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.)