Going West

1926–1935

Employed by: Art Students League of New York

late 1920s – early 1930s

Jackson Pollock among his students

Among Benton's students at the Art Students League of New York is Jackson Pollock, the future founder of Abstract Expressionism. Pollock often said that Benton's traditional teaching gave him something to rebel against.

1932

A breakthrough: the commission for the Indiana murals

He breaks through to the mainstream: a relative unknown, he wins the commission to paint murals of Indiana life that the state has planned for the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago. The success brings him fame in the following years.

1933

A scandal over the Indiana murals

The Indiana murals stir controversy: Benton painted everyday people and events from the state's history that some did not want publicized, and critics attack the work for showing members of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan in full regalia. At the Klan's height (membership peaked in 1925) an estimated 30% of adult men in Indiana belonged to it; the panels are now at Indiana University in Bloomington.

24 December 1934

On the cover of Time magazine

Appears on one of the earliest color covers of Time magazine: in the feature “The U.S. Scene” he, together with fellow Midwesterners Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, is presented as a new hero of American art, and Regionalism is described as a significant art movement.

1935

Leaving New York for Missouri

Having alienated both the left-leaning community of artists with his disregard for politics and the larger New York–Paris art world with what was considered his folksy style, Benton leaves the artistic debates of New York for his native Missouri. Settling in Kansas City and taking a teaching job at the Kansas City Art Institute, he gains greater access to a rapidly changing rural America; a Populist by upbringing, he sympathizes with the working class and the small farmer.