The fluid, sculpted figures in his paintings showed everyday people in scenes of life in the United States.

Known as the "little giant of the Ozarks", Maecenas named his son after his own great-uncle,[5] Thomas Hart Benton, one of the first two United States Senators elected from Missouri.

"[4] In Paris, Benton met other North American artists, such as the Mexican Diego Rivera and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, an advocate of Synchromism.

He was directed to make drawings and illustrations of shipyard work and life, and this requirement for realistic documentation strongly affected his later style.

[14][15] On his return to New York in the early 1920s, Benton declared himself an "enemy of modernism"; he began the naturalistic and representational work known as Regionalism.

A relative unknown, he won a commission to paint the murals of Indiana life planned by the state in the 1933 Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago.

[25] Benton's work was featured along with that of fellow Midwesterners Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry in an article entitled "The U.S.

Due to his Populist political upbringing, Benton's sympathy was with the working class and the small farmer, unable to gain material advantage despite the Industrial Revolution.

It was considered scandalous by the Kansas City Art Institute, and was borrowed by the showman Billy Rose, who hung it in his New York nightclub, the Diamond Horseshoe.

"[28] During this period Benton also began to produce signed, limited-edition lithographs, which were sold at $5.00 each through the Associated American Artists Galleries based in New York.

[29] Benton's autobiography indicates that his son was enrolled from age 3 to 9 at the City and Country School in New York in exchange for his teaching art there.

[30] He included the school's founder, Caroline Pratt, in "City Activities with Dance Hall", one of the ten panels in America Today.

[32] With another of his students, Glen Rounds, who went on to become a prolific author and illustrator of children's books, Benton spent a summer touring the Western United States in the early 1930s.

[35] Benton's students in New York and Kansas City included many painters who contributed significantly to American art.

[38] In 1944, Benton appeared in an episode of John Nesbit's Passing Parade titled “Grandpa Called It Art,” that showed several contemporary artists at work.

[39] Benton demonstrated his process for the camera, from obtaining a farmer's permission to sketch his farm through making a three-dimensional model of the scene to the final painting.

[40] During World War II, Benton created a series titled The Year of Peril, which portrayed the threat to American ideals by fascism and Nazism.

[41] Benton remained active for another 30 years, but his work included less contemporary social commentary and portrayed pre-industrial farmlands.

Benton was hired in 1940, along with eight other prominent American artists, to document dramatic scenes and characters during the production of the film The Long Voyage Home, a cinematic adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's plays.

He continued to paint murals, including Lincoln (1953), for Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri; Trading At Westport Landing (1956), for The River Club in Kansas City; Father Hennepin at Niagara Falls (1961) for the Power Authority of the State of New York; Joplin at the Turn of the Century (1972) in Joplin; and Independence and the Opening of the West, for the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence.

[44] The historic site has been preserved nearly unchanged from the time of his death; clothing, furniture, and paint brushes are still in place.