Thomas Hart Benton Display at TGS

Thanks to a grant written by Tremont High School Art Teacher Nichole Roller, the grade school is proud to display the work of Thomas Hart Benton, the second of this year's four featured artists.

Here are some facts about the artist:

As described by a Ken Burns documentary for PBS: His paintings were burly. Energetic. And as uncompromising as the Midwestern landscapes and laborers they celebrated.  Thomas Hart Benton depicted a self-reliant America emerging from the Depression.  Today his works hang in museums, but during his life, Benton preferred to hang them in 'ordinary restaurants' and meeting places where 'regular people' got together.    

•   Named for great-uncle Thomas Hart Benton, U.S. Senator influential in Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny

•   Was expected by his family to become a politician, but chose to pursue Art instead.

• Most famous for murals done during the 1930s, usually having to do common everyday scenes from Midwestern life.

• Murals glorified "the common working man"

• Style not liked by the established Paris and New York art world of the day… his work described as too "folksy" and "hokey"

• Deliberately distorted the way the figures looked… exaggerated bones and muscles, making things curvy to suggest movement and activity.  The opposite of static posed figures.  Also the curvy figures complemented the curvy fields, sky, animals, etc. of the Midwest landscape

• Personality described like this:  He was a dark, active dynamo, only 5 ft., 3 1/2 in. tall. He was outspoken, open, and charmingly extreme; he had a great mane of hair and a face the texture of oak bark.  He wore rumpled corduroy and flannel, and walked with the unsteady swagger of a sailor just ashore.  He chewed on small black cigars and spat in the fire.

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