Thomas Hart Benton: Musical Evenings

T.P. on flute, Rita on guitar, Thomas Hart Benton on harmonica

"On the tenth of July in the year that Rita and I bought and settled ourselves in our new Kansas City house, 1939 it was, we had a new baby girl born to us. We named her Jessie. Her coming stopped our annual trip to Martha's Vineyard, but she was so welcome that it made no difference. Our boy, T.P. [Thomas Piacenza] and I slipped off into Arkansas for a little river floating and fishing, but we didn't stay long. The new baby and the new house drew us back. My new studio also was an invitation to work. I stuck close to home and for a longer time that I had in many years.

T.P., now thirteen, had given up his childhood recorders and was now playing the flute. To while away the evenings, I picked up the harmonica again, and we worked together on duets, old duets by Samartini, Handel and others by little-known German and Italian composers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The craze for trying to make music came back to me and I bought a virginal, a little pre-harpsichord type of instrument. Soon others joined us.

They would come to dinner, and after dinner we played. Rita fixed up big dinners. This and the chance to play unusual scores drew more players and pretty soon our Saturday nights became musical events. We'd have twenty or twenty-five people for dinner and maybe fifty or more afterwards. We never knew who'd be sleeping on the living room couch when morning came. 

(There is a recording of 'Saturday Night at Tom Benton's' by the group for Decca at this link.)

Rita began to have enough. Besides, wartime restrictions, now beginning to come, made all things more difficult to manage. When T.P. reached his eighteenth year and was called out of the University into the Army, they ceased altogether. I dropped the harmonica and have not played now for years."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.) 

Thomas Hart Benton: Missouri State Capitol

How Thomas Hart Benton worked with the door frames

"The Indiana mural had publicly reestablished my ties with the Midwest, and a number of my Missouri friends began thinking of ways to set up a Benton mural project for our home state. A bill was passed by the Missouri legislature in the spring of 1934, commissioning a mural for the Capitol in Jefferson City. Shortly after this I received an invitation to take over the painting and drawing classes at the Kansas City Art Institute, and with the assurance that my duties there would not be allowed to interfere with work on the mural project, I moved to Kansas City and established my home there.

The mural space offered was made up of three walls, one fifty feet long and two of twenty-five feet. The height of the space was sixteen feet. Each wall was cut by a very prominent door, which created designing problems. Whatever I did had to be adjusted to them. After approximately placing the subject sequences in a drawing, I constructed a plastilene model of the whole mural space, setting the doors on the first plane of the design. The actions of the figures also began on this plane but moved back to planes further in the rear. In order to attach the frames of the doors to the design of the mural and keep them from standing out too much, I continued them illusionarily into the mural space, imitating their color and texture in the final painting. In this way I also produced architectural frames for my representations of Missouri legends Jesse James, Frankie and Johnny, and Huck Finn, since because of their mythical character, I did not want to introduce them into the main part of the mural.

My contractual deadline was January, 1937, but I finished the work in December of '36. As usual, the 'Social History of Missouri' raised a storm of criticism, this time from good old hidebound, middle-class Missouri conservatives who saw its 'common life' representations as an insult to the State. However, the mural is still in the State Capitol and has grown so respectable that school children from all over Missouri are now bussed to see it."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: Indiana Murals

"I had hardly washed my brushes after the completion of the Whitney mural when I was called upon to do a set of murals for the State of Indiana's exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair, which was to open on the first of June, 1933. I signed a contract for this early in December of '32, which gave me six months of execution time. The theme of this mural was the 'Social History of the State of Indiana.' The space to fill was two hundred feet long by twelve feet high, an immense project for so limited a time.

As I had to begin from scratch, knowing nothing of Indiana's history, the first month was given over to research and to traveling over the state to get the feel of it.  The alignment of my subject matter into progressive sequences and its sculptural and pictorial organization, plus the mass of drawings I had to make, took about a month and a half, so that I was finally left with only a little over three months' time for execution. But working night and day [with assistants], I got the job done."

Benton divided the murals into two parallel, chronological sequences, one focused on culture and one on industry. The narrative of both streams dramatized the changes in society and the environment, capturing the aspirations and hard work that helped Indiana transform from a wilderness to an agricultural and industrial state. 

The industrial panels feature early indigenous potters, the pioneer age, the evolution of river transportation to the railroads, and life on the farm up through the gas and steel booms in central and northwest Indiana. The cultural panels begin with the Mound Builders and follow the development of small farm communities into larger cities, the evolution of early schools into large universities, and social issues facing Indiana and the nation. Once completed, the murals headed to Chicago. Benton was on site not only to supervise their installation but also to paint a free-standing panel of the Indiana Dunes.

