Thomas Hart Benton

Few American artists have incited more controversy than Thomas Hart Benton. Argumentative, brilliant, and enormously influential, Benton inspired acclaim and loathing among students, friends, fellow artists, and outraged critics. Now, in a series of provocative essays, premier Benton scholar Henry Adams examines the many facets of the man as artist and the pitched battles of his long career.

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Few American artists have incited more controversy than Thomas Hart Benton. Argumentative, brilliant, and enormously influential, Benton painted for nearly seventy years, inspiring acclaim and loathing among students, friends, fellow artists, and outraged critics.

Now, in a series of provocative essays, premier Benton scholar Henry Adams examines the many facets of the man as artist and the pitched battles of his long career, including the fight that raged over the subject matter of his murals, the real reasons for Benton’s feud with the radical left and his fall from grace in the New York art world, and his tumultuous, 36-year-long love-hate relationship with the student with whom he worked most closely, another iconic artist of the 20th century, Jackson Pollock. Adams ends with an account of his own twenty-five-year struggle to expose fakes of Benton’s work.