Gallery owner comes full circle with Thomas Hart Benton show

One of the key painters in the American regionalist movement, the Missouri-born Benton (1889-1975) specialized in muscular, heroic renditions of American rural life. Along with his contemporary, Grant Wood, Benton captured the farmers, soldiers, laborers and ordinary working folk of the American heartland in his paintings. In 1934 he was one of the few artists to ever have his picture featured on the cover of “Time” magazine, achieving a legendary status that distinguished him among American artists.

But Avery knew little of Benton’s renown. He just knew what he liked. And he liked “Photographing the Bull” (1950), a lithograph of which he discovered while thumbing through an auction catalog at his neighbor’s house in 1969. The painting featured the red barns, burly farm hands, hay stacks and undulating landscape that defined Benton’s style. It depicts a photographer with his head hidden beneath a camera’s shroud preparing to snap a man with his arm outstretched toward a frighteningly virile bull. The image struck Avery like a freight train. He knew he had to have it.

“My family has deep roots in tobacco farming,” says Avery, who grew up in Greenville, N.C. “It just seemed like home. It hit me personally.”

He told his neighbor, a sophisticated television producer with a stylish bachelor pad and a swimming pool in the backyard, “I want one of his pieces.”

Informed the piece cost $1,500, Avery convinced his uncles to put him to work in picking tobacco that summer.

“Working in tobacco fields was very hard work, but it paid very well,” says Avery.

So the enterprising Avery — who would grow up to own one of the longest-running modern art galleries in Buckhead — went to work to buy that lithograph. For two summers he labored on his uncle’s farm doing work so dirty it left him coated in a gooey slime of stinky, odoriferous tobacco juice.

“You went in at 4:30 in the morning and you came out at 3 in the afternoon, but you were covered in all that tar,” remembers Avery.

What Avery didn’t know was that his neighbor, concerned the painting would get snapped up by somebody else, had bought the lithograph and was storing it until Avery raised the money to buy it.

But once Avery whisked his prized Benton home, he didn’t proudly display it on his bedroom wall. Instead he did the 9-year-old’s version of stashing a stack of Benjamins under the mattress and hid it behind his dresser.

“I was paranoid that someone would steal it. It was not until I graduated from North Carolina School of the Arts at age 15 and got my first real job waiting tables that I could afford to frame it,” he says.

“The first time it hung on a wall was when I moved to Atlanta in 1978.”

Today, Avery has 32 Thomas Hart Bentons proudly displayed in his Vinings home, though they represent only a fraction of the work he’d like to own. But every time Avery would go to an auction house like Sotheby’s or Christie’s to try and bid on a Benton, one fervid collector would always drive the prices up into the stratosphere.

“Barbra Streisand is probably the biggest collector of Thomas Hart Bentons, and I would always know when her representatives were in the room, because the price would go beyond my affordability very quickly. So I had to find mine in secondary auction houses,” says Avery.

On Nov. 16, Avery’s Benton-philia will come full circle, in a sense, when he opens “Lonesome Road: Works From the Estate,” an exhibition of Thomas Hart Benton’s paintings, watercolors, lithographs and drawings at his East Paces gallery, Alan Avery Art Company.

The show is centered on Benton’s African-American subjects and the hardships of their lives, which Benton did not shrink from portraying. Among pieces on exhibit is “Chain Gang,” featuring a trio of African-American prisoners laboring in the foreground as two white men, one armed, watch them from a distant car.

“I think it is interesting that a white man of his time really captured the soul of a black man having to work and deal with society at the time. And he does it in a very realistic way,” notes Avery.

“Lonesome Road” came about in a moment of extreme serendipity. Two of Avery’s art collectors from Marietta bought a vacation home in a Mexican resort town next door to Thomas Hart Benton’s daughter, Jessie Benton Lyman. The collectors recounted the story of Avery as a precocious 9-year-old, small-town boy who set his sights on her father’s work. Charmed by the tale, Benton’s daughter granted Avery access to works held by St. Louis, Missouri’s UMB Financial Corp., which manages the artist’s estate.

Out of that archive, Avery has assembled a show of about 26 works, many of which have never been shown before.

And among those Thomas Hart Bentons will be that hard-earned $1,500 lithograph that captured the imagination of a 9-year-old boy.