After the fair concluded, the murals were moved to the Indiana State Fairgrounds where they languished for nearly five years. In 1939, President Wells and Lieber worked together to convince then-Governor Cliff Townsend to donate the murals to the University of Indiana.

On December 8, 1939, the Indiana Murals arrived on the Bloomington campus. The university placed the 16 central panels in the IU Auditorium grand lobby (now known as the Hall of Murals); four panels with "recreation" themes in IU Cinema (then the University Theatre); and two panels with "business" themes in Woodburn Hall—then the center of IU's new business school.

When it was all said and done, Benton had traveled 3,000 miles studying Indiana's history and culture, used 10,000 eggs in the making of his egg-tempera paint, and created 22 panels measuring 12 feet tall and 232 feet wide! Later on he also oversaw the installation and retouching of the murals on the Bloomington campus."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton and "The Indiana Murals" on the Indiana University Bloomington website: https://murals.sitehost.iu.edu/history/index.html.) 

 

Thomas Hart Benton: "The Arts of Life in America" Mural

"Arts of the South" from "The Arts of Life in America" murals
by Thomas H. Benton

"With the completion of the New School mural, I made the final step into the third phase of my development, which was the application of my methods, by now thoroughly under control, to the scenes, behaviors, and mythologies of American life.

Mrs. Juliana Force, director of the Whitney Museum, who purchased a dozen or more of the drawings made for the New School mural, commissioned me to do a series of panels for the library of the Whitney. The theme I chose was 'The Arts of Life in America,' meaning by this the popular arts of the cities and countryside - the arts practiced by, or directed toward, people in general. 

Mrs. Force's commission stipulated that it be finished in September, which gave me about five months for its planning and execution. The improvement and curtailment of my planning methods was of great help in meeting this date. I painted this wholly in egg-tempera from drawings and pilot sketches in black and white paint, and I had it ready to unveil at the appointed date.

Critical reaction was even more adverse than those occasioned by the New School mural. Though I was becoming hardened to this kind of reception, some of it angered me. I was particularly offended when a group of artists - my fellow teachers at the Art Students League - wrote, signed and published a round-robin letter to one of the New York newspaper critics, applauding him for his condemnation of my work.

My responses, which grew with the criticisms, did not, of course, help to reduce them. But it certainly brought me to the general public's attention. A lot of people rose to my support, and while during the early days of the thirties, artists were everywhere depending on government doles, I was able to sustain myself in a moderate but sufficient fashion by sales of my paintings. My critics had done me the ultimate favor of providing me with a living."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: America Today Mural, Pt. 2

"Some twenty-five years later, when on a trip to New York, I visited the New School, I found, because the Board room had been turned into a classroom and that folding chairs and blackboards were stacked against the surface of the mural. This treatment had evidently been going on for a long time, because very marked lines of abrasion had developed over the mural surface. Scrapes from the blackboards had obliterated parts of the basic drawing as well as the surface color.

I called this to the attention of Alvin Johnson, founder of the school, who still maintained offices in the building. He was shocked when he examined the damages, confessing that he had not looked closely at the mural for years. He said that the professors who used the room for their classes were naturally more interested in their subjects than the mural and probably had not noticed the growth of the abrasions either. In any case no one had reported anything. In the end I agreed that I would clean the mural if the New School would put a protective rail about it. This was done, and in the autumn of 1956, I took the old varnish off the surface, repaired the abrasions, and put the work pretty well back into its original shape.

In June of 1968, I again visited the New School to receive an honorary degree. Looking over my mural room, I found that the mural's surface was again frightfully dirty and that most of the restorations I had made in 1956 had chipped off. I was not overly shocked, because a few years back one of my friends, who was an expert in the problems of picture preservation, had inspected the work and had warned me that the high temperatures of the mural room would so desiccate the egg-tempera paint films that they would, in time, break up. He said that only the installation of proper air, temperature, and humidity controls in the room would save the mural. 

The school was willing to install the controls. And this time, because of its superior adhesive power, I used an acrylic polymer emulsion paint, instead of egg-tempera. Fortunately a varnish, removable from such paint, had been made, so the mural can be easily cleaned when, and if, that again becomes necessary - and without affecting my restorations. With the newly controlled conditions in the room I believe the mural will have a long life. But with paint, as with other things, Man proposes, God disposes."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: America Today Mural, Pt. 1

"America Today," Thomas Hart Benton's mural for the New School for Social Research

"By this time my explorations of American life were providing the subjects for all my easel paintings, and I decided that I would make a survey of contemporary America for my first big public mural for the board room at New York's New School for Social Research. I had all the subject material necessary in the drawings of my sketchbooks, and after getting the project approved, I set about organizing it.

