Carpenters, plasterers, electricians and harried directors worked fast last week to complete one of the finest modernist buildings in New York, the New School for Social Research, in time for its opening next week. In the board room ready to be looked at were nine vibrant mural panels which have already attracted national attention and brought fame to the New School as a building, whatever may be its success as an institution. The artist is Thomas Hart Benton. Artist Benton was born in Neosho, Mo., on the edge of the Ozarks, a great-nephew of Andrew Jackson's trusted Senator Thomas Hart Benton, son of Congressman Maecenas Eason Benton. At 17, Maecenas' son was carrying a chain as a surveyor's assistant in Joplin. Shortly thereafter he began a long, arduous, uninteresting art apprenticeship as a newspaper cartoonist, then as an art student in Chicago, Paris, New York, where he kept himself alive painting scenery for the old haphazard cinema studios of Fort Lee, N. J. Six months in the Navy during the War knocked the French impressionism out of him. He began to develop his own style. In 1919 he started work on a project that bore its first tangible fruits last week: a gigantic pictorial history of modern U.
S. For ten years he worked on it, experimenting with various techniques of mural painting. He traveled up, down and across the country making sketches, collecting material.