1920:

The Bentons’ first of 53 summers on Martha’s Vineyard.

1920-21:

Caroline Pratt, Helen Marot and the Bentons become acquainted—either in New York City where they will be near neighbors for 15 years or, far more likely, on Martha’s Vineyard where they are next-door Chilmark/Menemsha neighbors for 34 years (until both women had died).

1920-22:

West Side Express is thickly painted with a palette-knife in New York. It seems extravagant for an artist struggling to afford supplies—one often having to paint on paper, tin and other materials at hand. In this virtuosic painting, Benton separately introduces and then integrates all four cutting-edge European modernist directions of that era. Each, in its turn, then expands to fill the canvas. Further, he then mixes in this image all three of the traditionally separated disciplines of visual art—painting, sculpture and architecture. Lastly, the image is a visualization of Caroline Pratt’s “Play School” educational innovations. That subject suggests from the outset that the painting would go to Pratt either by gift or by purchase.

1926:

T.P. Benton born—in New York City (?).

1929:

T.P. enrolls at Caroline Pratt’s The City and Country School in Greenwich Village at age 3. He attends there until late 1935. T.P.’s tuition at the City and Country School is paid with artworks.

1929:

Caroline Pratt acquires Benton’s bartered artworks from the school and pays for them from personal funds. This continues in practice 6 years.

1930:

Caroline Pratt models for Benton’s America Today New School for Social Research mural panels. She is posed with Rita Benton and the four-year-old T.P.—one of two friends posed with family members (Benton and Alvin Johnson, his mural patron, are also in the vignette`to complete this group of five).

1930:

Jackson Pollock arrives in New York from California. Two older brothers already there in Benton’s classes had urged him to come and attend with them. At 18, he meets Benton when his brother, Charles, takes him to dinner in Benton’s home. He enrolls in September at the Art Students League where Benton teaches. He will study Benton’s unique methods and modernist composition theories there for the next five years and become like a surrogate son to the Bentons—meeting their friends etc.

1930-31:

Benton’s America Today, his first commissioned mural project, is unveiled to wide public acclaim. Critics are less pleased. His blurring of demarcation lines between painting, sculpture and architecture, a modernist concept launched ten years earlier in West Side Express, is fully realized. Architectural trim moldings are central to the design of all ten panels. Further, each square inch of canvas is sculptural since Benton worked meticulously from 3-dimensional tilted clay “maquettes” for all his paintings after West Side Express experiments with clay had achieved that stylistic result. His 1922-27 American Historical Epic was the proving ground for that technique. Critics and viewers alike have declared those 17 panels to be no less than “aggressively sculptural.” Of course, that was the goal.

Benton’s mature sculptural painting style—for which he is famed—arrives when America Today is unveiled (in 1930). The modernist concept of “wall sculptures” also had arrived, some 40 years ahead of its time.

1930-31:

Pollock meets Caroline Pratt and Helen Marot. Marot is a surrogate grandmother to Pollock early on; and a mentor by 1935 after the Bentons move away. His exposure to West Side Express in their Martha’s Vineyard and Greenwich Village homes is exclusive among artists other than Benton and is extensive throughout the full decade of the 1930s.

1931:

Pollock’s first of several summers with the Bentons on Martha’s Vineyard. He babysits their young son when needed. He converts a Benton property chicken coop into a summer home. From there he has ready access to visit the home of Marot and Pratt as well.

1932:

In April Benton donates a painting to be auctioned in a fund raiser for the City and Country School.

1935-36:

Bentons move to Kansas City where Tom heads Kansas City Art Institute’s Department of Painting. He works on Missouri Capitol mural.

1939:

Jessie Benton is born in Kansas City, Missouri.

1940:

Helen Marot dies in New York City on June 3^rd, six days shy of her 75^th birthday. She had visited Pollock’s studio one week earlier and had told a friend from what she saw and heard that day, “We may have a genius on our hands.”

1941:

In April Caroline Pratt visits relatives in Kansas City and stays several days with the Bentons as a house-guest.

1941:

On April 22^nd Benton writes a tribute to Caroline Pratt in longhand on a single sheet of typing paper stating in conclusion that “Tom and Rita like Caroline Pratt better than anybody they know.” This is for the school’s 25^th Anniversary Book—a scrapbook from many famed personages whose children attended the City and Country School. (See “Documents” page.)

1941:

Assimilating the “mixture-of-styles” technique learned from Benton’s West Side Express along with painting techniques from Picasso, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Hans Hoffman and others, as well as Native American sand paintings he had seen as a boy in Arizona; Pollock prepares artworks (in December) for his inclusion, along with Lee Krasner, as exceptional American modernists in a show of European modernism scheduled for a January 1942 opening at the McMillen Gallery.