The representation of such a theme would necessitate the amalgamation of many subjects having little or no relationship to one another, certainly no pictorial relationship. The problem was to get them together in such a way that they would function as parts of an overall pictorial form. This was solved by composing each subject unit so that some parts on the periphery of its design were left open so that they could be connected with the forms on the edge of the adjoining units. In some areas of the mural where these differences were great, sections of the moulding that framed the mural were injected into the mural design itself. Separations such as this are often found in the illustrated pages of nineteenth-century magazines and books using decorative linear patterns.

The mural was done on panels of wallboard, reinforced with one by three inch cradling. A heavy linen was glued to the panels and coated with gesso. Work began with underpaintings of distemper and was finished with overpaintings of egg-tempera. On some of the dark areas transparent glazes of oil paint were thinly applied.

At the end of six months the mural panels were ready for installation. I had executed them in a loft, a few blocks away from the New School. The panels were removed successfully from the loft, but as they had to be entered horizontally into the third floor window slots of the school and as the movers, not realizing the brittleness of the gesso ground, allowed them to be bent, they got into the boardroom in a badly cracked state. However, only a few of the paint surfaces had chipped, and after they were attached to the wall, I repaired the damages."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: A Pattern of Life

"The Music Lesson" by Thomas Hart Benton

"My life and work commenced taking on very definite patterns. In the winter I would teach and paint in New York, with occasional sessions at some of the Eastern colleges, Dartmouth and Bryn Mawr among them. In the summer I would be for the most part at Martha's Vineyard, where married by now, my wife and I were acquiring properties. Every year in the spring or early autumn I would take a trip for several weeks into the hinterlands, generally into some mountainous country of the South - Virginia, North Carolina, east Tennessee - or westward into the Missouri Ozarks.

These were inexpensive trips, as they had to be for me. They began by train or bus, to get out of the heavily settled areas, and were continued, mostly, by foot, with occasional rides picked up in some friendly fellow's Model T. I traveled with a knapsack on my back, in which I carried a heavy Navy jacket, a few changes of light clothes, and sketching materials. 

On each trip I made quantities of drawings. Having in mind their possible use for painting, I treated these drawings somewhat as maps of form. Most could be readily turned into sculptural forms, projected in clay or plastilene. Sometimes I would make two drawings of the same subject: one to find its general form, another to describe the detail of that form. I often ended a trip with three or four filled sketchbooks. Not every drawing was successful, but the very making of it would cut a memory impression and thus help build up the general image of America which I was now searching for.

Once in a while I would find a companion for my travels, a younger student friend who liked me for myself rather than for what he might learn from me. One of these was Bill Hayden, who went on several trips with me. On the first we started out from New York in a station wagon, equipped for camping, and toured the southern mountains, the cotton and rice and sugar country of the Deep South, and the western cattle country and the Rockies. A mass of drawings came of this expedition, and a selection shown at the Delphic Gallery in New York in 1928."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: Missouri

"Boomtown" by Thomas Hart Benton

"In March of 1924,  I returned to Missouri to watch over my father, who was dying of cancer in a Springfield, Missouri, hospital. Springfield was in Ozark hill country and its familiar character gave me a nostalgic feeling. The people who came to see my father also affected me by their frank, outgoing friendliness. I made up my mind to see more of them and to regain touch with their country, which, I reflected, was also mine. I guess I began at this time my return to Missouri, though it would be another eleven years before that was accomplished in fact.

In 1926 I made another visit to Missouri, arriving there in early May, and took a three week walking trip through the Ozark Hills making pen-and-wash drawings as I went. This was the beginning of those studies of the American rural scene which would hold so much of my interest for the next fifteen years. It was the beginning of what came to be called my 'Regionalism.'

I developed a constantly repeated formula for this field reporting. After the first few days of my walking trip, I noticed that the drawings in my sketchbooks, which were made with pencil, were beginning to smear. Due to the movements of my walking, the pages of these books were rubbing together, sometimes almost obliterating the drawings. I began, then, a practice of covering the main lines of these with India ink and washing a thin tone of watercolor - sepia or umber - over the rest. The gum in the watercolor held the pencilled modellings. In this way I was able to preserve my material intact for later use.

After completing my Ozark hike, I went out to the West Texas oil country, then 'on the boom.' I made many drawings of the western oil industry and the rough life accompanying it. I carried my explorations on this trip as far west as Santa Fe and Taos, returning east at the end of the summer. A friend put out a strong hand at the Art Students League in New York and procured a teaching position for me there. I taught at the school for nine years, until I returned to Missouri for good."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.) 

