Thomas Hart Benton (artist)

Thomas Hart Benton (artist) (1889-1975), regionalist American painter, known for his vigorous, colorful murals of the 1930s, mostly of rollicking scenes from the rural past of the American South and Midwest.

Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, and named after his granduncle, the famed pre-American Civil War senator. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then spent three years in Paris. Living in New York City after 1912, Benton turned away from modernism and gradually developed a rugged naturalism that affirmed traditional rural values. By the 1930s he was riding a tide of popular acclaim along with his fellow regionalists Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. Benton’s masterpiece, the mural America Today (1930-1931, The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S., New York City), presented an optimistic portrayal of a vital country filled with earthy, muscular figures.

Benton returned to Missouri, taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, and continued to paint both panels and murals. His mural in the state capitol in Jefferson City (1935) stirred protests because of its open portrayals of some of the seamier facets of Missouri’s past. Other Missouri murals are in the Truman Memorial Library, Independence (1961), and in Joplin (1973). Benton’s most famous student was Jackson Pollock, who studied with Benton at the Art Students League in New York City from 1929 to 1931.