Corn and Winter Wheat, 1948

Corn and Winter Wheat is probably based on sketches that Benton made while traveling in rural Missouri in 1945. Dwarfed by the rolling Missouri farmland, two farmers in the center foreground plant winter wheat with the aid of a horse-drawn wagon. A farmhouse with a red barn and windmill, standard ingredients of the American regionalist landscape, appear in the left background. Six shocks of corn occupy the foreground.

Since the late 1930s Benton had been painting landscapes such as Cradling Wheat (1938, St. Louis Art Museum, MO) that represent farming in the rural areas where he often traveled in search of suitable subjects. These works had been successful for Benton, and an early example, July Hay (1943), was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art the same year it was executed. Benton’s small-scale easel paintings were derived from motifs found in the monumental public murals that had helped to establish his reputation in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, farming scenes have a prominent role in his Social History of Missouri (1936) in the House Lounge of the Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City. After the war Benton avoided controversial social commentary in his paintings and even experimented with a mythological subject—Achelous and Hercules (1947, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC)—for a mural commissioned by a women’s clothing store in St. Louis.

In an earlier and very similar painting also titled Corn and Winter Wheat [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Thomas Hart Benton, Corn and Winter Wheat, c. 1945, oil and varnish glazes on fabric, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester. Gift from the Chapin and Mary Alexander Riley Collection, 1970.156. © Worcester Art Museum, Benton has represented a farmer seated on the ground gathering corn into shocks. The corn shocks are also a prominent feature of the equally similar 1945 lithograph Loading Corn [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] Thomas Hart Benton, Loading Corn, 1945, lithograph, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of W. J. Cole. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY that was based on sketches Benton had made in autumn in Missouri. He explained that such scenes were “to be seen on most hill farms. The problem with these subjects is not to find them but to find them in a pictorially workable setting.”[1]  [1]
Creekmore Fath, The Lithographs of Thomas Hart Benton (Austin, TX, 1990), no. 65, 150.

In his harvest scenes Benton has depicted a labor-intensive, traditional method of farming wheat and corn that was in the process of being rendered obsolete by mechanization.[2]  [2]
Introduced to Kansas by Mennonite immigrants in the 19th century, winter wheat is planted from September to December. Crops sprout before freezing occurs, become dormant until the soil warms in the spring, and are ready for harvesting by early July. The widespread cultivation of winter wheat began in Kansas at the turn of the 20th century, largely through the efforts of the agriculturalist Bernard Warkentin and the botanist Mark Carleton, and quickly spread throughout the Great Plains. Regarding corn, late in the harvest season, after picking the ears by hand, farmers bundled the remaining corn stalks together and tied them into teepee-shaped shocks that they set upright in the field. This process facilitated drying so that the remnants of the corn plants could be used as fodder for farm animals. See Thomas D. Isern, “Wheat Explorer the World Over: Mark Carleton of Kansas,” Kansas History 23 (Spring–Summer, 2000): 12–25, and “Bernard Warkentin,” Kansas Historical Society, last modified January 2016, http://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/bernard-warkentin/15595. The first mechanical corn harvester, for instance, had been developed in 1930 by Gleaner Harvester Combine Corporation in Independence, Missouri, and after World War II modern, efficient mechanical harvesters for various crops were fast becoming a ubiquitous part of rural life.[3]  [3]
“Harvester Cuts Corn, Shells Cleans and Bins It,” Popular Mechanics, Nov. 1930, 762. Benton was extremely knowledgeable about farming, and on his travels—even while summering on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts—he deliberately sought unusual, antiquated planting and harvesting techniques as subjects for his landscapes.[4]  [4]
Benton did occasionally represent modern mechanized farming; see, for example, Rice Threshing (1945, private collection) and Wyoming Hay (1963–1964, Winston Churchill Memorial and Library, Fulton, MO). In his explanatory notes to the 1939 lithographs Cradling Wheat and Planting, Benton noted that their subjects were based on his earlier observations of traditional methods of farming in east Tennessee and southern Arkansas, commenting that “old ways don’t die easily.”[5]  [5]
See, respectively, Creekmore Fath, The Lithographs of Thomas Hart Benton (Austin, TX, 1990), nos. 27 and 28, 74–76. In the commentary to Island Hay, no. 68, 156, Benton drew attention to the traditional scythe cutting method still being used on Martha’s Vineyard.

J. Richard Gruber has noted that Benton’s carefully observed and researched agricultural subjects show that the artist “viewed these scenes as reflective of a larger order at work, a traditional American agrarian order that was based on the importance of man working in harmony with the world of nature. The abundance of the harvest in these works serves as evidence of the fruits of man’s labor when he respected those natural systems and worked in accordance with the laws of the natural world.”[6]  [6]
J. Richard Gruber, Thomas Hart Benton and the American South (Athens, GA, 1998), 46. Corn and Winter Wheat, like other landscapes by Benton during this period, is a nostalgic look back in time to the country’s agrarian, pre-industrial past that extols the virtues of the rural midwestern lifestyle.

In the years following World War II, American regionalism fell out of fashion, its popularity superseded by the growing attention paid to modernist abstraction in America. Grant Wood had died in 1942, John Steuart Curry in 1946, and the reputation of Thomas Hart Benton, the sole survivor of the movement’s three leading artists, was in decline. In May 1946 the well-known art historian Horst W. Janson wrote an article for the Magazine of Art in which he attacked regionalism, stating that the movement was “essentially anti-artistic in its aims and character” and “nourished by some of the fundamental ills of our society” before directing some personal aspersions at Benton.[7]  [7]
H. W. Janson, “Benton and Wood, Champions of Regionalism,” Magazine of Art, May 1946, quoted in Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (New York, 1989), 320. In 1947 Benton broke with his dealer Reeves Lewenthal ostensibly because he did not use enough Missouri artists to execute a commission for a St. Louis department store. In 1948, when Look magazine published a list of the 10 best American artists based on the recommendations of museum professionals and critics, Benton’s name was not mentioned.[8]  [8]
“Are These Men the Best Painters in America Today?” Look, Feb. 3, 1948, 44–48, discussed in Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (New York, 1989), 320. Henry Adams has noted that the indistinct, painterly quality of Corn and Winter Wheat can be related to the artist’s “slightly depressed mood at the time, when he’s being pushed off stage and the America he knew is changing, and he’s trying to figure out who he is as an artist and what he should do next.”[9]  [9]
Henry Adams to Robert Torchia, Mar. 28, 2012, NGA curatorial files.

Robert Torchia

August 17, 2018