Thomas Hart Benton: The American Historical Epic

"Prayer" from Thomas Hart Benton's "American Historical Epic"

"During the winters in New York City, I developed my "History of America" project. The plan for this had been worked out as a progression of chapters, each chapter to contain five formally related pictures covering, over all, twenty-five feet of lateral space. The first chapter was to symbolize the period of discovery and settlement, the second the period of colonial expansion, and so on. Having acquired architect Ely Kahn's support, I counted on the Architectural League to exhibit my history as I produced it. 

In the winter of 1923-24, I finished the first chapter. It was accepted by the League and hung, and received a great deal of attention, including some sharp critical attention. This was due to its aesthetic, which was totally at odds with the prevailing views of mural work. Architects in general were then committed to the idea that mural paintings should not break the plane of the wall. They should be flat, pale in color and unobtrusive. The French muralist Puvis de Chavannes provided the most acceptable type of mural.

During the winters of 1925 and 1926, I completed the second chapter of my American history, which was also exhibited at the Architectural League. During this time, having come across Cennini's famous treatise on Renaissance techniques, I started working with the tricky problems of egg-tempera painting. I also returned to experimenting again with distemper. To get richer color for the latter, I made the mistake of using too heavy a glue solution, with the consequence that most of the paintings cracked so badly they were not worth preserving.

But my histories had by now given me something of a reputation as a mural painter."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton. Benton abandoned this series in 1926 after completing the two out of five chapters mentioned above. He had grown tired of its historical subject matter.)

Thomas Hart Benton: The Making of a Mural

In this Encyclopedia Britannica film from 1947, Thomas Hart Benton takes us through the steps of creating his famous Achelous and Hercules mural for now-defunct Harzfeld's Department Store in Kansas City. As he proceeds, you can see the clay maquettes that he routinely sculpted as part of his process. The mural is now preserved at the Smithsonian Institution.

 

Thomas Hart Benton: Finding the Method

"Approaching Storm" by Thomas Hart Benton

"One day while reading an article on Tintoretto, I came across an account of his procedures in the creation of the famous 'Last Supper' in the Venetian church Santa Maria della Salute. For this complicated painting, Tintoretto had made a small sculpture to work out the positions of the figures and give them a logical and realistic light and shade. 

As the idea of trying my hand at historical painting persisted, it occurred to me that a similar procedure might help me with such a project. Perhaps by modelling my compositions sculpturally, as Tintoretto had done, I could supply the concrete references I appeared to need. I spent a number of months learning to make effective dioramic sculptures and to compose pictorially with clay and plastilene. In the end I developed modelling techniques which allowed me to compose rapidly and to arrive at a product which was transferable to my paintings. I could give imaginative conceptions a substantive character.

Stylistic changes began to occur in all of my work. In a short while my painting completely changed its character, and from this time on they would all possess a certain stylistic continuity. This would eventually come to affect even my studies from real life. My people and landscapes, even fruits and flowers, looked much like sculptural carvings. It had taken me eleven years to dig a method out of the artistic jungles of my time. 

It took some seven or eight more years to explore the second phase of making the method serviceable for expressing the meanings that my experiences in American life were to provide. And, before it was finished, the third phase, unhappily, would find most of the meanings, which it took so many years to formulate, would disappear with the dissolution of the world that generated them."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: WWI

“Embarkation – Prelude to Death” by Thomas Hart Benton

"America was by this time deep in the First World War, and ascertaining that I was eligible for the draft and might end up in the European trenches, I signed up for the Navy. After various experiences I was put to work making freehand studies of installations and activities about the Norfolk Naval Base. This was my first reportorial work and was fascinating. Some of the new attitudes it generated were to have lasting effects.

Airplanes, blimps, particular kinds of ships, coal loaders, dredges could not be merely 'expressed,' they had to be accurately defined, their characteristics distinctly shown. Along with my drawings, and often from them, I made a series of watercolors which, though less detailed and much freer in execution, were primarily descriptive. A selection of these was exhibited at the Daniel Galleries in New York during January, 1919. A number were sold and no doubt survive in different collections.

During the latter part of my sojourn in the Navy I had been permitted to live 'off base' in a Norfolk lodging house. In the parlor there I had found an old-fashioned four-volume history of the United States, plentifully illustrated with engravings in the various styles of the period. I began to ask myself questions. Why could not such subject pictures dealing with the meanings of American history possess aesthetically interesting properties, deliverable along with their meanings? History painting had occupied a large place in the annals of art. Why not look into it again, I asked, and try to fill the contextual void of my own painting, give it some kind of meaning. Though unaware of it, I began here that fundamental change of mind which was soon to separate me wholly from my Parisian background and give a new, and, this time, permanent direction to my painting."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: Lessons from the Movies

"Jessie with Guitar" by Thomas Hart Benton

"The problem of how to live in New York, how to maintain myself there, was partially solved in the summer of 1914 by my friend Rex Ingram, who had abandoned his sculptural ambitions to become an associate director in the moving picture business. Rex procured employment for me to do research and draw up elevations for movie backgrounds and sets. As the movies of these days did not employ color, I made my set designs and backdrops in black and white. My conceptions were enlarged and sometimes modified by professional scene painters. Under Rex's sponsorship, moving picture work would continue for several years providing a basic, if sporadic, income.

