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Thomas Hart Benton was born on April 15, 1889 in Neosho, Missouri, USA into an influential clan of politicians and powerbrokers. Benton's father was a lawyer and United States congressman and his great-uncle (from whom he received his name) was one of the first two United States Senators from Missouri.
Benton spent his childhood shuttling between Washington D.C. and Missouri. Benton rebelled against his grooming for a future political career, preferring to develop his interest in art. As a teenager, he worked as a cartoonist for the Joplin American newspaper, in Joplin, Missouri.
In 1907 Benton enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, but left for Paris, France in 1909 to continue his art education at the Académie Julian. In Paris, Benton met other North American artists such as Diego Rivera and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, an advocate of Synchromism. Wright's influence gave a strong Synchromist leaning to Benton's work.
Benton returned to New York City in 1913 and continued painting. His work as a draftsman in the United States Navy in 1919 changed his style significantly. His artwork during his navy stint concentrated on realistic sketches and drawings of shipyard work and life—a change of focus that would continue throughout Benton's career.
On return to New York in the early 1920s, Benton declared himself an "enemy of modernism" and began the naturalistic and representational work today known as Regionalism. Benton taught at the Art Students League, and was active in leftist politics. He expanded the scale of his Regionalist works, culminating in the America Today murals at the New School for Social Research in 1930-31. He was heavily influenced by El Greco and also taught Jackson Pollock.
In 1932 Benton broke through to the mainstream. A relative unknown, he was chosen to produce the murals of Indiana life that would become that state's contribution to the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, Illinois. The Indiana Murals stirred controversy; Benton painted everyday people in an unflattering light, including Ku Klux Klan members in full regalia. The controversy landed Benton on the cover of Time magazine and made him a household name. The mural panels are currently displayed at Indiana University in Bloomington with the majority on display in the "Hall of Murals" at Indiana University Auditorium. Four additional panels are displayed in the former University Theatre which is connected to the Auditorium. The final two panels, including the most controversial panel, with images of the Ku Klux Klan, are located in Woodburn Hall.
In 1935 Benton left New York, where artistic debates were heated and endless, for a teaching job at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas City afforded Benton greater access to the rural America then disappearing. Benton's sympathy was with the working class and the small farmer, unable to gain material advantage despite the Industrial Revolution. His works often show the melancholy, desperation and beauty of small-town life. His most promising student at that time was Roger Medearis, a talented tempera painter; but Medearis' career was stunted by the later fashion for Abstract Expressionism fostered by a later Benton student.
Benton's students at the Art Institute included many of the future painters of the Midwest heartland. His most famous student, Jackson Pollock, whom he mentored in the Art Students League, would go on to found the Abstract Expressionist movement—wildly different from Benton's own style. Jackson Pollock often said that Benton's traditional teachings gave him something to rebel against. Pollock never gave up on the idea art needed impact on the audience, in this way he followed Benton.
Another one of Benton's famous students at the Art Institute was Jackson Lee Nesbitt. Though they were very different in age, Nesbitt and Benton were also friends who traveled and sketched together often -- and the art they created was very similar. When financial necessity caused Nesbitt to give up his art for a successful career in the advertising industry, Nesbitt did not speak with Benton for many years out of embarrassment.
In 1941, Benton was dismissed from the Art Institute after calling the typical art museum "a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait" and similar homophobic remarks.[1] Despite this, his work remained popular until the end of the decade, when it was eclipsed by the rise of Abstract Expressionism.[2]
For the rest of his career Benton concentrated on murals in public buildings in the Midwest, such as the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City. His work on the Harry S. Truman presidential library in 1960 initiated a friendship with the former U.S. President that lasted for the rest of their lives. Benton died on January 19, 1975 at work in his studio, brush in hand.
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