Thomas Hart Benton, American, 1889-1975

Jesse James
1936
Lithograph on wove paper
Gift of Robert McGrath; PR.973.240

While American art has long concerned itself with issues of national identity, at no time was this focus more apparent than in the art of the 1930s. Widespread poverty, drought, and escalating political tensions abroad gave a greater sense of urgency to the quest to identify archetypal American themes and promote them through the arts. Many artists rejected modernist abstraction as being too elitist, too tied to its foreign origins, and too removed from the exigencies of contemporary life to serve this mission and speak to the issues of the day. They sought instead to create a more “democratic” art, using representational imagery of identifiably American subjects that would be meaningful to a wide audience. Consequently, large-scale murals for public buildings and large-edition, highly affordable prints were the favored media of the so-called regionalist artists, who felt that America’s identity was rooted in its rural, regional traditions rather than its modern, homogeneous, corporate identity. Thomas Hart Benton, along with Grant Wood, was among the foremost midwestern regionalists. This print derives from one section of his famous Missouri State Capitol murals, which chronicle significant events in the state’s social history. Here he drew on one of the state’s most notorious outlaws, Jesse James, whom some hailed as a Robin Hood figure. This composition conflates two different robberies committed by James and his brothers— one of a railroad and the other of a smalltown bank. Jesse, in particular, became a hero of American folklore and inspired the classic “Jesse James” musical ballad, written soon after his assassination in 1882 and popular to this day. Benton’s image initially sparked controversy, as not everyone in Missouri wished to be remembered for bandits, but it has come to be treasured as a key image in one of the artist’s most significant mural series.