The Missouri State Capitol and Thomas Hart Benton's Mural

Twenty-some miles south of Columbia on Highway Sixty-Three, the city of Jefferson City sits on a bluff above the Missouri River, and on that bluff stands the Missouri State Capitol, completed in nineteen seventeen after the previous building burned in nineteen eleven. The dome is visible for miles in every direction, a limestone mass that anchors the river bend the way a crown anchors a forehead. Inside, in the House Lounge on the third floor, hangs one of the most ambitious murals in American public art.

Thomas Hart Benton, the Missouri-born painter who became the defining figure of American Regionalism, painted his work there between nineteen thirty-six and nineteen thirty-seven. He called it A Social History of the State of Missouri. It covers four walls and the lunette above the entrance, and it is crowded with human figures in a way that rewards extended looking.

Benton was not painting heroes on horseback. He was painting the working people of Missouri: trappers and farmers, miners and river workers, politicians at rallies, a Black family in a field, a lynching in the background of one panel included deliberately as a statement about Missouri's history of racial violence, social gatherings and political meetings and the ordinary textures of life in a state that had always stood between the South and the North, between the frontier and the settled country. The mural was controversial when it appeared.

Some legislators objected to the frankness of its social content. Benton had included scenes of gambling and drinking, of slavery, of the violence that ran through the state's history, none of which everyone in the statehouse wanted on public display. Benton was unapologetic.

He believed that art which told only comfortable truths was not art at all. Benton grew up in Neosho, Missouri. He studied in Chicago and Paris, spent years in New York, and came back to Kansas City in nineteen thirty-five, the year before he began the Capitol mural.

He taught at the Kansas City Art Institute for decades. He died in his studio in nineteen seventy-five while at work on his final mural, a commission for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, a death that seemed almost scripted.