?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
THOMAS HART BENTON (1889-1975)
Running Horses. Lithograph, on paper, 1955. 317x420 mm; 12½x16⅝ inches, full margins. Edition of 75 (from an intended edition of 100). Signed in pencil, lower right. Published by Associated American Artists, New York.
A very good, richly-inked impression of this scarce lithograph.
Benton was already seen as a leader in the Regionalist movement and a celebrated muralist by the time the WPA started the Federal Arts Program. He had been commissioned to paint murals of life in Indiana for the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago, which caused controversy. In 1934, his work was featured on the cover on Time magazine, which legitimized Regionalism as an art movement. His murals were influential for many of the artists hired as muralists under the WPA.
Benton used the imagery of horses running with a steam train— horsepower against man-made power, the old versus the new— in two lithographs, this work and The Race, 1942 (see Fath 56), as well as in several oil paintings. Fath 78.
