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Thomas Hart BentonProdigal Son1939
1939
$5,746.39
£4,125
€4,882.18
CA$7,802.73
A$8,746.80
CHF 4,561.26
MX$107,214.45
NOK 57,798.81
SEK 54,951.15
DKK 36,427.37
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About the Item
A man raises his hand to his chin, his neck tilted and face turned to look at a dilapidated farmhouse, barely held together by planks of wood and exposed to the elements. Behind him lies a suitcase, and in the background, a parked automobile – which sits somewhat precariously. It is evident from his expression that he has just arrived, or returned, to this bleak landscape.
An ominous crosshatched sky of thin clouds hangs above rough grassy terrain, while mounds of shrubbery frame the bottom half of the image. In the right-hand corner, a cow skeleton sits, with it's eyes staring back at the viewer. The lithograph is rich in contrast, evoking a moody and foreboding feeling, a sense that the man has not yet adjusted to the landscape.
The title "Prodigal Son" recalls the biblical parable of a man who recklessly squanders his inheritance and is forced to work as a hired hand for a pig farmer to survive. Realizing the error of his ways, he returns home to his father, begging for forgiveness. The father, despite the son's hedonistic past, welcomes him with open arms and throws a feast. Like the prodigal son, Benton returned from New York to his native Missouri in 1935. This work, completed a few years later, surely expresses Benton’s anxieties about returning home to the Midwest.
Similarly to the “prodigal son”, Benton came from a wealthy background but rejected his father's wishes and followed his impulses. He pursued a career in art and indulged in his vices; drinking heavily and keeping a mistress during his early adulthood. His return to the Midwest allowed him to settle down in Missouri, to reflect on the significance of rural life and focus on his lithographs, paintings, and murals.
A fine impression with full margins published by Associated American Artists with their information label present - pictured in Art and Popular Religion in Evangelical America, 1815-1940.
- Creator:Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975, American)
- Creation Year:1939
- Dimensions:Height: 19.25 in (48.9 cm)Width: 22 in (55.88 cm)Depth: 1.75 in (4.45 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:London, GB
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU2039212065592
Thomas Hart Benton
Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri on April 15, 1889. Even as a boy, he was no stranger to the "art of the deal" or to the smoke-filled rooms in which such deals were often consummated. His grandfather had been Missouri's first United States Senator and served in Washington for thirty years. His father, Maecenas Benton, was United States Attorney for the Western District of Missouri under Cleveland and served in the United States House of Representatives during the McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt administrations. Benton's brother, Nat, was prosecutor for Greene County, Missouri, during the 1930s. As soon as he could walk, Benton traveled with his father on political tours. There he learned the arts of chewing and smoking, and while the men were involved in their heated discussions, Benton delighted in finding new cream colored wallpaper on the staircase wall, at the age of six or seven, and drew in charcoal his first mural, a long multi-car freight train. As soon as he was eighteen, even though his father wanted him to study law, Benton left for Chicago where he studied at the Art Institute during the years 1907 and 1908. He continued his studies in Paris, where he learned delicious wickedness, aesthetic and otherwise. Once back home, he became the leader of the Regionalist School, the most theatrical and gifted of the 1930s muralists and as Harry Truman described him,"the best damned painter in America." Detractors said that Benton was "a fascist, a communist, a racist and a bigot"; the ingenious structure, powerful use of modeling and scale and the high-colored humanity of the murals and easel paintings are retort enough. He was a dark, active dynamo, only 5 ft., 3 1/2 in. tall. He was outspoken, open, charmingly profane; 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 poured a salwart drink, chewed on small black cigars and spat in the fire. Benton was once described as the "churlish dean of regionalist art." If you listened to a variety of art authorities, you would find them equally divided between Harry Truman's assessment of Benton as "the best damned painter in America" and Hilton Kramer who proclaimed Benton "a failed artist." The East Coast art establishment tended to regard Benton as memorable for one reason only: he was the teacher of Jackson Pollock. Benton was married in 1922 to Rita, a gregarious Italian lady, and they had a daughter and a son. At the height of his fame in the 1940s, Benton bungled the buy-out he was offered by Walt Disney and went his own way, completing his last mural in 1975 in acrylics the year of his death. He died in 1975.
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