Observing the scene painters, I became interested in 'distemper,' or glue painting, and began experiments with that medium. The quick drying of the glue solutions, with which their pigments were saturated, permitted rapid over-painting and precise brush drawing, both of which struck me as highly advantageous. From this time on, I would continue to experiment with distemper painting.

I also began a practice which was later to become habitual. This was to underpaint with distemper and overpaint with oil. The distemper, drying rapidly, permitted me to make up my mind about what I was going to do in a third of the time it took with oil and without the risk of muddied color. Later, egg-tempera would take the place of distemper, but the principles of such combinations of mediums, the use of which was commence here, are the same. Later it would lead to the egg-tempera techniques which I used for my murals of the thirties."

To be continued 

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: New York

"The Boy" by Thomas Hart Benton

"Realizing that I would never make a living in my home town, my father agreed to finance a stay in New York, where I thought I might find opportunities with my portraits or with some of the commercial arts which flourished there. I arrived in New York in early June of 1912, and set myself up in the old Lincoln Square Arcade. 

Shortly after arriving, I received a small commission to space the lettering and pictures of an importer's booklet on Japanese porcelain and china. I obtained an introduction to a Mrs. O'Hara, a lady then widely known as a professional china decorator. Visiting her studio, I picked up the basic techniques for the application of vitrifiable paints and enamels, which I would later put to some practical use for myself.

One of my friends was now receiving very substantial sums of heads of pretty girls, executed in pastels, which he sold to magazines and calendar houses. If I could find a pretty enough girl, I said to myself, there is no reason why I could not paint straight realistic portraits of her and sell them. I sought out an attractive model who was willing to pose for a share of the profits if I sold her picture. My first venture was successful. I sold my young lady's portrait for one hundred dollars to a weekly magazine. This, however, was my only success in the pretty-girl business. Though I tried for weeks, I could not duplicate it.

I continued to try my hand in other commercial directions, though with but very moderate success. I invested some of my newly earned money in porcelain bowls and china plates which I decorated in the flat manner of my florals. This proved to be a fairly profitable venture. I sold all of my products. But purely decorative work did not long satisfy me. I turned again to portraits, and, among others, painted one of my younger sister. I submitted this picture to the National Academy jury, but it was not accepted. However, at an exhibition of the Academy 'refuses,' it attracted attention and was reproduced in 'Collier's,' then a nationally circulated magazine - my first widespread publicity."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: Au Revoir, Paris

"Fire in the Barnyard" by Thomas Hart Benton

"A letter from my father warned me that the money set aside for my education was dwindling and also asked for proof that I was accomplishing something. I had not heretofore thought of submitting pictures to the Salon juries, but I now decided that I had better do so. Acceptance in a Paris salon would indicate to my home folks that I was getting somewhere. I put expensive frames on two of my new pictures and prepared to submit them to the Salon. Sadly they were rejected, and my discouragement increased with the knowledge that my Parisian sojourn was approaching its end.

At this time my mother, with my two younger sisters, arrived suddenly in Paris to see the sights of the city, putting me to some hot and fast scurrying around to disguise my way of life which, though conventional enough for the Quartier Montparnasse, would have seemed odd from a Missouri viewpoint. She brought the news that my father was unwilling to further support my Parisian studies and that I must either find a way to make a living in Paris or return home. As I knew the chances of money making for an American in France were too slim to consider, I reconciled myself to the return. In late July of 1911 I went back to America, to my hometown in Missouri, arriving there just under three years after I had left it.

In my lecture tours of the thirties when questions came up about my Parisian work, I would answer that I had first studied at the Academie Julian and then had painted as an Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist, leaving the sense of a kind of orderly progression. Actually the pattern of my Parisian experience was a most illogical zigzag. I was subjected to too many influences to hold any direct course. I was, in fact, much too young and much too impressionable to lay such a course, and had arrived at no stylistic convictions. Looking back, I think that the best I got out of my stay was an introduction to art history, a love for French literature, and an ability to think in a language other than my own."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: Return to Nature

"A Tree in the Forest" by Thomas Hart Benton

"Finding myself in this situation, I determined to get away from Paris, forget all theories, return to painting directly from nature, and see if I could produce any finished pictures. With the assistance of a French artist whose acquaintance I had made, I found a place in a small mountain village . This area was quite rugged and offered attractive scenery full of running streams and numerous waterfalls. Landscape motifs were everywhere. I remained there from mid-August until early November, and freed from all the pressures of Paris, I did the best work of my sojourn in France.

