America Today

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

The Changing West (from the America Today Murals)
92 x 117” Thomas Hart Benton

In exhibition through April 19th, 2015 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was Thomas Hart Benton’s iconic mural, America Today, reflecting Benton’s view of the America of the 1920s. He said, “The United States is loud and not in good taste,” upon completing the massive work. The mural was originally painted for the newly completed building of the New School for Social Research in the early 1930s. It is comprised of ten panels reflecting different regions of America: Deep South, Midwest, The Changing West; the energy of urban environments: City Activities with Dance Hall, City Activities with Subway; changes in manufacturing, materials and technologies of the time: Coal, Steel, Instruments of Power, City Building; and Benton’s own political sentiments: Outreaching Hands. The mural has been called the visual Fanfare for the Common Man, (Aa…