Benton Thomas Hart

Born on 15 April 1889: Thomas Hart Benton, US Regionalist painter, illustrator and lithographer, who died on 19 January 1975.
He was the son of a congressman and first studied art in Washington DC, where he saw the murals in the capital’s public buildings. In 1907 he enrolled for a year at the Art Institute School in Chicago, visiting Paris the following summer. He studied until early 1909 at the Académie Julian and thereafter independently. Benton rejected academic methods and was exposed to both the Louvre and modernist styles; his interests seem to have focused on Impressionism and Pointillism. In Paris he met Diego Rivera and a number of fellow US artists, such as John Marin and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who had a lasting influence on him. He also read and admired Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, whose thought countered modernist ‘art for art’s sake’ attitudes with a sense of the artist’s responsibility to the social milieu.

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 US 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 US culture. He was convinced that the culture and images from the South and Midwest should be the source of US art. 

      Benton emerged as the defacto head of the US Regionalist painters at about the beginning of the depression. During the depression Benton painted a number of notable murals. Among them are several City Scenes (1930-1931) for the New School for Social Research in New York City. He frequently transposed biblical and classical stories to rural US 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 [28 Jan 1912 – 11 Aug 1956] was one of his students. Later Benton taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design, Kansas City, Missouri. Fairfield Porter was another of his students.