Boomtown

Boomtown. by Thomas Hart Benton. Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri into an influential family of politicians. His father, Maecenas, was a lawyer and 4 times elected U.S. congressman from Missouri. Known as the "little giant of the Ozarks," he named his son after his great-uncle Thomas Hart Benton, one of the first two United States Senators elected from Missouri. At an early age Thomas wanted to develop his skills as an artist and his mother supported him in this endeavor. As a teenager, he worked as a cartoonist for the Joplin American newspaper in Joplin, Missouri., In 1907 Benton enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. He moved to Paris in 1909 to continue his art education at the Académie Julian. His mother supported him financially and emotionally to work at his art until he married in 1922. At age 33, Benton married Italian immigrant Rita Piacenza. They met while he was teaching art classes in New York City where she was one of his students. They had two children and were married for almost 53 years until Thomas' death in 1975. Rita died eleven weeks after her husband., He returned to New York in 1913 and declared himself to be an "enemy of modernism" and thus began the naturalistic and representational work today known as Regionalism. Benton served in the U.S. Navy in World War I and was stationed at Norfolk, Virginia. Directed to make drawings of shipyard work and life, the demand for realistic documentation helped his later style develop. Benton said that his work for the Navy "was the most important thing, so far, I had ever done for myself as an artist.", A friend of the family owned the Dilley Hotel in Borger where Benton painted "Boomtown" from his hotel room on Main Street in 1928 while on a summer sketching trip. The original resides in the permanent collection of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York., Benton wrote of Borger, Texas , "Out on the open plain beyond the town a great thick column of black smoke rose as in a volcanic eruption from the earth to the middle of the sky. All the mighty anarchic carelessness of our country was revealed in Borger... It was revealed with a breadth, with an expansive grandeur... One did not get the feeling, in spite of the rough shacks and dirty tents in which the people lived, of that narrow cruelty and bitter misery that hovers around eastern industrial centers. There was a belief, written in men's faces, that all would find a share in the gifts of this mushroom town.... Borger on the boom was a big party where capital joined hands with everybody in a great democratic dance.", Captions , Lower Right: This depiction of Thomas Hart Benton's "Boomtown" was painted pro bono, by local artist Michelle Dubiskas in February 2020. The paint and the steel base it is painted on were purchased by Friends of the Hutchinson County Historical Museum. The steel base was fabricated by the Hutchinson County Road and Bridge crew. Woody's Glass donated indoor studio space for the painting's execution. Thanks to all!