Artist

Thomas Hart Benton

born Neosho, MO 1889-died 1975 Kansas City, MO

Media - J0001255_1b.jpg - 87594 — Thomas Hart Benton seated in front of History of New York , © Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum J0001255

Also known as: Tom Benton
Thomas H. Benton
Born: Neosho, Missouri, United States
Died: Kansas City, Missouri, United States
Active in: New York, New York, United States

Biography: An American scene painter who, along with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, was a leading regionalist painter of the 1930s. Well known for his murals and portraits depicting everyday life, particularly in the Midwest, Benton authored two autobiographies, An Artist in America (1937) and An American in Art (1969).
Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection (Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)
: Artist Biography
Benton's idiom was essentially political and rhetorical, the painterly equivalent of the country stump speeches that were a Benton family tradition. The artist vividly recalled accompanying his father, Maecenas E. Benton—a four-term U.S. congressman, on campaigns through rural Missouri. Young Tom Benton grew up with an instinct for constituencies that led him to assess art on the basis of its audience appeal. His own art, after the experiments with abstraction, was high-spirited entertainment designed to catch and hold an audience with a political message neatly bracketed between humor and local color.
Elizabeth Broun "Thomas Hart Benton: A Politician in Art," Smithsonian Studies in American Art Spring 1987, p. 61

Works by this artist (17 items)

View all artworks

Nelson’s Monument

Artist

Esther Blaikie MacKinnon

Daten.d.

etching on paper

Lions in a London Square

Artist

Esther Blaikie MacKinnon

Date1884-1934

etching and aquatint on paper

Goats in a Field

Artist

Esther Blaikie MacKinnon

Daten.d.

color lithograph

Weaver

Artist

Esther Blaikie MacKinnon

Daten.d.

color lithograph

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Achelous and Hercules by Thomas Hart Benton is a raucous, gaudy, vibrant mural, 22 feet long, full of surging shapes and churning rhythms. By the time Benton painted it for a Kansas City department store in 1947, he had already been tagged by the East Coast critics as an uncouth, outspoken, provincial artist, so he may have been playing to his critics with his bright colors and athletic figures.

BETSY BROUN: “Achelous and Hercules” by Thomas Hart Benton is a raucous, gaudy, vibrant mural, twenty-two feet long, full of surging shapes and churning rhythms. By the time Benton painted it for a Kansas City department store in 1947, he had already been tagged by the East Coast critics as an uncouth, outspoken, provincial artist– so he may have been playing to his critics with his bright colors and athletic figures. I always imagine this scene with the sounds of Aaron Copland’s “Rodeo” in the background, or maybe it’s closer to “spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountains’ majesty, and the fruited plain.”

In this large post-war mural, the high-flying, allegorical figure offering a laurel wreath and trailing a red drape seems especially out of place. She is there to remind us that this is not a simple Midwestern farm scene. Benton took the story of Achelous and Hercules from Bulfinch’s mythology. The myth of Achelous and Hercules explains how the development of agriculture depended on the taming of rivers that overflow their banks and destroy cropland. At flood season, the river god Achelous assumed the form of an enraged bull. He wrestled with Hercules for the favors of Deianira, who symbolized the fertile river delta. In the struggle, Hercules vanquishes the bull and tears off one of his horns, which is magically transformed into a cornucopia, spilling harvest abundant. Interestingly, this mural was painted in 1947, just as the Marshall Plan was put into place. Under the Marshall Plan, a key program of President Harry Truman, American cash and food was used to help rebuild Europe after the war. So, celebrating American abundance may have been a timely subject. This would have been especially true for Benton, who wanted to revitalize his own career by associating himself with President Truman. Like Truman, Benton was short, feisty, irreverent, and from the state of Missouri.

Twenty years later, in 1966, Benton suffered a serious heart attack. As he began to recover, he painted “Wheat”. An endless army of heavy-headed wheat stalks marches back into infinity. This is Benton’s emblem for the democratic masses of America, rather like Walt Whitman’s use of “Leaves of Grass”. The first two rows have been harvested, but green shoots signal a new generation coming. One stalk is broken but not yet harvested. This may be Benton himself in the year after his heart attack.

It’s interesting to me to see how Benton’s desire to picture America reached a kind of noisy crescendo in the big public commission, “Achelous and Hercules”. But a brush with death concentrated his mind without changing his plan. In a strange way, the underlying purpose of these two pictures is the same: to celebrate nation and nature by linking them inextricably together.

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Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum commemorates Treasures to Go, a series of eight exhibitions from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, touring the nation through 2002. The Principal Financial Group is a proud partner in presenting these treasures to the American people.

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Thomas Hart Benton

Works by this artist (17 items)

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