Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was one of the principal American regionalist painters of the 1930s. He imbued the subjects of his work, people of the small towns of the Midwest and South, with a crude, zesty vigor.

Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, the son and grandnephew of a United States congressmen. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1907, then traveled to Paris, where he spent five years observing new trends, familiarizing himself especially with cubism. Upon his return to the United States in 1912, he became a devotee of the synchromism advocated by his friend Stanton Macdonald-Wright. (Synchromism --"with color and sound"--was a nonobjective mode of painting, featuring intersecting planes. It was especially close to French orphism, a branch of cubism.) The work Benton submitted to the Forum Exhibition of American Painting of 1916 showed the influence of synchromism. But during most of...