Until last week, museums were generally unkind to Thomas Hart Benton and Benton was unkind to museums. They resemble graveyards, he remarked ten years ago, "run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait . . . Nobody goes to museums. I'd like to sell [my paintings] to saloons . . ."
Billy Rose took the tough-talking Missourian up on that notion, hung Benton's nude Persephone in his Diamond Horseshoe for three months. Last week a mellower Benton mildly announced that he was lending the same painting to Manhattan's...
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