Art © T.H. and R.P. Benton Testamentary Trusts/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
On view
Wilmerding Pavilion
Philip & Nancy Anschutz Gallery
Pussycat and Roses,
1939
More Context
Handbook Entry
Around 1920, Thomas Hart Benton renounced abstraction for a type of social realism eventually known as Regionalism, whose self-conscious accessibility focused on American life and traditions. As a means of honing his painterly skills, Benton produced still lifes incorporating objects of diverse textures, such as <em>Pussycat and Roses</em>. The composition of this work may also have served as a study for a similar passage in <em>Persephone</em>, his notorious picture of the same year. In the Princeton painting, Benton depicted a Maltese kitten adopted by his students at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he taught until the clamor over the lascivious <em>Persephone</em> caused his dismissal.
Information
1939
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1982", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 42, no. 1 (1983): p. 50-70., p. 68 (illus.)
- "Acquisitions of the Art Museum 1983," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 43, no. 1 (1984): p. 18-42., p. 36
- Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), p. 248 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 263 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 315
