Benton also repeatedly traveled in the West, particularly the diverse landscape of Wyoming…. Alongside this “grand” scenery of Wyoming’s Southern Rockies, Benton continued depicting the state’s Great Plains. This experience of representing the varied West proved to be a life-giving challenge for Benton. Looking back on his career at seventy-four, Benton explained: “I wouldn’t stop painting ’cause there’s always something I’ve got to learn yet. Just mere problems of drawings; there are always some things you can’t do, and there’s always a draftsman who did it better. So your life is full.”[1] The artist wrote that he felt at peace, having learned artistic practice was its own reward; “The only way an artist can personally fail is to quit work.”[2]

—Lauren Kroiz, excerpt from Thomas Hart Benton: Where Does the West Begin?, Schoelkopf Gallery, 2024

[1] Homer Brown, “The Work of Art’: An Interview with Thomas Hart Benton, Part 2,” recorded May 6, 1962, Missouri Historical Review 108, no. 1, (October 2013): 8.

[2] There are four editions of Benton’s 1937 autobiography. He authored new chapter updates appended at the end “After” (1951 edition) and “And Still After” (1968 edition), both are included in the posthumous edition that I cite: Thomas Hart Benton, “And Still After,” An Artist in America, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), p. 369