Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton 1889-1975, American regionalist painter, b. Neosho, Mo.; grandnephew of Sen. Thomas Hart Benton and son of Congressman Maecenas E. Benton. In 1906 and 1907 he attended the Art Institute of Chicago and at 19 went to Paris, where he remained five years. On his return to the United States, he designed movie sets, managed an art gallery, and continued to paint. The best-known American muralist of the 1930s and early 40s, he executed murals for the New School of Social Research (later sold) and the Whitney Museum, both in New York City; the Missouri statehouse, Jefferson City, Mo.; and the Postal Service and Dept. of Justice buildings, Washington, D.C. He is noted for his dramatization of American themes. His style is graphic, strong in color, repetitious and insistent in the use of rhythmic line. July Hay (1943) is in the Metropolitan Museum. Benton taught painting at several colleges and art schools.

Bibliography: See his autobiographical An Artist in America (1951, rev. ed. 1968) and An American in Art (1969); K. A. Marling, Tom Benton and His Drawings (1985) and R. D. Hurt and M. K. Dains, ed., Thomas Hart Benton (1989).

Benton, Thomas Hart (1889–1975), grandnephew of the Missouri senator of the same name, had a deep sense of relation to the traditions of that state, where he was born and which he depicted in paintings and murals, such as those in the Truman Library. He wrote two autobiographies, An Artist in America (1937) and An American in Art (1969), and illustrated an edition of Grapes of Wrath.