Thomas Hart Benton 1889-1975

This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné being prepared by the Thomas Hart Benton Catalogue Raisonné Foundation. Committee Members: Dr. Henry Adams, Anthony Benton Gude, Andrew Thompson and Michael Owen.


Thomas Hart Benton painted overtly historic murals in the 1950s, including a 1955 commission from the River Club, which he described as “an exclusive businessmen’s organization in Kansas City.” The group requested an overmantle mural for the lounge “depicting Old Kansas City—pioneer Kansas City.” [1] The assignment suggests Benton’s increasing integration into Kansas City and willingness to depict a more harmonious vision of Western settlement. The white settler family engages in trade with a Native American man and woman, rendered with some ethnographic specificity likely to evoke the Pawnee Tribe. The Native American man holds a pipe rather than a weapon, although the white man has a revolver on his hip, as stagecoaches and cattle stream upward from the Missouri River and boats below. Benton idealized and abstracted, but he did capture the sharp bend in the river that characterized the elevated view from the Northwest edge of downtown Kansas City, where the prestigious club is located, suggesting environmental continuity contributed to the resonance of imagined history.

[1] 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. 330

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