Benton, Thomas Hart (1889-1975)

US painter. One of the leading Regionalists and American Scene painters, Benton is known for his scenes of Midwestern daily life, history, and folklore. In the 1930s and 1940s Benton created murals for the Federal Art Project that illustrated his interpretation of the USA. His depictions of the Midwest, featuring preachers, gangsters, and criminals, are painted in a bold, colourful, and dynamic style intended to suggest the restless energy of a new nation. Murals such as American Today (1930; New School of Social Research, New York City), and The Missouri Mural (1936; Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City, Missouri) are characterized by his use of rhythmic lines and powerful colour.

Born in Neosho, Missouri, he was the grandnephew of Senator Thomas Hart Benton. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago 1907-08, then in Paris until 1911, and for several years after his return to the USA he was strongly influenced by modernist styles such as cubism. However, by the early 1920s Benton, along with many other US artists such as fellow Regionalists John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, and the New Realist painters Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, began to completely reject modernism and developed an entirely ‘American’ art free of European influence.

Turning to his own environment, and portraying every aspect of American life, past and present, Benton sought to create an epic of the nation's history and myth. His crowded pictures, frequently combining several scenes in one, as in the mural City Activities with Subway (1930; New School for Social Research, New York City), stress the role of the individual in the building of a nation. July Hay (1943; Metropolitan Museum, New York) is more typical of his small, more lyrical images of rural life.

Benton taught art for many years, Jackson Pollock being one of his more notable pupils. He published two volumes of autobiography: An Artist in America (1951) and An American in Art (1969).