" Ben Ragan and Trouble"

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(1941)

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"Ben Ragan and Trouble" lithograph, 280x185mm; 11" x 7 1/4", full margins.  Edition size 100. Signed in the stone.   From 'Swamp Water'.  A good, dark impression [Fath 50].

Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was born in Neosho, Missouri, and studied at the Chicago and Paris Institutes of Art.  Benton is one of America's most controversial, contentious, flamboyant and brilliant artists. He is most famous as a Regionalist painter and muralist, and was the leading artist of the so-called Regionalists, who focused chiefly on rural Midwestern subjects.

Benton's interest in American subjects began about 1920 and he, together with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, crystalized the Regionalist paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s. In 1935, Benton left New York and returned to Missouri railing against the control being exercised over art by European and New York artists. He urged artists to escape the Eastern United States and to repudiate those elements he felt were sterilizing expression.  He argued for a return to the "realities of common life" and the common man. His strong concern for rhythmic composition of figures was to remain a permanent part of his technique, with an ever increasing stylization of forms.

"Ben Ragan and Trouble" is in a 26" x 22" distressed designer burl frame. The outer camel fine linen, middle Beveled Accent ivory black and inner raised 4-ply rag mats are acid and lignin free and protected with Acrylite-AR3 OP3 (UV) by CYRO...... SOLD