When was thomas hart benton born

Art was far from what his father, Colonel Maecenas Benton, had in mind for his son, whom he shipped of to military school. The elder Benton couldn't have been a more inappropriate mate for Benton's beautiful, artistically-inclined mother, Elizabeth. The Colonel was a rough-hewn politician, four times elected to Congress and known as the "little giant of the Ozarks.

But according to Benton's sister, Mildred Small, it was her mother who supported Tom both financially and emotionally until he married at age Although the Colonel wanted his son to become a lawyer and politician like himself, Small recalls that it was her mother who eventually prevailed and Tom was sent to the Chicago Art Institute.

Benton then went on to Paris and, finally, to New York, where he persevered as an impoverished painter for more than a decade but found his "regionalist" roots. Benton was at war with the Eastern art establishment from the moment he hit his stride as a determinedly realistic painter. At a time when revolutionary art forms were flourishing, Benton was working on huge murals and audacious paintings that reflected raw American life, some of it historical, mostly of ordinary folk caught in the throes of hard work.

According to Adams, the painter had alienated both the left-leaning community of artists with his disregard for politics and the larger New York-Paris art world with what was considered his folksy style. He returned to Missouri. While not all critics agree on Benton's work today, he has his champions, Adams among them:. The murals are packed with complexity and energy.

Here, Benton classicized his own musculature, stressed the highly physical modern male body. The image of Rita conveys Benton's solid knowledge of 16 th -century Italian art. Here, a multi-racial labor force - this in itself is modern and utopian image because of heavily segregated labor in America - busily build the city.

Emphasis is placed on the producer, rather than on material consumption. Benton pictures high skyscrapers, which were markers of the new modern city, urbanism, and industrialism. The presence of a ship recalls Benton's earlier work for the US Navy, and reminds us of New York's prominence as a port city.

Benton applied wood molding to the canvas to separate one vignette from the other, which gives a modern, cinematic quality to the overall composition. Benton had earlier worked in the film industry as well. His rapid compositional shifts in depth between the foreground and deep background recall cinematic effects.

Standing in front of this monumental and brightly colored image, one senses the city humming and pulsating with new energy. The work illustrates an old Ozark folk song of the same name in which a man stabs his wife on account of her supposed infidelity, only to find out later that his suspicion was unfounded. This work is typical of Benton's devotion to sound and music-making in his painting career.

Elements of Synchromism - the musical characteristics of color - are evident such as the radiant layered halo connecting the man and wife in the background, which suggests music resonating. Early works by Pollock echo the undulating forms and use of space evident here in his teacher's painting, and in fact, Pollock who was close to Benton and his family, modeled for the harmonica player in the foreground.

Based upon a popular folk song that Benton felt was representative of Missouri lore and mythology, the tale of Frankie and Johnny might have in fact concerned an incident.

Benton freezes the drama and its actors in mid-action as the gun at center fires a bullet. Benton's rhythmic composition is evident in the undulating line made up of the six figures. All the figures and action are heightened and exaggerated as if in a Baroque manner. The eye travels the length of the six characters in a curvilinear line typical of Benton's dynamic compositions and figures. Benton long depicted racial and ethnic minorities within his works, but at times was accused of creating racially stereotypical facial features.

The bright note of red at center brings attention to this pivotal figure that creates the tumultuous action within the canvas. The work demonstrates the difficulties of painting religious imagery and Biblical scenes with a contemporary vocabulary.

Based on the religious parable from the Book of Daniel, Benton recasts the tale within rural America. Here, Susanna is shown bathing, unaware of two elderly, lecherous men who spy on her. The pair will demand that Susanna has sex with them; least they spread salacious rumors about her.

In this scene, the men confer on their plan to blackmail the young Hebrew maiden. Benton's frank and realistic treatment of the Susanna's body, rather than an idealized and sanitized version, breaks from the long tradition of classicizing the female body dating back to antiquities, and would have been radical and shocking to audiences at the time. In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Benton decided to paint large-scale propagandistic paintings to awaken Americans to the evils of fascism.

In only six weeks, Benton produced eight works in a series he called The Year of Peril. His plan was to hang the works at the busy crossroads of Kansas City's Union Station wanting to jolt the travelers and commuters who passed by into awareness.

Throughout the rest of the s, Benton continued to create notable works, including controversial nudes of the mythological Greek goddess "Persephone" and an interpretation of the Biblical story "Susanna and the Elders.

It documented his travels around the U. In addition to his notable work as a painter, Thomas Hart Benton had a long career as an art educator.

There, one of his most notable students was Jackson Pollock , later a leader of the abstract expressionist movement. Pollock later claimed that he learned what to rebel against from Benton's teaching. Despite his declaration, the teacher and student were close at least for a time.

The school dismissed him from his position after Time magazine quoted him saying that the average museum was, "a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait.

His series titled "The Year of Peril" depicted the threats of fascism and Nazism. It included the piece "The Sowers," which references, in a nightmarish fashion, Millet's world-famous "The Sower. By the end of the war, regionalism was no longer celebrated as the vanguard of American art. Abstract expressionism captured the attention of the New York art world. Despite the fading of his celebrity, Thomas Hart Benton actively painted for another 30 years.

Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri. It shows reverence for barn dances, Appalachian ballads, and the African-American influence on country music. The style of painting is unchanged from Thomas Hart Benton's peak period 40 years earlier. Thomas Hart Benton was one of the first American artists to effectively combine aesthetic ideas from modernist painting with reverence for regional realistic subject matter.

He embraced his native Midwest and elevated its history and people through his creation of monumental murals celebrating their everyday life. While some dismiss Benton's role as an arts educator in the development of American painting, echoes of his brash, muscular approach to creating art can be seen in the work of his most famous student, Jackson Pollock. In , the National Academy of Design, an honorary organization for artists, elected Thomas Hart Benton as a full member.

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