Amalgamating the various methods I had learned and casting out the influences I did not find immediately useful, I managed to complete some dozen canvases. Although a few were broadly brushed, I used the Pointillist method of painting with small spots of color for most of them. However, I abandoned all schematic color treatment, trying to paint the colors and tonal values of nature as they appeared. One of these paintings, a chestnut tree "Contre Soleil,' has survived. The rest were destroyed, along with my other Parisian experiments, and in fact, nearly all my youthful efforts, when our family home at Neosho, Missouri, burned to the ground in 1917.

When November arrived and it became too cold for outdoor painting, I returned to Paris, hung my new work about my studio, and prepared some little cards announcing an 'atelier thé' for its exhibition. Some of these cards I delivered, the others I left on the counter at the Cafe Dome, where my American and English acquaintances could see them. This effort at self-promotion proved a complete flop. Only three people came, my neighbor, John Carlock, my mentor and Donald Wright. Since my three visitors, though friendly to me, thoroughly detested each other, the gathering was less than a success. Wright was the only one to show real interest."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: Paris

"Cradling Wheat" by Thomas Hart Benton

"It is hard to realize today the temper of the Parisian art world during the time of my stay there. A very considerable number of that world cultivated highly 'intellectualist' attitudes. This was so, irrespective of how meager might be the scholarship supporting them or how uncertain the manner of expressing them in art.

There were no movies, no radios or other inexpensive sources of entertainment, so the habit of reading was widespread - much more so than in student circles of today, where it is rare to find a young artist who has information beyond that provided by the 'arty-critiky' columns of the current newspapers or weeklies. Neophyte artists devoured books and attended Saturday morning lectures at the Sorbonne. They concocted theories, sought historical justifications for these, and the studios and cafes rang with arguments. Few painters took their easels before nature without ideas to test or exploit. Though most of these were immature and half-baked, some even ludicrous, they arose from a genuine and lively spirit of inquiry. And they fed a constant urge toward new and novel experimentation.

Salons and gallery exhibitions began to be held regularly, and they displayed the work of all the 'ultramodern' experimenters, including that of the 'Fauves' and the emerging cubists. Although I had been aware of the existence of this new painting, the impact caused by seeing so much of it all at once was upsetting. The emphasis on design and especially the very novel varieties of that, and the totally arbitrary use of color - or what appeared to be so - introduced me to a mass of unsuspected problems.

Although I was very enthusiastic about my various experiments and always felt that each change would lead to my artistic salvation, I now began to realize that I had done little or nothing in the way of substantial production. I could point to no accomplishments. I had not even exhibited in a salon."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: Parisian Studies

"Le Jardin Potager et le Clocher d'Eragny" by Camille Pissarro

"I was certain that studying at the Academie Julian would not lead to any kind of art that I wanted to produce. I was not sympathetic to the charcoal techniques insisted upon in the drawing classes. My habitual approach approach to drawing, developed perhaps by my constant use of pen and ink, put more emphasis on line than these techniques permitted. The poses of the models were held for a week, sometimes two, and it was hard for me to sustain interest for so long a time. To add to my general dissatisfaction with the Academie, my pride was assaulted when I was assigned for my first two weeks to a cast-drawing class. Nevertheless, I stuck to the place for eight months.

At the end of the spring term on 1909, I left the Academie Julian and took to drawing independently at the Academie Collarossi, a famous sketching studio of the Quartier Montparnasse. There was no instruction, but a model was always there, and by coming early, one could get close enough to see. This had rarely been the case for me at Julian's, where studio positions were always assigned. Also, mature and even famous artists sketched at Collarossi's, providing more stimulating examples than the plodders at the Academie Julian.

I also began regular visits to the Louvre, sometimes daily, making rough pencil studies of the drawings, sculptures, and paintings there. This was continued all during my Parisian stay and provided an introduction to Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance art. There was also a permanent exhibit of the Impressionists' work at the Luxembourg Museum. The picture that most attracted me was a sunlit scene of red tile roofs and backyard gardens by Pissarro [see above]. Perhaps because of the clear-cut exposition of method in this picture, I made myself an ardent disciple of Pissarro and tried to paint as nearly in his manner as I could. I began with still lifes, but when spring came, I carried my experiments out to the parks and streets of Paris."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: Academie Julian, Pt. 1

"The Studio" [Academie Julian] by Marie Bashkirtseff

"The Academie Julian vied with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts for supremacy as the top art school of the world. It was famous everywhere as a factory for turning out draughtsmen. Training procedures at the Academie were not different from those I had encountered in Chicago, but were more rigorously applied and enforced. 

