Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Thomas Hart Benton Family Trust.

Exhibited:

Benton’s America: Works on Paper and Selected Paintings, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, January 19-March 2, 1991, illus., p. 27

Recorded:

Marling, Karal Ann. Tom Benton and his Drawings: A Biographical Essay and a Collection of His Sketches, Studies, and Mural Cartoons. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1985, illus. in color, p. 122

Thomas Hart Benton was born in the southwestern Missouri city of Neosho in 1889, the son of a U.S. congressman. From an early age he showed a keen interest in art, rebelling against his father’s wishes of a political career for his son. Benton initially studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1907, and then moved on two years later to study in Paris at the Académie Julian. He was exposed to the numerous modern art styles that consumed Paris at the time, and Benton tried his hand Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Synchromism. He returned to the United States and settled in New York in 1912, continuing to paint in a modernist vein.

Benton enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1918. His naval service resulted in a profound shift in his style of art—he began sketching realistic scenes of sailors at work and the landscape of Naval boatyards. He declared himself an “enemy of modernism” and began to develop his own personal style of realism, concentrating on quintessential scenes of American laborers. Benton traveled widely across the U.S., closely observing and sketching the various behaviors and cultures of the country’s citizens.

Benton’s fame started with his 1930 mural commission from the New School for Social Research in New York, depicting “Contemporary America.” In 1932 Benton was selected to paint murals depicting the history of the state of Indiana for the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago. The murals provoked a public controversy, for the artist depicted his subjects in a realistic, and often unflattering light (among the subjects were Ku Klux Klansmen in full costume); they also made his career. In 1935 he was the first artist to be featured on the cover of Time magazine, cementing his fame in American popular consciousness.

Benton had great distaste for the work of modernist painters in New York. He left the city in 1935, resettling in Kansas City, where he began teaching at the Art Institute. Colonial Post is a preparatory drawing for a mural commissioned for a U.S. Post Office in Washington, D.C., although the mural was never realized.

In his murals, Benton attempted to compose his subjects in an illusionary three- dimensional space, avoiding any sense of flatness or mere decoration. As the artist remarked in an interview: “The logic of a design lies in the way its different parts are related to one another. In painting, lines and shapes are set up which lead the eye from one part to another part. These are what we call logical relations… The pictorial logic lies in the flow of lines and shapes from one area to another.” ¹

This pictorial logic is abundantly evident in Colonial Post. The central focus in the drawing is the postman in the foreground, the perspectival lines of the foreground stairs and of the roof above point directly to him. He is drawn in Benton’s typical idiom: the muscular physique with its numerous undulations and slight elongations result in a body of great fluidity. The postman’s backward look leads the viewer to scan the rest of the drawing. First, the two men in middle-ground unloading a carriage, and then on to the figure on horseback, bending over to hand a package to a woman. From there, the forms connect to the ship at sea in the far background, whose prow points back to the postman at front. Thus Benton presents a narrative of mail delivery. Colonial Post is drawn with great precision, and Benton’s handling of the pencil’s gradations allow for many beautiful and varied tonalities throughout. Benton has also applied very subtle, almost vestigial, outlines of many of the forms in red pencil; these marks may appear arbitrary upon first notice, but upon further viewing it is clear that they are another part of the pictorial logic contributing to the overall harmony of the work.