He illustrated the American peasant: Who is Thomas Hart Benton?

(1889-1975) American painter. He is one of the leaders of American painting in the direction of regionalism. He was born on April 14, 1889, in the town of Neosho, Missouri. He was the son of a family that was famous in the political arena. Despite the opposition of his parents, he started working as an illustrator for a local newspaper at the age of seventeen. He studied art in Chicago. He studied painting in Paris between 1908-1911. He served in the navy in World War I. After the war, he went on trips that covered a large part of America, making drawings and collecting documents for the paintings he thought of realizing.

He was one of the most influential and influential artists of the American art scene with the large-scale murals that he made for the New School of Social Research in 1930, the Whitney Museum of American Art Library in 1931, Indiana University, and Missouri State Capital in 1933. He became a powerful person. In 1935, he opposed the contemporary art movements and defended the understanding of localism. During World War II, he made a series of paintings aimed at warning the public against the war. Benton fell out of favor in the field of art in the 1950s, as stylistic concerns began to predominate and the concept of abstract expressionist painting became widespread. He died on January 19, 1975, in Kansas City.

Benton, along with John Steuart Curry (1897-1946) and Grant Wood (1892-1942), represents the Localism movement in American painting. Like the other painters of this movement, Benton's main theme is the lives, stories, and traditions of rural people in America, who believes that the artist should paint only the environment he knows. Its formal understanding evokes the Spanish painting tradition, especially El Greco's understanding of form. The spatial arrangement, which is energized by a line and volumetric agility, forms the basic structure of his painting. It avoids massive forms and superficial texture effects. However, in his last works, the decorative effect gradually diminished, leaving its place for a more massive, plain, and simple formalism.

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