Fire in the Barnyard
Fire in the Barnyard
Thomas Hart Benton
American, 1889 - 1975
1944
Lithograph
8 3/4 x 13 3/8 in. (22.2 x 34.0 cm)
Signed in pencil lower right. Edition of 250.
A barnyard fire lights the night sky. Benton drew on a childhood memory of a straw-stack fire on a farm next to his grandfather "Pappy" Wise's cotton farm outside Waxahachie, Texas, when he was seven or eight. Published by Associated American Artists, New York.
Benton recalled the glow being so great that the adults spoke of the end of the world, and hearing the next morning how the farmer and his sons had got the frightened horses out of the barn. An impression is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Fath 64)
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975)
Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Académie Julian in Paris. Rejecting the European modernism of his early years, he became, with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, a leader of American Regionalism, painting the farmers, laborers, and folklore of the Midwest and South in a dynamic, sculptural style. His major murals include America Today (1930–31, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and A Social History of the State of Missouri (1936) in the Missouri State Capitol, and in 1934 he became the first artist to appear on the cover of Time. Beginning in 1934, Associated American Artists published his lithographs in editions sold by mail at modest prices, making them among the most widely collected American prints of the century. Benton taught at the Art Students League in New York, where Jackson Pollock was his student, and later at the Kansas City Art Institute. He died in his Kansas City studio in 1975.
A barnyard fire lights the night sky. Benton drew on a childhood memory of a straw-stack fire on a farm next to his grandfather "Pappy" Wise's cotton farm outside Waxahachie, Texas, when he was seven or eight. Published by Associated American Artists, New York.
Benton recalled the glow being so great that the adults spoke of the end of the world, and hearing the next morning how the farmer and his sons had got the frightened horses out of the barn. An impression is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. (Fath 64)
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975)
Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Académie Julian in Paris. Rejecting the European modernism of his early years, he became, with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, a leader of American Regionalism, painting the farmers, laborers, and folklore of the Midwest and South in a dynamic, sculptural style. His major murals include America Today (1930–31, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and A Social History of the State of Missouri (1936) in the Missouri State Capitol, and in 1934 he became the first artist to appear on the cover of Time. Beginning in 1934, Associated American Artists published his lithographs in editions sold by mail at modest prices, making them among the most widely collected American prints of the century. Benton taught at the Art Students League in New York, where Jackson Pollock was his student, and later at the Kansas City Art Institute. He died in his Kansas City studio in 1975.
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