Self-Portrait

One of the three most prominent Regionalist painters along with John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) and Grant Wood (1891-1942), Thomas Hart Benton was most closely associated with his home state of Missouri. As the child of a distinguished political family, he was named for his famous forebear who represented Missouri in the United States Senate from 1821 to 1851. Benton studied first at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before going to Paris where he studied at the Académie Julian and the Académie Collarossi, returning to America in 1911.

Initially, Benton worked in a Cubist-inspired modernist style, which he would soon eschew for the expressive realism characteristic of his mature work. Benton was a prolific lithographer and easel painter as well as executing a number of mural cycles of expressly American themes. These include America Today (1930), for the New School of Social Research, The Arts of Life in America (1932), for the Whitney Museum of American Art, and A Social History of the State of Missouri (1936), for the Missouri State Capitol, among others.

Benton became a regular member of the faculty of the Art Students League, New York, in the 1920s until the mid-1930s, where his most famous student was soon-to-be Abstract Expressionist, Jackson Pollock, and with whom he would remain quite close. In 1935 Benton was invited to head the painting department of the Kansas City Art Institute, and removed permanently to Kansas City, Missouri, where he lived for the rest of his life. Benton was elected Associate member of the National Academy only in 1954, after an already extensive and successful career. He originally satisfied the requirement of membership by submitting a photograph of himself to the Academy. Ten years later, he reconsidered and submitted this self-portrait in 1963.