Thomas Hart Benton
A Life
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3.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Born in Missouri at the end of the nineteenth century, Thomas Hart Benton would become the most notorious and celebrated painter America had ever seen. The first artist to make the cover of Time, he was a true original: an heir to both the rollicking populism of his father's political family and the quiet life of his Appalachian grandfather. In his twenties, he would find his calling in New York, where he was drawn to memories of his small-town youth—and to visions of the American scene.
By the mid-1930s, Benton's heroic murals were featured in galleries, statehouses, universities, and museums, and magazines commissioned him to report on the stories of the day. Yet even as the nation learned his name, he was often scorned by critics and political commentators, many of whom found him too nationalistic and his art too regressive. Even Jackson Pollock, his once devoted former student, would turn away from him in dramatic fashion. A boxer in his youth, Benton was quick to fight back, but the widespread backlash had an impact—and foreshadowed many of the artistic debates that would dominate the coming decades.
In this definitive biography, Justin Wolff places Benton in the context of his tumultuous historical moment—as well as in the landscapes and cultural circles that inspired him. Thomas Hart Benton—with compelling insights into Benton's art, his philosophy, and his family history—rescues a great American artist from myth and hearsay, and provides an indelibly moving portrait of an influential, controversial, and often misunderstood man.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas Hart Benton (1889 1975) had a clear mission as a painter: to be, as Wolff puts it, the "most American" artist. But as an individual, Wolff argues in this comprehensive and critically astute biography, Benton was far more complicated: belligerent, vulgar, and with tendencies toward antielitism and political and cultural conservatism. University of Maine art historian Wolff (Richard Caton Woodville: American Painter, Artful Dodger) grounds Benton's relentless drive and self-confidence in the artist's political family (Benton's father was a U.S. congressman and his great-uncle a well-known senator) and shows how Benton's independent nature and self-proclaimed genius remained constants throughout his training at the Art Institute of Chicago, as a young painter in Paris, and as an increasingly established artist in New York City interested in the power and necessity of art to express common experience. Wolff illuminates Benton's internal life and aesthetic development; sections on his artistic philosophy based in art's ability to transform society and restore lost American folk culture in a corporate, industrial context are some of the book's most interesting, while analyses of Benton's individual works are strong on critical reception and historical context but weaker on aesthetic interpretation. This is a lucid and engaging study of the artist's life in its historical context.
