
Recently I had the pleasure to watch Thomas Hart Benton, a 1988 documentary by Ken Burns. This fascinating introduction to the artist’s complicated and dynamic personality inspired me to pay a visit to the Benton mural, America Today, now residing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The mural, a series of ten panels originally commissioned by the New School for Social Research in 1930, was sold to AXA Equities in 1984, and then given to the Met in 2012. You can watch a video about the Met’s acquisition here.