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Threshing

Threshing
Threshing
Threshing

Threshing

 American, 1889 - 1975
1941
Lithograph
9 1/4 x 14 in. (23.5 x 35.6 cm)
Signed in pencil lower right. Edition of 250.

A steam engine drives a threshing machine as a crew works the wheat harvest. Benton identified it as the last steam thresher operated in Johnson County, Kansas, within twenty-five miles of his Kansas City home. Published by Associated American Artists, New York.

The lithograph was made from a series of drawings and a painting of the subject; the related painting, Threshing Wheat, is in the Sheldon Swope Art Museum, Terre Haute, Indiana. (Fath 48)

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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