Humanities Week 32 Name



Humanities Week 32 Name:_______________________________________

Thomas Hart Benton: Sources of Country Music Date:___________________________________

1. Thomas Hart Benton (April 15, 1889 – January 19, 1975) was an American _________________ and __________________________. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the ______________________ art movement.

2. Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, into an influential clan of _________________and powerbrokers. Benton's father, Maecenas Benton, was a _________________and United States congressman, Named after his great-uncle Thomas Hart Benton who was one of the first two United States Senators from__________________________. Benton spent his childhood shuttling between Washington D.C. and Missouri. Benton rebelled against his grooming for a future political career, preferring to develop his interest in ____________________.

3. As a teenager, he worked as a _______________for the Joplin American newspaper, in Joplin, Missouri.

4. Benton met and married Rita Piacenza, an __________ immigrant, in 1922. They met while Benton was teaching art classes for a neighborhood organization in New York City and she was one of his students. They were married for 53 years until Thomas's death in 1975. Rita died ten weeks after her husband.

The couple had a______, Thomas Piacenza Benton, born in 1926, and a _____________, Jessie Benton,

born in 1939.

5. On December 24, 1934, Benton was featured on one of the earliest color covers of ______________ magazine. Benton’s work was featured along with fellow __________________ Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry in an article titled “The U.S. Scene”. The article portrayed the trio as the new heroes of American art and cemented ___________________as a significant art movement. Regionalism also known as __________________________Scene Painting.

6. American scene painting refers to a ________________ style of painting and other works of art of the 1920s through the 1950s in the United States. After _______________________many American artists rejected the modern trends emanating from the Armory Show and _________________ influences such as those from the School of Paris. Instead they chose to adopt academic realism in depicting American ________________and _____________________ scenes.

7. American scene painting conveys a sense of __________________ and _____________________ in depictions of everyday American life. During the 1930s, these artists documented and depicted American cities, small towns, and rural landscapes; Some did so as a way to return to a simpler time away from industrialization whereas others sought to make a political statement and lent their art to revolutionary and radical causes.

8. Benton’s fluid, almost sculpted paintings showed __________________ scenes of life in the United States. Though Benton’s work is perhaps best associated with the Midwest, he created scores of paintings of New York, where he lived for over 20 years;__________________________, where he summered for much of his adult life; The American South; and the American West.

9. Thomas Hart Benton was eighty-four in 1973, when he came out of retirement to paint a mural for the _______________________________________________________________in Nashville, Tennessee. His assignment was to describe the regional sources of the musical style known as “_______________,” and Benton couldn’t resist the opportunity to paint one last celebration of homegrown American traditions. It was during his lifetime that the __________________________country-music industry in Nashville had replaced the ___________________________-based music of rural America.

10. As a theme of his art, his ambition was to paint meaningful, intelligible subjects—“the living world of active men and women”—that would hold broad, popular appeal. Therefore, by virtue of its subject and its setting, the Nashville _____________was to be a painting, Benton said, “aimed at persons who do not ordinarily visit art museums.” The Sources of Country Music is currently on display in the Country Music Hall of Fame Rotunda and is part of the exhibit tour.

11. On January 18, 1975, in his carriage-house studio in Kansas City, Thomas Hart Benton put the _______ brushstrokes on his painting The Sources of Country Music. The mural had been commissioned the year before by Nashville's Country Music Foundation to be displayed in the Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum. Its completion, in _______________ a year, by an eighty-five year-old-artist, was an impressive physical achievement.

12. The Sources of Country Music presents _______ distinct scenes to survey the music of ordinary Americans. 1. The central subject of a _________ dance, with a pair of fiddlers calling out sets to a group of square dancers, describes the dominant music of the frontier. 2. A comparatively calm scene shows three women in their Sunday best with _______________ in their hands, suggesting the importance of church music in Protestant America. 3. In the foreground, two barefoot mountain women sing to the sounds of a lap dulcimer, an old instrument associated with Appalachian ballads. 4. In the opposite corner an armed cowboy, one foot on his saddle, accompanies himself with a guitar. 5. An African American man, apparently a cotton picker in the Deep South, strums a tune on a banjo, an instrument slaves brought with them to the New World. Beyond him, on the other side of the railroad tracks, a group of black women dances on the distant riverbank.

13. Despite the range of regional styles, instruments, and customs, the mural seems to pulsate to a ________ beat, as if Benton took care to ensure that all the musicians played the same note and sang their varied American songs in tune. The mural preserves an image of American folkways that were rapidly disappearing.

14. Benton’s characteristically dynamic style expresses the powerful rhythms of music while suggesting the inevitability of_______________. Many of the robust, nearly life-size figures balance on___________, shifting ground. The fiddlers look liable to _________ into the mysteriously bowed floor, and the log on which the banjo player sits threatens to ___________down the steep slope of the red-clay landscape. Even the telephone poles seem to sway in the background.

15. The _________________ engine, an indication of________________, represents the end of an agrarian life and the homogenization of American culture, which necessarily entailed the loss of regional customs.

16. The mural pays ________________ to the country music singer and movie star Tex Ritter, who had helped to persuade Benton to accept the Nashville commission but died before it was completed. Benton represents Ritter as the singing ______________who turns to face the coal-black engine steaming along the horizon.

17. Benton based the train in his painting on the photographs of the St. Louis engine, and finished the canvas on January 18, a little bit ahead of his schedule. On the afternoon of January 19, when he had drinks with his young friend John Callison, he suggested that they should drive to St. Louis together someday soon to look at the actual train. Unfortunately, however, he was not able to make this trip.

18. That same evening after dinner, Tom walked out to his studio, wearing the same old hat John Callison had posed in while turning a windlass for the 1972 mural of "Turn of the Century Joplin." (Located in the Municipal Building of Joplin, Missouri.) He announced to his wife, Rita, that he wanted to look over his mural; if he decided it was completed he was going to sign it. Around 8:30 Rita went out to fetch him, and chide him for staying out so late. She found Tom lying on the floor with his spectacles on, directly in front of the Nashville mural, which was still unsigned. Stricken by a massive heart attack, he had fallen on his wristwatch, which stopped at the exact moment of his death: five minutes past seven o'clock.

QUIZ: Write your answers to the questions below in paragraph form. Remember to pack it full of facts!

1. Identify the artist and the artwork.

2. Identify the things and people that are making music and sound in this scene?

3. What does the steam engine represent?

4. Why did Benton include in the painting a homage to Tex Ritter, the singing cowboy?

5. Benton wanted all the musicians to play the same note and sing their varied music in tune.

6. Do you think this painting seems like noisy confusion or are all the parts in harmony?

7. Why did Benton not sign this painting?

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