri as the Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site.
The historic site has been preserved nearly unchanged from the time of his death; clothing, furniture, and paint brushes are still in place.
Displaying 13 original works of his art, the house museum is open for guided tours.
Benton was the subject of the eponymous 1988 documentary, Thomas Hart Benton, directed by Ken Burns and produced by WGBH-TV.
In December 2019, a lawsuit was filed by Benton's daughter, Jessie, her son, and her two daughters against the UMB Bank, a trustee of the Benton Trusts and manager of Benton's estate since 1979: "More than a hundred paintings gone, priceless works of art stored in subpar conditions, paintings sold for fire sale prices - those are the allegations put forward by a new lawsuit filed by the heirs of famous American artist Thomas Hart Benton".
The bank did not directly respond to the specific allegations in the lawsuit but characterized them as misguided.
The bank's president, Jim Rine, said that it regrets that the Bentons chose to resolve the issue through litigation and that the bank takes its role as trustee of Benton's art very seriously. | Source: © Wikipedia
Thomas Hart Benton (Neosho, 15 aprile 1889 - Kansas City, 18 gennaio 1975) è stato un pittore Statunitense.
La sua carriera da artista comincia nel 1907 iscrivendosi all'Art Institute di Chicago.
Decide in seguito di compiere un viaggio a Parigi nel 1909 dove incontra altri artisti Americani, tra i quali Diego Rivera e Stanton Macdonald-Wright, quest'ultimo sostenitore del Sincronismo che influenza molto il lavoro futuro di Benton.
Nel 1913 torna a New York e riprende la sua attività di artista. Viene chiamato alle armi durante la Prima Guerra Mondiale e messo di stanza in Virginia.
L'esperienza ha una forte influenza nel suo stile.
Concluso il conflitto, nuovamente a New York nei primi anni venti, lamentandosi del divario crescente tra l'ascetismo delle avanguardie ed il gusto tradizionale, si dichiara “nemico del modernismo”, attacca il degrado dell'arte moderna.
Benton vuole creare un'arte diretta a tutto il popolo e non soltanto ad una ristretta élite.
Comincia così lavori rappresentativi e naturalistici - realistici ispirandosi alla tradizione di Michelangelo, Tintoretto, El Greco e Daumier, oggi noti sotto il nome della corrente del Regionalismo.
Inizia con piccoli murali di vita quotidiana americana.
Preferisce il murale in quanto include più temi in contemporanea e quindi sono più espressivi per la società, per la visione stessa.
Inoltre il murale è arte pubblica e gli piace l'idea che raggiunga direttamente le persone.
Nel 1932 Benton esegue diversi murali di grandi dimensioni per il Whitney Museum of American Art dal titolo The Arts of life in America.
Sempre nel 1932 avviene un salto di qualità che lo porterà alla fama negli anni a venire.
Ancora sconosciuto, gli vengono commissionati i dipinti murali sulla vita in Indiana che saranno esposti al Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago (Oggi esposti all'Università dell'Indiana).
The Indiana Murals sono influenzati molto dai murali messicani.
Benton coinvolge direttamente gli abitanti dello Stato usandoli come modelli per dare ancora più realismo al capolavoro.
Alla conclusione i murali suscitano però non poche polemiche. Benton non dipinge solamente la gente comune ed illustre che ha fatto la storia dell'Indiana, ma anche personaggi appartenenti al lato oscuro dello Stato, come ad esempio esponenti del Ku Klux Klan.
Sono definiti torvi e minacciosi, mancanti del buon umore che da sempre caratterizza gli abitanti dello Stato.
Ma l'impatto che questo lavoro ha avuto sulla carriera di Benton è immediato.
Si ritrova in una delle prime copertine a colori del Time, dove è presentato insieme agli altri artisti della Scena Americana Grant Wood e John Steuart Curry, ritraendoli come i nuovi eroi della pittura americana ed esaltando il movimento del Regionalismo.
Nel 1935 accetta di realizzare un dipinto murale per il Missouri State Capitol a Jefferson City intitolato A Social History of Missouri, forse il suo più grande lavoro, provocando come precedentemente molte polemiche.
Si stabilisce a Kansas City, sempre nel Missouri, dove accetta un posto da insegnante presso il Kansas City Art Institute; da qui ha la possibilità di accedere alla grande America rurale che sta lentamente scomparendo.
Nel 1937, acclamato dalla critica, pubblica la sua autobiografia An Artist in America.
In seguito produce filmati e litografie in edizioni limitate.
Negli anni dell'insegnamento, il suo più famoso allievo è Jackson Pollock, all'Art Students League di New York. Durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale, Benton crea una serie dal titolo The Year of Peril, mettendo in luce la minaccia del fascismo e del nazismo contro gli ideali americani.
Con la fine della guerra, finisce anche la grande stagione del Regionalismo, messo in disparte dall'espressionismo astratto nascente. Benton nonostante tutto rimane attivo per altri trent'anni, concentrando il suo lavoro non più molto sulla critica sociale, ma per la maggior parte sulla creazione di immagini bucoliche stilizzate delle campagne pre-industriali.
Nella vita privata, Benton sposa Rita Piacenza, un'immigrata italiana, nel 1922 dalla quale ha due figli, Thomas Piacenza Benton, nato nel 1926 e Jessie Benton nata nel 1939. Uniti per 53 anni, Rita muore dieci settimane dopo il marito. | Fonte: © Wikipedia
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