Thomas Hart Benton

Schoelkopf Gallery is pleased to present Thomas Hart Benton: Where Does the West Begin?. The exhibition focuses on Benton’s travels across vast expanses of North America including Montana, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.

Comprising 48 paintings and works on paper drawn primarily from the Thomas Hart Benton Trust, the exhibition explores a range of subjects, including adventurers, cowboys, locomotives, as well as desert, mountain, and plains landscapes. Throughout his travels, Benton remained committed to his singular creative process, in which he worked out ideas for compositions in black and white and full color across a range of mediums including pencil, watercolor, oil, and tempera.

"Benton has been so famous for most of a century that we all have a picture in our minds of who he was and the subjects he painted. While he was a defining American modernist and worked in a variety of modes of expression including abstraction, he is perhaps best known as the founder of Regionalism, and his aura is an integral part of the fabric of America’s heartland. “I was after a picture of America in its entirety,” Benton explained. “I ranged north and south and from New York to Hollywood and back and forth in legend and history.” The thrust of this exhibition is to explore Benton’s creative response to cultural perceptions of the West and to his own travels to the region.

Benton started painting the West in the 1920s with the triumphant American Historical Epic composed of fourteen panels in three chapters. The third chapter highlights the West, and includes panels titled: The Pathfinder, Over the Mountain, The Jesuits, Struggle for the Wilderness, and The Lost Hunting Ground. The West would feature as prominent subject matter in his work for nearly five decades following this epic opening salvo, culminating in ambitious compositions that emphasize the sense of limitless possibility offered by the western landscape, such as The Plains, 1953; The Sheepherder, 1955–57; and Trail Riders, 1964–65.

As you dig into the publication and exhibition, we wish to thank Lauren Kroiz who contributed the essay. Dr. Kroiz is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley and an expert on American modern art. She is the award-winning author of Cultivating Citizens: The Regional Work of Art in the New Deal Era and many other insightful books and articles on American art and culture. It has been our delight to work with Dr. Kroiz, and we thank her for the engrossing story and insights shared in the pages which follow.

My colleagues and I would also like to thank Benton’s family and the trustees of the Thomas Hart Benton Trust. And the gallery’s friend Megan Fox Kelly who we are always appreciative to collaborate with. We are additionally grateful for the generous contributions from Henry Adams and Andrew Thompson who are com- piling their research in a forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Benton’s work along with fellow committee members Anthony Benton Gude and Michael Owen, under the aegis of the Thomas Hart Benton Catalogue Raisonné Foundation.

We would also like to share a special note of thanks to the River Club of Kansas City, its members, and particularly its leadership, Mike Mayer and Trey Humphrey, for the opportunity to share in this publication and the gallery’s exhibition their monumental Trading at Westport Landing (Old Kansas City), 1956 which was commissioned by the organization in 1955 and is being shown outside of Kansas City for the first time."

—Andrew L. Schoelkopf