NEW YORK (AP) - New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has received 29 drawings and studies relating to Thomas Hart Benton’s epic mural “America Today.”
The museum announced the recent gift from AXA on Tuesday. It comes four years after the insurance company donated the mural to the Met.
The 10-panel work by the realist painter depicts American life before the Depression. It was commissioned in 1930 for the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and purchased by AXA in 1984.
The mural features imagery of industrial American life throughout the 1920s. There are figures of farmers, coal miners, steelworkers and tycoons of modern industry and transportation. It established Benton as a leading American muralist.
The mural and the studies are on view at the Met.
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