Missouri’s smallest state park takes up less than an acre but chronicles nearly 100 years of American art history through the eyes and work of one of the state’s most famous sons. His impact on art was far bigger than his park.
The Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio Historic Site in the Roanoke neighborhood of Kansas City is a sturdy 19th-century limestone home and carriage house converted into a studio by an artist who was the Andy Warhol of his era. In the 1930s-50s, only illustrator Norman Rockwell rivaled Benton in popular acclaim.
He was a quintessentially American artist who reflected his times and environs. “Common art for the common man,” Benton once said. The son of a Missouri congressman, Benton studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris and was painter Jackson Pollack’s teacher in New York. He appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, illustrated posters for popular films and books, including “The Grapes of Wrath,” and was interviewed by Edward R. Murrow on the new medium of television in the 1950s. From 1935 until his death in his studio in 1975, Benton lived and worked in this home and studio. The site boasts original drawings, sketches, sculptures and paintings from the man whose giant murals told the story of America. His works hang in museums, statehouses and universities across the country. (“American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood,” a retrospective at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, runs through Jan. 3.)
The home has remained virtually untouched since his death and includes original furniture, appliances, libraries and artwork in the home, as well as his paints, brushes and sketches in the studio. The home and belongings reflect his varied interests in music (he recorded an album and played several instruments), history, art and family. Benton, a practical man, stored his brushes in empty coffee cans. The studio offers insights into Benton’s unique artistic process. Beginning with black and white and sometimes colored drawings, Benton sculpted models of his murals before finally painting the canvases along measured grids. He said the sculpted models imbued his paintings with almost a three-dimensional quality. “I feel my paintings in my hands,” he once wrote. His stylized depictions of history in murals and scenes of rural Americana convey great motion in figures that seem to leap off the canvas. He viewed his murals of state, regional and American history like public storytelling, saying, “History was not a scholarly study for me, but a drama.”
The Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio Historic Site is at 3616 Belleview Ave., Kansas City, Mo. Call 816-931-5722 for dates and hours. Admission is $5. www.mostateparks.com.
Mark Taylor is a freelance reporter.
