Thomas Hart Benton
American Regionalist muralist, and the man who taught Jackson Pollock.
Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri in 1889 into a political family, studied in Chicago and Paris, and returned to America determined to paint it rather than Europe. With Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry he became the public face of Regionalism in the 1930s: rolling, muscular, deliberately unmodern murals of farm work, river towns, industry and American history, several of them still in place in state capitols and universities. He taught at the Art Students League, where Jackson Pollock was among his students, and later dismissed his own influence on him as merely technical. He died in his Kansas City studio in 1975.
Benton worked out his murals through a long sequence of preparatory material — small clay maquettes, oil sketches, drawings — and this preparatory work is much of what comes to market, valued according to how closely it relates to a known finished mural. He also produced lithographs through Associated American Artists in editions of a few hundred, which are the most accessible part of the output and where condition, margins and the sharpness of an impression decide value. Tempera and oil-and-tempera panels are the top of the market.
If you own a work by Thomas Hart Benton
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