Artworks

Commenting on its oil related to this lithograph, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts describes:

"In Haystack, the rhythmic swirls of paint and lyrical movement of the workers make farm life appear pastoral. The theme—man working in harmony with nature, and the landscape as a source of bounty and sustenance—presents an ideal view of the hardships that farmers endured during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Referred to as a Regionalist, Thomas Hart Benton believed that the subjects of American artists should come from the nation’s heartland. After initially absorbing the lessons of Modernism and embracing an abstract, vivid style, Benton turned in the 1920s to developing what he considered an “authentic American art,” an art that was socially responsible and never aesthetically hermetic.

[...] In Haystack, the spiraling motion implicit in the hay coiled on the central pole is echoed throughout the painting, where content and artistic process meld seamlessly as Benton weaves together sky, earth, and farmer into one holistic vision of rural life in Missouri."

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Source: https://emuseum.mfah.org/objects/19173/haystack