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 opened the penultimate chapter of his 1937 autobiography by asking: “Where Does the West Begin?” The painter, who would travel in the region for nearly five decades, answered by tracing the “marked change of country” to “a zigzag pattern up and down the ninety-eight degree line.”[1] In choosing the specific meridian, Benton drew on historian Walter Prescott Webb’s 1931 book The Great Plains, which shifted from the older hundredth-degree marker. A massive tome acclaimed by academics and the popular press, Webb’s controversial thesis tied the distinctness of the West to its aridity, identifying the technological innovations—revolver, barbed wire, and windmill—that allowed whites to colonize and change the environment. The latter two innovations are visible in Benton’s The Plains (1953), and a viewer can easily imagine the revolver on the hip of the foreground rider. While the bucolic subject might seem far from familiar, spectacular images of Westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, such as John Gast’s 1872 crowded American Progress, Benton’s invocation of Webb in defining the West’s beginning suggests we see his depictions of the region’s environment as a kind of mid-twentieth-century history painting.

…

Although the scene in The Plains, and other of Benton’s Western paintings look initially pastoral, the painter articulated unsettling experiences in the vast spaces. Many found it “unbearable,” especially those he termed “cozy-minded people” who need “the sense of intimacy.” Some experienced “the monotony, the weariness, the oppressiveness” of the plains landscape. Benton felt a “releasing effect” and “immense freedom of spirit” that allowed him to escape even beyond his own busy mind.[2]

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

[1] Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America, New York: R. M. McBride & Co., 1937, p. 199.

[2] Benton, pp. 199-200.