Thomas Hart Benton’s home and studio is a tiny jewel in Midtown
Thomas Hart Benton’s home. // Courtesy photo
Unless you’re looking for the Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site, it’s easy to miss. At one-third of an acre, it’s the smallest state park in Missouri, and it’s nestled inconspicuously in Kansas City’s Roanoke neighborhood. Save for a few small signs on surrounding streets, there’s not much to draw you in. Yes, there’s a cardboard cutout of Benton himself on the front steps, but at just under five foot three inches, the man hardly struck an imposing figure.
Yet the impact of the site belies its physical proportions. In that way, the home is like Benton himself—small in stature, significant in so many other ways. Touring it was one of the most enjoyable cultural experiences in Kansas City.
Benton and his work are everywhere: He once graced the cover of Time Magazine; when the Nelson-Atkins Museum bought his masterwork “Persephone” in 1986, the purchase price set a museum record; he illustrated popular novels and painted grand murals on government buildings; President Harry Truman once called him “the best-damned painter in America.”
His professional resume is too lengthy to unpack here. Suffice it to say that for a small guy, Benton talked big and painted big, and his impact on our culture was equally outsized. It seems almost surreal that for $5, you can walk through his house as he lived in it. You can stand inside the studio where he worked every day of his life, including his last. Tours of the home offer a fascinating tether to a grand history of the Midwest.
The whole experience reminded me of the time I saw videos of Pablo Picasso painting—it feels like it shouldn’t be possible. The legend around certain artists renders them almost inhuman, as though they couldn’t possibly inhabit the same world as the rest of us, much less have existed in a contemporary era. The case could be made that Benton was the most famous Kansas Citian of the 20th Century and so should occupy the same rarified air of other, inaccessible celebrities. But that’s the beauty of this museum.
“The atmosphere we try to convey is that the Bentons have stepped out for the day. And you get to take a peek around,” says Steve Sitton, the site’s director. “Ninety percent of what we have in the house is original. I can show you what Tom’s swim trunks looked like.”
Katie Hastert, the site’s lead historian, agrees.
“We’re so fortunate not to have had to recreate their possessions, which is what a lot of historic homes have to do.”
Because the park is just a few blocks from 39th Street, I was able to kill some time at Meshuggah Bagels and Prospero’s before making my way through the gates for a tour. It was a cold morning, but Sitton and Hastert greeted me warmly, their passion for their work evident from the outset. The site has only four employees, and only Sitton and Hastert are full-time. For visitors, that sort of intimacy is a boon.
“I love that I get to interact with the public,” says Hastert. “A lot of historians don’t get to do that. The people that come here are so interesting and they care about history and art.”
The tours, unique every time, take you through the Bentons’ home as Rita, his wife, preserved it. You’ll see the piano where their children learned to play. The bookshelves are filled with volumes the family read, many inscribed to the great artist. The sight of a large television on the second floor tickled me. Of course, there was a TV. The man only died in 1975.
Credit to the guides for not being thrown by my strange fixations. Because they don’t use a script, guests are encouraged to ask questions and allow their interests to guide the discussion.
“I always encourage that,” says Hastert. “It makes it more fun if [the visitors] ask questions because I know what you’re interested in.”
“We can do a tour for someone who has no idea who Thomas Hart Benton is,” says Sitton. “We can do tours for someone who just wants to see an old house. We can do tours for curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
As can happen with local landmarks, Sitton says a lot of Kansas Citians wait until they get visitors from out of town to visit the site. Because almost every serious art museum in the country has a Benton somewhere in its collection, the guides can usually connect Benton’s work to visitors, no matter where they’re from.
That said, waiting is a mistake—so is only visiting once. A single, hour-long tour won’t come close to plumbing the depths of Benton’s life and the treasures in his beautifully preserved home. There are countless ways to see the space and interact with the experts guiding you around.
The most moving part of the site is Benton’s studio, which occupies most of the property’s carriage house. It has tall ceilings and is filled with light during the day. It exists much as it did the day he died in there, complete with sketches, coffee cans repurposed as brush containers, and a few smoking pipes. On the wall are pictures of him and his friend, President Truman, and a flier announcing a festival celebrating Benton’s long-awaited homecoming to Neosho, MO.
Standing in that room, surrounded by Benton’s tools, Sitton and I talked about the artist’s process. We spoke about how Benton planned and the amount of work that went into scaling his works, especially the murals. Sitton likened Benton to a symphony composer, creating music to be played in huge concert halls, but only after weeks of rehearsals.
The conversation demystified a creative form I’d assumed happened in unpredictable bursts of inspiration. Certainly, there are artists who paint that way, but they are more like jazz musicians, improvising in front of smaller rooms. Benton’s thoughtful, meticulous nature allowed him to create art on a larger scale. He could create narratives in his work.
In Sitton’s words: “We try to talk about that; yes, he’s a visual artist, but he was also a storyteller.”
Benton said he did “common art for the common man.” At the risk of disagreeing with the great master, I’m not sure his art was common, whether or not his subjects were commonplace. Accessible seems like a more appropriate word, especially after spending time in his home, talking with people who have made a career out of the study of his life.
“This is who he was,” says Sitton. “This is his personality, his work habits. This is how he lived. We want to bring him alive.”
The Thomas Hart Benton Home and Studio State Historic Site is located at 3616 Belleview Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64111. It is open year-round, Thursday through Monday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Scheduling tours online is recommended.
