Art: Tarted Up Till the Eye Cries Uncle

If ever an American artist had seemed dead and buried a decade ago, along ! with the movement he had led, that man was surely Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975)...

Art: Grass-Roots Giant

"His work didn't mean anything to me. But he did exactly what he wanted to do, every day for 85 years, and how many of us can claim that much?" In its way,...

Art: Benton v. Adams

Thirty-nine years ago this month, a Missouri boy named Thomas Hart Benton arrived at Chicago's Art Institute to learn cartooning. "Besides cartoonists there were...

Art: Rebel Against Rebellion

Back in the 19303, Thomas Hart Benton boasted that his pictures—like those of his fellow Midwesterners Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry—were "illustrative,...

Art: Be Kind

Until last week, museums were generally unkind to Thomas Hart Benton and Benton was unkind to museums. They resemble graveyards, he remarked ten years ago,...

Art: Benton Hates Museums

Art museums, which lately got some sharp criticism from New York City's Park Commissioner Robert Moses (TIME, March 10), last week caught another egg squarely on...

Art: Joke

Thomas Hart Benton received $16,000 for the remarkable murals of American life which he painted on 1,000 square feet of wall surface in Missouri's capitol at...

A Bunch of Softies

Tough-talking, little (5 ft. 4 in.) Missouri-born Thomas Hart Benton, most swaggeringly masculine of U.S. painters, blew into Manhattan last week and let go a...

Picasso's Progeny

It was Arshile Gorky who got right to the point. "If Picasso drips," he said, "I drip." That was in the late 1930s, a time when deciphering Picasso's intentions,...

Art: Dappled Glories

The most eagerly awaited show of the U.S. art season opens this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City: the retrospective of Jackson Pollock's work,...