Thomas Hart Benton 1885-1975
Thomas Hart Benton is one of the most unique painters in the canon of art history, possessing a style entirely his own. His formal art training began at the Art Institute of Chicago at the turn of the century and finding himself immersed in a rapidly growing metropolis, Benton found creative energy in urban industrialism and architectural innovations. “…he found a modern romanticism in the architectural expression of steel. The urban exuberance of movement, expansion, and height was, years later, transformed into the thrusting images that recorded his sense of the kinetic energies coursing through American life.”
In 1908 he moved to Paris and continued his studies at the Academie Julian where he was exposed to Post-Impressionism and the Modernist trends that were burgeoning in Europe at that time. Although he experimented with Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Synchromism and Constructivism, Benton ultimately rejected these styles - as well as grew disillusioned with the thrill of modernity - and when he returned to the United States he established his own, completely unprecedented, inherently American, form of painting which honored rural America. "...Benton tried to honor both art and life, or, as he indicated, to develop an artistic construction parallel to reality but not an imitation of it. Benton’s aesthetic quests were modified and ultimately given direction by his increasing concern for relevant subject matter, and by the beginning of the 1920s he had found a way to bring together his art, his political beliefs, and his environmental ideas. He began to focus more precisely on American themes."
As America transformed into an industrial superpower during the years of World War II, and Benton’s rural America began to vanish, he began to favor landscapes over figures, including in his Martha’s Vineyard works. Matthew Baigell notes, “By the 1950s and certainly in the 1960s, Benton could no longer insinuate himself easily into conversations; people had become leery of strangers, and the old roads had, as often as not, been paved or even turned into four lane highways. As a result, his ability to…record the typical appearance of a region’s inhabitants, simply evaporated.” (Thomas Hart Benton, New York, 1973, p. 178)