White Bluffs, Buffalo River, 1973 Egg tempera and oil on hardboard, 9.875 x 14.125 inches SOLD PROVENANCE Likely the most important artist of the American Regionalist movement, Thomas Hart Benton created a style and addressed subject matter that was uniquely American. Drawing inspiration from the everyday life, a combination of modernism and realism, Benton captured the essence, and created the underlying sensuality, of American industrialism and the world that surrounded it. Thomas Hart Benton, along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, made up a group of artists known as Regionalists. These artists were interested in depicting ordinary life in the United States, especially in the Midwest. In the 1920s, Benton began his series of journeys across the country and traveled through the Ozarks. In 1924, his father became seriously ill and Benton returned to Springfield, where he spent much contemplative time on river banks. In the decade after his father died, Benton took many overland and water trips through the deep South where images of waterways figured prominently in his art to follow. His depictions of rivers, streams, gullies, and creeks form a sub-genre of American landscape painting, inviting us to rethink the artistic meaning and historical legacy of even the narrowest and intimate of inlets. "White Bluffs Buffalo River" is a champion of this series, an extraordinarily personal canvas and yet one of the most rhythmically charged works produced by Benton. The painting depicts the artist during one of his annual float trips taken with a group of friends from Kansas City, fording one of the many streams cutting through the Ozark Mountings of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri. Benton always carried a sketch pad with him, capturng the dramatic landscape of the river and painting arguably some of the best works of his important career. Benton once said, "muddy or not, the rivers have charm. Great sycamores hang over their banks and in the summer when the current moves slowly these are duplicated in the stream below. On one side or another of the rivers' outcropping, white bluffs hang and break the monotony of tree branch and foliage." The Buffalo River has long wandered through the Arkansas Ozarks. En-route on its 150-mile course to join with the White River, the Buffalo winds past towering, multi-colored bluffs, pastoral fields, prehistoric and historic cultural sites, and varied wildlife. A tale of trips past, and an accumulation of years of his artistic environmental studies, Benton grabs his audience with a bold color palate and deep and engaging shadows and layers, the style he is most noted for. Thomas Hart Benton was born on April 15, 1889 in Neosho, Missouri, and Ozark town of 2,000 people. Art was far from what his father, Colonel Maecenas Benton, had in mind for his son, whom he shipped off to military school. A Midwesterner and proud of it, he did flee East and overseas to develop a style which is best known for celebrating rural America. Benton studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, resided briefly in Paris and New York City, then settled in Kansas City, working as an instructor of drawing and painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. Benton was at war with the Eastern art establishment from the moment he hit his stride as a determinedly realistic painter. At a time when revolutionary art forms flourished, Benton was working on huge murals and audacious paintings that reflected raw American life, some of it historical, mostly of ordinary folk caught in the throes of hard work. His most famous student was Jackson Pollock, whose abstract expressionist paintings are the opposite, almost an confrontation, to Benton's own work. The figures in his works often appear cartoon-like through the way he distorts the bone and muscular structure of the their faces and bodies. His students hailed the complexity and energy of his own work which translated into theirs: "He conveyed to us his sensuous involvement with color, materials and textures. He'd get terribly excited about a milkweed in the fall with its glowing gold interior. He showed us how milkweed could be sexy." His paintings epitomize and accentuate the beauty of the Ozarks, tell the stories of Midwest cities, mountains and rivers, and capture the spirt of the vast Midwestern America. Benton died on January 19, 1975 in his studio.