First half 20th century
North American Art

North American Art
Before the Second World War

Thomas Hart Benton

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 Thomas Hart Benton

born: Neosho, Missouri; 15 April 1889
died: Kansas City, Missouri; 19 January 1975

Benton worked as a cartoonist for the American (a Missouri newspaper) in 1906. Later he studied at the Chicago Art Institute and then in Paris at the Académie Julian during a three-year visit. When he returned to the United States, he and his friends favored avant-garde art, but he abandoned a modern idiom in his own art about 1920. In 1924, he traveled through the rural American South and Midwest, sketching the scenes and people he encountered.

Benton's images of people and landscapes are done in an original style marked by brilliant color with undulating forms displaying stylized, cartoon like figures. Like his fellow Regionalists, he was annoyed by the domination of French art in American culture. He was convinced that the culture and images from the South and Midwest should be the source of American art. Benton emerged as the defacto head of the American Regionalist painters around the beginning of the depression.

During the depression Benton painted a number of notable murals. Among them are several "City Scenes"(1930-31) for the New School for Social Research in New York City (see below). He frequently transposed biblical and classical stories to rural American settings, as in "Susanna and the Elders" (1938) and "Persephone" (1939); both shown below.

For many years Benton taught at the Art Students League in New York City. Jackson Pollock was one of his pupils. Later he taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, Kansas City, Mo.

Persephone

Frankie and Johnny

Ballad of the Jealous Lover

Romance 1931	Kansas Farmyard	Autumn
Cradling Wheat		Cradling Wheat
Hail Storm 1940	The Lord is Our Shepherd	The Saving
Self	Musician	Huck Finn

First half 20th century
North American Art