Benton As Teacher
Benton taught at the Art Students League of New York from 1926 to 1935 and at the Kansas City Art Institute from 1935 to 1941. His most famous student, Jackson Pollock, whom he mentored in the Art Students League, founded the Abstract Expressionist movement. Pollock often said that Benton's traditional teachings gave him something to rebel against.
Benton's students in New York and Kansas City included many painters who contributed significantly to American art. They included Pollock’s brother Charles Pollock, Charles Banks Wilson, Frederic James, Lamar Dodd, Reginald Marsh, Charles Green Shaw, Margot Peet, Jackson Lee Nesbitt, Roger Medearis, Glenn Gant, Fuller Potter, and Delmer J. Yoakum. Benton also briefly taught Dennis Hopper at the Kansas City Art Institute; Hopper was later known for being an independent actor, filmmaker, and photographer.
In 1941 Benton was dismissed from the Art Institute after he said the typical art museum was "a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait." He made additional disparaging references to what he said was the excessive influence of homosexuals (which he called "the third sex") in the art world.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Hart Benton (painter)
Famous quotes containing the words benton and/or teacher:
“All my life I’ve felt like somebody’s wife, or somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter. Even all the time we were together, I never knew who I was. And that’s why I had to go away. And in California, I think I found myself.”
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“I look for the new Teacher that shall follow so far those shining laws that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of the heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)