Thomas Benton

The U.S. painter and graphic artist Thomas Hart Benton was born on April 15, 1889 in Neosho, Missouri, into an influential Midwestern political family. Against his father's wishes, however, Thomas Hart Benton decided to become an artist and studied at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago from 1907. In 1909 Thomas Hart Benton went to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. In Paris, Thomas Hart Benton also met the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, whose painting style and murals or wall paintings made a lasting impression on him. In 1912 Thomas Hart Benton returned to the USA. During World War I he served in the U.S. Navy in Norfolk, Virginia. During this time he produced numerous works depicting the maritime world and the everyday life of shipyard workers. Important representative of American regionalism and muralism. After the end of the war, Thomas Hart Benton went to New York. From 1926 to 1935 he teaches at the Art Students League in New York. In the 1920s, he develops his very own realistic style with two-dimensional, clearly outlined, solid forms. His subjects are everyday scenes of the hard-working rural population. In the late 1920s he received his first major commission for murals at the New School for Social Research in New York, for which he painted ten canvases on the theme of "America Today". In 1933 he was commissioned to paint murals depicting life in Indiana for the exhibition "A Century of Progress" at the Chicago World's Fair. Thomas Hart Benton continues to devote more of his paintings to everyday life in the Midwest of the United States, they are rural images of pre-industrial agricultural life. Benton and other painters paint nostalgic works whose subjects are meant to be accessible to the everyday viewer. The Regionalists strive to create American art that shows the history, people, and folklore of their country. In December 1934, Benton's photograph graces the cover of Time magazine; the issue is devoted to three painters, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry, who are seen as emerging and most important exponents of forward-looking painting. In 1935, Thomas Hart Benton is at the height of his career. But he also reaps harsh criticism in New York, which judges his work as too backward-looking. Thomas Hart Benton left New York and returned to Missouri to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935. One of his major works now is the Missouri Social History murals for the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City. In 1937, he published his autobiography, An Artist in America. Fading fame with the rise of abstract expressionism. Thomas Hart Benton teaches in Kansas until 1941. After World War II, his fame and that of the more patriotically minded Regionalism fades with the advent of the new avant-garde style of Abstract Expressionism and non-representational art. In 1942, Thomas Hart Benton is inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1956 he is elected a member of the National Academy of Design. Exhibitions in recent years feature the paintings and prints of Thomas Hart Benton and his role in American art history, including "Benton and America in the 1930s" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2004. Most recently, Thomas Hart Benton's works will be shown 2009-2011 within the traveling exhibition "Modern Life: Edward Hopper and His Time" at Bucerius Kunstforum, Hamburg, Kunsthalle Rotterdam, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Thomas Hart Benton died on January 19, 1975 in Kansas City, Missouri.