Word: benton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
THOMAS HART BENTON: AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo. He said he wished his work could be exhibited in saloons, but the colorful, cantankerous Benton (1889-1975) is being honored in his centennial year not only with a biography and a PBS special but also with this full-dress retrospective in his native state. Featured: the stylized murals of American history and daily life for which he was best known. Through June...
...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). True, his huge murals writhing with buckskinned, blue-jeaned and gingham-clad Americans were still to be seen in situ in the Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City, and the Truman Library, Independence, Mo.; his name might still be invoked in Kansas City, where his latter years were spent; and most students of American art history knew that he had been the teacher (and to no small extent, the substitute father) of Jackson...
...nostalgia and a market boom bring most things back eventually. In 1983 the Whitney Museum of American Art revived Benton's old co-regionalist, Grant Wood, with a retrospective. Six years later, it is Benton's turn, with a show of some 90 works at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Curated by the museum's Henry Adams, who wrote the well-researched and highly readable accompanying biography, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original, it will run until June 18, then travel to Detroit, New York and Los Angeles through July...
...show confirms what one had already suspected. It is bound to be a hit, because Benton was a dreadful artist most of the time. He was not vulgar in the tasteful, closeted way of an Andrew Wyeth. He was flat-out, lapel-grabbing vulgar, incapable of touching a pictorial sensation without pumping and tarting it up to the point where the eye wants to cry uncle...
THOMAS HART BENTON: AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. He said he wished his work could be exhibited in saloons, but the colorful, cantankerous Benton (1889-1975) is being honored in his centennial year not only with a biography and a PBS special but also with this full-dress retrospective in his native state. Featured: the stylized murals of American history and daily life for which he was best known. Through June...