Legislators' Lounge

For the past four months tourists to the State Capitol at Jefferson City, Mo., many of them eating as they walked, have passed into the oblong Italianate Representatives' Lounge and gaped earnestly at a small, dark, wiry man painting furiously in a faint odor of rotten eggs, while the walls slowly blossomed with mule skinners, Mormons, dancing Negroes and Mississippi boatmen. Artist Thomas Hart Benton last week had finished, and some of the most important murals in the U. S. were ready for their formal unveiling.

A longtime favorite of Manhattan art critics, Artist Benton was born in Neosho, Mo. 47 years ago. Legislatures are no novelty to him: his father was a Congressman, the great uncle for whom he was named was a Senator from Missouri, stalwart defender of President Andrew Jackson. After years of study in Paris when he imitated every known school of French painting, Artist Benton suddenly found himself in the U. S. Navy during the War, began to develop his well-known style: crowded panels of attenuated muscular figures painted in vibrant and sometimes consciously crude color. His first murals to attract national attention were done for Manhattan's New School for Social Research. He paints on panels of prepared gesso (a wash of thin plaster) in tempera, mixing his dry hand-ground pigments with the yolks of eggs.

For Chicago's Century of Progress Exhibition, the State of Indiana commissioned him to do a gigantic panorama which was one of the outstanding hits of the Fair, now lies in a warehouse waiting a permanent home. Missourians suddenly remembered that Tom Benton was a native son, urged him to come home and do a job of work for the State House. Artist Benton agreed to decorate the Representatives' Lounge for $16,000.

"If I make a price I'll stick to it," said he, "but on the other hand I don't work for nothing."

Just to be sure that he would not lose too much he also accepted a job as director of the painting department at the Kansas City Art Institute, 160 miles away.

His original idea on arriving at Jefferson City was merely to do the history of Huckleberry Finn, but the sight of all that wall space, 1,000 sq. ft. of it, got the better of him. An emaciated Huckleberry Finn is there all right, watching a giant Negro land a fat catfish, but there are in addition Frankie & Johnnie and most of the history of Missouri. A slave trader is lashing a Negro, a buckskinned trapper in a fur cap is shooting his rifle. Mormons are being ridden out of town. There are also a country political meeting, a stenographer drinking a bright pink soda, a young mother changing her baby's diapers, a barn dance, a hired man milking a cow. Like giant snakes tying the whole together, run the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

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