Notes from watching Ken Burns' Thomas Benton.
read moreHe was an American artist. Really seems unique in that he traveled all around America and drew the people he met and what he saw. His paintings look like clay models sometimes, because he modeled things in clay before painting them. They look kind of bulgy. He did a lot of murals, huge walls that took years, usually with an array of all sorts of people who live in the city. So if there is a mural with 100's of people in America, it might be him. He paints social history, throughout the decades of a place. Jackson Pollock was one of his pupils, and one of his primary ones. Jack was like a son to Benton. "The Year of Peril", which is his depiction of World War II while it was happening. It's pretty funny that Jackson Pollock went on to create, after being Benton's pupil, incredibly abstract art, because Benton had always absolutely hated that kind of art more than anything else.