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Thomas Hart Benton Original Lithograph, 1944 - Wreck of the Ol’ ‘97
About the Item
Original stone lithograph created 1944 by well-known Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton.
The print is in excellent condition with full margins and pencil signed lower right. Also signed in the stone.
It is matted in a 4-ply archival mat and rests in a simple black frame.
Image size: 10 ½ x 15. Frame size: 18 x 23. Published by AAA. Ed: 250.
Thomas Hart Benton found inspiration for his art in the ebb and flow of daily life in rural and small-town America. Wreck of the Ol’ 97, one of his best-known prints, is based on a ballad of the same title that tells the story of a rail disaster. A speeding locomotive attempting to make up lost time jumped the tracks as it descended a Virginia mountain. Eleven people died, including the engineer.
“Everybody knows the song,” Benton commented. “Goin’ down grade at ninety miles an hour, Ol’ 97 hit a broken rail and hell busted loose. This picture shows the moment just before the bust. The song doesn’t say who saw the affair, but somebody must have, and it could just as well have been people like those in the wagon. I put ’em in anyhow.”
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was born in Neosho, Missouri, the son and grandnephew of a United States congressmen. Benton was one of America's most popular and heavily patronized modern artists during the decades leading up to World War II and his murals were especially acclaimed. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, Benton gained artistic fame as a Regionalist painter, depicting the people and culture of the American Midwest, in particular his native state of Missouri. While his subjects were primarily based in America's heartland, he lived in New York City for twenty years. While there he dabbled in abstraction, before developing the Regionalist style he is known for. One of Benton's most famous students was Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.
- Creator:Thomas Hart Benton (Artist)
- Dimensions:Height: 18 in (45.72 cm)Width: 23 in (58.42 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)
- Materials and Techniques:
- Period:
- Date of Manufacture:1944
- Condition:
- Seller Location:Phoenix, AZ
- Reference Number:
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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