JACKSONVILLE, FLA.- The newest exhibition at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Thomas Hart Benton and the Navy, is on view February 16 through June 3, 2018 and features a series of 24 paintings and drawings that capture the heroic actions and moments of respite that made up life aboard submarines and around shipyards during World War II.

Thomas Hart Benton and the Navy
As World War II escalated in the early 1940s, American painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889 – 1975) joined the fight by creating dozens of works in support of the nation’s military. This exhibition presents a series he developed behind the scenes as an artist-correspondent in the U.S. Navy. Thanks to Benton’s signature style — bold colors, elongated figures, and rhythmic elements — these paintings, watercolors, and drawings present an optimistic and inspiring narrative of America’s readiness for battle at sea.

This story captures the construction of an LST — an amphibious “Landing Ship, Tank” transport vessel — at shipyards in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The artist depicts the ship’s launch and its first “shakedown” cruise along the Mississippi River, where the crew enjoys a night on the town in New Orleans before heading into combat. Benton’s series also includes glimpses of submarine life on the USS Dorado (SS-248), based on studies made aboard her maiden voyage.

Benton produced this body of work on commission for Abbott Laboratories, a Chicago-based pharmaceuticals manufacturer founded in 1888 and still operating today. During the war Abbott toured these pictures, as well as works by other artist-correspondents, and the company republished some as posters to further display its patriotism. Abbott later gifted all of its sponsored war propaganda to the Navy. Today, the collection is cared for by the Naval History and Heritage Command at its museum in Washington, D.C.

Thomas Hart Benton (American 1889 – 1975)
Through both style and subjects, Thomas Hart Benton defined himself as an All-American artist. In contrast to the abstraction of Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973) and European Cubists, the Missouri native created deliberately plain-spoken images, proudly and nostalgically celebrating the culture of the Heartland. He excelled as a pictorial storyteller and observer of contemporary life in the United States — sometimes comic, sometimes troubled by poverty, racism, or war.

Benton found his unique artistic voice while serving as a draftsman in the Navy in 1918 during the final months of World War I. Drawing the ships, dredges, and blimps around the new naval base in Norfolk, Virginia, inspired him to abandon youthful experiments with jumbled shapes and colors — “my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns,” in his words — and embrace “a world which, though always around me, I had not seen. That was the world of America.” Though few of these early Navy sketches survive, Benton continued painting in this representational mode and ultimately returned to these roots as a patriotic sailor-artist during World War II.