Feb 16, 2023 - Sale 2626

Sale 2626 - Lot 224

Price Realized: $ 6,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000

THOMAS HART BENTON (1889-1975)


Threshing.
Lithograph. 237x353 mm; 9 3/8x14 inches, full margins. Edition of 250. Signed in pencil, lower right. Published by Associated American Artists, New York. 1941.

A superb, strong impression. Fath 48.

This lithograph relates to a series of drawings and a painting (now in the Swope Art Gallery, Terre Haute, Indiana) that Benton made in 1938 on a farm in Johnson County, Kansas, around 25 miles outside Kansas City.

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 the artists hired as muralists under the WPA.