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The Race

The Race
The Race
The Race

The Race

 American, 1889 - 1975
1942
Lithograph
9 15/16 x 13 3/16 in. (25.2 x 33.5 cm)
Signed in pencil lower right. Edition of 250.

A riderless horse races a steam train across the open prairie. Published by Associated American Artists, New York.

Benton wrote: "Common enough scene in the days of the steam engine. Why did horses so often run with the steam trains while they now pay no attention to the diesels?" Also known as Homeward Bound, the title on the original Associated American Artists label that this impression retains. Impressions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Terra Foundation for American Art. (Fath 56)

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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