![]() ![]() One of Benton’s friends recalled him chalking a train some 100 feet long on a concrete drain. There are various accounts of these early train drawings, now lost. I scrawled crude representations of them over everything. To go down to the depot and see them come in belching black smoke with their big headlights shining and their bells ringing and their pistons clanking gave me a feeling of stupendous drama, which I have not lost to this day. Engines were the most impressive things that came into my childhood. My first pictures were of railroad trains. As he wrote in his autobiography, An Artist in America: Throughout his life, Benton was fascinated by trains. The distinct forward thrust of the body of the train closely relates to a still earlier work, a drawing by Benton of a train exiting from a tunnel that was reproduced in The Dial, the most important modernist magazine of its period, in July 1925. It’s most direct prototype is the similarly elastic streamlined train in the panel Instruments of Power–the central defining image of his mural America Today, 1930, the painting which made Benton famous and which is often considered his masterwork. There’s an ancestry to this train in slightly earlier works by Benton. I particularly love the virtuosity of the single wiggling line that represents smoke coming from the front stack, as well as richly evoked volume of the the swirls of the smoke in the background, and the way that Benton really dug into the paper to capture the dark shapes of the cowcatcher and the wheels of the train. It’s more forceful in its expressive exaggerations, such as the way the front of the locomotive pushes ahead of the rest of the train, and the use of line is freer, more expressive, and less self-conscious. Personally, I like the drawing a little better than the print, although both are marvelous. The dimensions of drawing and print are identical, indicating that the drawing is a direct preparatory study, surely also made in 1934. You don’t get any emotional kick out of what you can’t see.Īs you know, this is a preparatory study for Benton’s lithograph Going West, which was issued by the Ferargil Galleries 1934, in an edition of 75, and is often regarded as Benton’s finest print. The Diesels have never had the same interest for me chiefly because their driving mechanisms are not visible. Steam powered railroad trains were fascinating all my life. Benton himself wrote nostalgically of trains of this sort: ![]() In his hands it becomes a living thing, the embodiment of life, force, energy, and the American spirit. Figures such as Marsh wonderfully capture the externals of a steam locomotive, but Benton in some magical way seems to become the train. ![]() Other great American artists such as Reginald Marsh made wonderful representations of trains, but this image is in a class by itself. The image is both modern, with a sense of movement and energy that recalls the Italian Futurists, and wonderfully American in its evocation of the great open spaces of the American West. I would not hesitate to rank this piece as one of the most outstanding drawings of the 20th century by any American artist. Indeed, if one were choosing one drawing by him to sum up his artistic achievement, I can’t think of a better example. Author of Thomas Hart Benton: An American OriginalĪt the risk of seeming to indulge in hyperbole, I think this is one of Benton’s very finest drawings, ranking with the best drawings by him I have seen. ![]()
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