The figure-drawing classrooms were large and lit by skylights. At one end of each was a model stand, and radiating in a semicircle from that, stools and easels were set in such a way that all students could see the model, though those in the rear usually had to stand to do so. The seats nearest the model were reserved for the more advanced students who, while they were closer to their subjects, had problems of acute foreshortening to deal with. These 'master draughtsmen' took pride in handling such problems and often would remain in the Academie year after year for the pleasure they took in solving them. For some of these students this kind of exercise became the 'all in all' of art. They became perpetual students and never did anything else.

On each easel in the classroom was a drawing board to which was thumbtacked a lightly grained sheet of drawing paper. Each sheet on each board was the same size. The students drew with thin sticks of charcoal and always held erasers for corrections. Each and every one kept a plumb line handy, which was held up now and then to determine the correct angles of things, the angles which, for instance, the model's shoulders or hips took, in the perspectives resulting from the student's particular position. In working out these angles, it was the practice to close one eye to establish a fixed point of vision - an exact point of focus - somewhat as a camera does.

The whole method was strictly visualistic, and in a most narrow and rigid sense. But it had a philosophy. This went about as follows. Drawing and painting were visual arts. In order to make sure that you visualized correctly you were supposed to divest your visual experiences of all the conditioning effects of non-visual experiences. Such experiences distorted your visual ones. They made you see incorrectly. You were to get rid of your memory, your imagination, and all preconceptions they might engender and learn to see 'purely,' with what John Ruskin and the American philosopher William James called an 'innocent eye.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: Art Institute of Chicago

Portrait by Louis Betts, Benton's Painting Teacher

"I first undertook oil painting in the class of a kindly and complaisant elderly artist named Freer and then in the classes of Louis Betts, a fashionable portrait painter of the time. Betts was a brushwork virtuoso who followed Sargent, Chase, and others of that school. I was not officially enrolled in the classes, but with the easy discipline of the Chicago Art Institute, I simply moved in. 

Both Freer and Betts favored a limited palette, at least for beginners. Since I was to come back to this palette - or one close to it - time after time in my later painting, it had better be described. I was composed of white and black, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, a Venetian red, and a green oxide dulled with black. Occasionally a blue might be added. 

This limited range of color encouraged free brush drawing which, particularly with Betts, was essential to 'vital' painting. The chief models for study in his classes were Frans Hals and Velazquez, enlarged reproductions of whose works were tacked up about the classroom walls. 

With teacher Frederick Oswald's encouragement and through the influence of a letter which he wrote to my parents, I went to Paris, France, in mid-August of 1908, enrolling a little later for the autumn term at the Academie Julian."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

Thomas Hart Benton: First Studies

Thomas Hart Benton

In his autobiography, artist Thomas Hart Benton wrote: "Although I had drawn pictures of one sort or another from earliest childhood, the first actual instruction I remember receiving was at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., when my father was in Congress. Saturday morning classes for young people were conducted there, but I was not much inspired because we drew from wooden cubes and other geometric figures, the very appearance of which was forbidding.

I preferred as models for my picture-making the engravings in my father's history books, especially those which showed bloody looking battles. I became quite proficient at this - enough so, when I was seventeen, to hold down a job as cartoonist for the Joplin American, a newspaper in the bustling lead and zinc center of Joplin, Missouri. My success there set me to thinking of journalistic art as a permanent pursuit.

In order to improve my drawing for such a career, I enrolled in February of 1907 at the Chicago Art Institute. Shortly after my arrival there, however, my ideas of the future began to change. A very sympathetic teacher, Frederick Oswald, in one of whose classes I had enrolled, induced me to try painting in watercolor. The experience proved fascinating and soon so engrossed my attention that I forgot my journalistic ambitions.

I obtained also in Chicago my first insights into the art of designing - of consciously planning, or composing, pictures before attempting to execute them. Oswald was enthusiastic about Japanese prints and encouraged continuous study of the way they were put together. Through continued observation of the prints, I learned to arrange my pictures in definite patterns and acquired a taste, from such artists as Hokusai, for flowing lines which lasted all my life."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography" by Thomas Hart Benton.)

The New Hope Artists Colony: Fern Coppedge

Painting by Fern Coppedge

"The Pennsylvania Impressionists comprised one of the strongest male-dominated artists' groups in the early twentiteth century. But by the twenties, two significant women painters, M. Elizabeth Price and Fern Coppedge, entered their circle. Both were members of the Ten Philadelphia Painters, a group established for exhibition purposes. 

