July 2006 Page 6

> Thomas Hart Benton
The artist was a native of Neosho, just a few miles south of Joplin near the Arkansas border. Although he is best known for his murals and depictions of rural life, he was also the early mentor of Jackson Pollock in New York... an unlikely seeming alliance if there ever was one; the two men could not have been more different. Pollock furiously and frustratingly attempted to emulate Benton's figurative painting style for a time, possibly because of his own rural upbringings in Wyoming, and came close. There do exist a few works to prove this point which only Pollock scholars would ever recognize as being by his hand. It has been written that Pollock drove himself to his now-famous manner of abstract expressionism partly because of his inability to do what Benton did... one cannot be sure of that assertion, in my opinion.
One famous Joplin story about Benton is told in his autobiography, "An Artist in America". He came here to work the mines at age seventeen. At some point he found himself downtown at the then-famous House of Lords bar at 4th and Main, and describes in his book his response to a saloon painting of a female nude common in those days. The teasing he received from other patrons ended him up doing drawings for the Joplin American newspaper, just around the corner (where the Joplin Globe still is). Benton wrote, "By a little quirk of fate, they made a professional artist of me. It had never seriously occured to me before that I wanted to be an artist, Certainly I had never declared myself one until the kidding in the House of Lords."

> Digitized Postcard Tour of Joplin
Go to www.joplinpubliclibrary.org
~ then click Digitized Collections button
~ then on word "Postcards"
Leslie Simpson, Director, Post Art Reference Library (see squib in this issue of ARTHROBS), worked for 18 months producing and writing narratives to go with all those vintage postcards. It makes for quite a nice virtual tour of this beautiful old town... quite a tribute to Leslie's tenacity and scholarship.