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65

Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection THOMAS HART BENTON (1889-1975) The City, 192...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:150,000.00 - 250,000.00 USD
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection THOMAS HART BENTON (1889-1975) The City, 192...
Property from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection
THOMAS HART BENTON
(1889-1975)
The City, 1920
signed and dated "Benton 20" (lower right)
oil on canvas
33 1/4 x 25 in. (84.5 x 63.5 cm) <p>Estimate: $150,000-250,000 <p> Provenance
Estate of the artist Graham Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland, 1975 <p> Exhibited
New York, Graham Gallery, Thomas Hart Benton, November 26-December 28, 1968, no. 7 (illustrated) Perth, Art Gallery of South Australia; Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia; Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery; Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria; Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Wellington, New zealand, National Art Gallery, Auckland, New zealand, Auckland City Art Gallery, Christchurch, New zealand, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, America & Europe: A Century of Modern Masters from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, 1979-1980, no. 44 Kobe, Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art; Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum; Tokyo, The Bunkamura Museum of Art; Hiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Two Hundred Years of American Paintings from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, January 5-August 25, 1991, no. 34 <p>Literature
Thomas Hart Benton, An American in Art. A Professional and Technical Autobiography, Lawrence, Kansas, 1969, p. 87 (illustrated) Matthew Baigell, Thomas Hart Benton, New York, 1974, p. 71 (illustrated, pl. 33 as New York, Early Twenties) Gail Levin, The Thyssen-Bornimesza Collection: Twentieth-Century American Painting, London, 1987, pp. 166-169, no. 50 (illustrated, p. 167) Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original, New York, 1989, p. 105. <p> The painting will be included in the catalogue raisonné of Benton's work being prepared by Michael Owen, Jessie Benton, Anthony Benton Gude and Henry Adams under the auspices of the Owen Galleries. <p> In 1920 Benton lived at Twenty-first Street, between First and Second Avenues, in a tiny two-room apartment with no water and no heat. The City, signed and dated 1920, was painted four or five blocks from this location. It shows the juncture of Broadway (on the left) and Fifth Avenue (on the right) at about Twenty-third Street, a few blocks up from the Flatiron Building. Madison Square, with its statue of Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State, William H. Seward, is visible in the right foreground. <p>1920 was a time of major stylistic change for Benton, and marks the point at which he began to move away from derivative forms of modernism, such as Synchromism and Futurism, to develop a personal style. Just the year before, Benton had started making clay models in preparation for his paintings, to aid in developing a dynamic rhythm of form. He first utilized this technique to design self-consciously artificial compositions that he described as "figure organizations," but very soon he also began to use this method to record the American scene. <p>The City was one of the earliest, if not the first, of Benton's urban scenes to be based on this technique of clay models. As a consequence, it characterizes Benton's mature, signature style, with boldly simplified forms, a rhythmic organization of every element, and a slightly tilted perspective. These abstract qualities, however, are combined with vivid observation of daily American life, to create an effect that feels earthy and immediate. Indeed, the boldly caricatured figures, and such humorous touches as the man racing to escape a speeding car, bring to mind the popular cartoons of the period. Thus, the painting seems to represent a synthesis of two different aspects of Benton's background that he had previously kept separate: his training as a modernist, and his experience as a popular cartoonist for The Joplin American. <p>To a startling degree, The City anticipates many of the elements that Benton later employed in Boomtown, 1928 (Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester), his first major western scene. Both paintings have a similar tilted perspective and strikingly similar motifs, such as the cropped figures at the bottom and the lines of parked cars. <p>We are grateful to Marianne Berardi for cataloguing this lot.
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