1889-1975
Painter

A Vision of America.

The decade's best-known practitioner of Regionalist painting, Thomas Hart Benton's work was aimed, he said, at an audience which "was never subjected to the aesthetic virus." Benton, born in Neosho, Missouri, was the son of a populist congressman, Maecenas E. Benton. On the campaign trail with his father he grew comfortable in Washington salons as well as revival meetings. From a youthful career as a reporter and illustrator for a paper in Joplin, Missouri, he attended the Chicago Art Institute. He moved on to art school in Paris (1908—1911), where he found himself unimpressed by the contemporary artists he met — Diego Rivera, George Grosz, Wyndham Lewis. Between 1918 and 1924 Benton abandoned modernism in favor of what he termed Americanism — a depiction of what he saw as the American character: hardworking, nonintellectual people who sometimes fell prey to circumstance...