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Thomas Hart Benton

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 3 months ago
 

 

Biography and Works of Thomas Hart Benton 

 

Another top dog of American Regionalism was Thomas Hart Benton.  No other American artist until Andy Warhol understood the art of publicity better or had an unerring eye for the media.  His works were genuinely popular, because they had the ability to cause controversy (Truman 1).  Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri to a political family.  His father was a United States congressman and his uncle was a senator (1).  Benton began to study painting at the Chicago Art Institute and in 1908, he left to study the arts in Paris for the next three years to come.  This is where he would study the abstraction in art that was all over Europe in the early 1900s.  When Benton returned to the United States in 1911 he went to New York and had a peripheral relationship with Stieglitz’s circle of modernists (Burns 2).  Benton was pushed out of this circle eventually and they never invited him to show his abstract work.  He became annoyed at these modernists and he rid of all of his abstract work that he had ever painted.   

 

 

Thomas Hart Benton started to study The Regionalist Movement since he received such terrible rejection from the modernists groups that he one tried to fit in with.  Benton realized that the regionalist’s values were all about idealization and propaganda and he felt that this washed him clean of the modernist’s movement for good (2).  His early works of art in the 1930s were very similar to the artistic movements in Germany and Russia. He did many military paintings and the government commissioned him to do so in hopes that they could recruit soldiers and what a brilliant time to do so since America will go to war not soon after the paintings were created.  In 1934, Benton understood that he had become quite famous, he had an article written about him in TIME magazine and it was in this article that he decided to lash out on the modernists groups that did not accept his works (3).  He said that the modernist artistic movements “were run by a concentrated flow of aesthetic-minded homosexuals.” (3)  Benton also stated in that article, “…none of this (homosexuality) could happen in the Midwest, whose citizens were highly intolerant of aberration.”

 

 

 

In 1935 he was commissioned to paint a mural for the decoration of the House Lounge in the state capital in Missouri (Burns 2). The theme of the mural is the social history of the state, from the pioneer times to the present. Benton had to study Missouri’s history for a long while in order to make his painting as precise as possible. This precision was another quality that Benton had learned from the regionalists movement that swept across America in the thirties. This mural along with some of the other creatins by Thomas Hart Benton are depicted in the slideshow below.  Look closley at the works and it is recognizable that these are in fact products of the regionalist movement.  Also when looking at the slides notice the propoganda that Benton used.  This was the type of art that was prominent in Germany at this time, and these were the paintings that some Americans sought controversy over.  Benton had a vast life that scaled from 1889-1975 and he was a prominent American figure that helped to shape our countrys history. 
 
 
 
 
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Useful Links
 
 
 
Works Cited
 
Burns, Ken. American Stories: Thomas Hart Benton Profile.  PBS Online. 2002.
            <http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/benton/benton/>
 
Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. 30 Sept 2007. Sponser State of Missouri.
            <http://www.trumanlibrary.org/teacher/benton.htm>
 
 
 
 

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