Although not as ambitious as Price, Fern Coppedge was extremely prolific, and for this reason her work is better known to art dealers and collectors today. She studied at the Art Students League with William Merritt Chase in New York City and at the Art Students League Summer School with John F. Carlson in Woodstock. She then moved to Philadelphia, where she studied with Daniel Garber at the Pennsylvania Academy. She also attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women where she studied with Henry Snell. She first visited the New Hope area in 1917 and settled in Lumberville in 1920, near Garber, Johnson and Taylor.

Coppedge became noted for her local scenes, particularly noted for her winter landscapes. She was something of a local character, as was described in a review of a 1933 exhibition of her work:

'We remember seeing Mrs. Coppedge trudging through the deep snow wrapped in a bearskin coat, her sketching materials slung over her shoulder, her blue eyes sparkling with the joy of life... Born a man, she undoubtedly would have manned a trawler and sailed the Arctic Ocean. For her passion is space, the open spaces of lands and sea. There are no delicate still lifes or posed nudes in her exhibition.'

Coppedge was much influenced by both the rapid, spontaneous brushwork of Redfield and by the vibrant color of Garber. In addition, after 1925 her art also reflects the influence of the school of Paris. Her painting methods were not unlike the rugged outdoor painting methods employed by Redfield, Schofield, and Rosen. In fact she painted many landscapes in the back seat of her car. She was honored by a one-woman show at Bryn Mawr College in 1938. She died in New Hope, Pennsylvania, on April 21, 1951, at the age of 67. She was cremated, her ashes merged with the familiar flowing waters of the Delaware River which she lived next to and painted for 40 years in Lumberville and New Hope. "

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Pennsylvania Impressionists" by Thomas Folk.)

The New Hope Artists Colony: Robert Spencer

"Lime Kilns, Point Pleasant" by Robert Spencer

"Robert Spencer married Margaret Fulton on 27 February 1914. She had been a student of WIlliam Lathrop and was the niece of the well-known American marine and landscape painters, Alexander and Birge Harrison. Unfortunately, their marriage proved to be a most unhappy one. The unfortunate state of the Spencer household is preserved in an unpublished manuscript by their daughter, Tink Spencer, titled 'Mother Was a Problem - from Bucks County to Bedlam.'

Sadly Spencer suffered several nervous breakdowns beginning in the early twenties, which culminated in him taking his life in 1931. In his last interview, he stated:

'In these days of our super-mechanical age, there are still those who, despite modern efficiency, hard-boiled businessmen and correspondence school, worship idealism and who work with a view of creating a beautiful thing regardless of whether it can be translated into dollars and cents or traded on the exchange... Civilizations come and go, different forms of government occur, morals change - yet art persists. And Cervantes, I am convinced, wrote Don Quixote with a deeper purpose than he has been generally credited with. At any rate, when we are all weary, tired of facts, tired of efficiency, we turn to romance, and we find it more safely in pictures, in literature, in music - in short, in the arts.'

Spencer had a unique artistic perspective. He could find romance in the most ordinary of Pennsylvania views, making local mills into Spanish castles. But his lower-class scenes demonstrate his unique position in Pennsylvania Impressionism, specifically, as well as in American Impressionism in general. His work transcends the merely charming. His mundane viewpoint has left a legacy that is truly beautiful."

(Excerpts from "The Pennsylvania Impressionists" by Thomas Folk.)

The New Hope Artists Colony: Robert Spencer, Style

"Repairing the Bridge" by Robert Spencer

"From 1906 through about 1910, Robert Spencer lived in towns in close proximity to the Delaware River, such as Frenchtown, New Jersey, and subsequently Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania. But about 1906 he began to depict local tenements along the Delaware Canal. Although the artist had already arrived at the subject matter he would become noted for, the work lacked the draftsmanship and penetrating mood of his later work.

In the summer of 1909, Spencer studied painting with Daniel Garber, although Garber was one year younger. Spencer lived with Garber at Garber's home and studio in the wooded glen of Cuttalossa Creek at Lumberville. Of all of Spencer's painting instructors, none had so great an influence as Garber, in particular his meticulous draftsmanship. Spencer incorporated this quality into his highly individual style.

Eugen Heuhaus gave this description of Spencer's look:

'Homely subjects under his hand become appealing and interesting to an unusual degree. His technical means are well adapted to the surface variations of the dilapidated brick structures he so loves to paint. With a playful and nervous touch he creates charming and varied surfaces that attract and hold one's attention like a beautiful embroidery. His color is personal and most distinguished; beautiful ranges of warm and cold grays, violets, blues and reds harmoniously blend together the many different objects which he includes in one canvas, as the atmospheric truthfulness of his work is a proof of his fine sense of observation as well as his power to create fine color harmonies of very subtle quality.'

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Pennsylvania Impressionists" by Thomas Folk.)