Benton’s West Side Express foray into surreal realism and abstracted expressionism two decades earlier—in a painting known only to the two American artists—stayed discreetly undiscovered. Each artist’s gestation of its lessons required ten or more years. Benton’s career as a muralist soared in 1931. Pollock’s near elimination of subject and ever bolder mixing of styles brought him to fame in 1941-42.

1943:

Building upon a dozen years of assimilated techniques (that included the in-person lessons of  West Side Express the first ten years); Pollock departs from representational painting altogether and produces his breakthrough “Mural” (a.k.a. the Peggy Guggenheim Mural), launching a new era in American Modern Art.

1946-56:

After 10-years of gestation, the wildly imaginative 1936 speculations of Siqueiros became realities in Pollock’s art.  From those seeds planted by a second innovative master, Pollock made secure his place in the sun. He stood on new shoulders and reinforced abstractionist world leadership with his famed drip and stick paintings. Pollock again had leapt well beyond his peers. He also had given a new dimension to Benton’s concepts of “over-all” painting that had been a staple in Pollock’s (and Benton’s) art throughout his formative years.

1954:

Caroline Pratt dies on June 5 at New York’s St. Luke’s Hospital at the age of 87. West Side Express, is sent to Caroline’s namesake and niece in Kansas City; Caroline Pratt Holzwarth.

1956:

Jackson Pollock dies on August 11 in an eastern Long Island car crash.

1954-65:

The painting stays with Mr. and Mrs. Holzwarth until her death in 1965.

1965-71:

The painting and 3 other Benton artworks remain then with Mr. Holzwarth.

1971:

Mr. Holzwarth gives the painting and other Benton artworks from her great aunt’s estate to his daughter, Mary Frances Holzwarth Needham.

1971:

Mrs. Needham contacts a family member in Kansas City who puts her in touch with Rita Benton. In November an appointment is made for a visit.

1971:

(October-November): The Needhams travel from Tulsa, Oklahoma (where they then were living) to the Benton home in Kansas City. They bring the four Benton artworks with them. After meeting Mrs. Benton, Mr. Needham unloads the artworks and carries them into the front room.

Tom Benton comes from his studio, examines the four artworks and declares them to be his work. He discusses with the Needhams the condition of West Side Express and recommends it be cleaned. They decide to leave the painting with the Bentons to be given to Sid Larson, their restorer of choice, for such restoration work as he deems necessary.

Mrs. Benton offers to buy the least of the four Needham artworks—a 1936 lithograph, “Missouri Farmyard.” The offer is refused, but a trade is made instead for a larger more recent Benton lithograph titled “Forward Pass.”

1971:

Rita Benton contacts Sidney Larson of Columbia, Missouri, telling him she has the Needhams’ painting for him to pick up. Larson comes to Kansas City to get the painting. He takes it home to his studio where he completes the necessary restoration work (lining with a new canvas backing, mounting to a new stretcher, and cleaning). (See Larson Letter on “Documents” page.)

1972:

Larson completes his work early in the year and sends the painting with an invoice to the Needhams in Tulsa. They pay him with a personal check.

1972:

In mid-March, Mr Holzwarth contacts the Bentons. Rita notes in her appointment yearbook that she has sent a letter to him on 3/22/72.

1973:

The Needhams move to Grand County, Colorado where they and the painting will remain for almost two decades.

1975:

Thomas Hart Benton dies in his studio on January 19^th at the age of 85. Rita, his wife and life partner dies in April, 11 weeks later.

1989:

Needhams relocate the painting to their corporate offices in Granby, Colorado.

1989:

West Side Express and two other Benton artworks from the estate of Caroline Pratt are offered to the painting’s present owners.

1990:

The painting is reframed in April by LeBron Brothers of New York in a geometric modern gold-leaf Lowy frame.

1990:

Painting is exhibited during May and June in an all-Benton show curated by Fred McCraw at the Louis Newman Gallery in Beverly Hills, California.

West Side Express is depicted in color in the exhibition catalogue. An insightful introductory essay by art critic Calvin Goodman is included.

Exhibition attendees in May included a then Nelson-Atkins Curator, Henry Adams, and Jessie Benton, the artist’s daughter. Newman related that Adams characterized to him that the exhibit was “the finest selection of early Benton art” he had seen assembled from private collections.

1990:

On June 29^th, the painting and two other artworks from the Pratt estate are sold by Needhams to the present owners. (The other artworks are: (1) an oil on newsprint titled “Chilmark” and (2) a gauche Benton drawing.)

September through November: the Newman Gallery exhibition is moved to the Wichita Art Museum. This is the second and final venue for McCraw’s 1990 all-Benton exhibition. (See Wichita Article “Documents” page.)

Sept. 1990:

Dr. J. Richard Gruber, Benton scholar/writer (and then Director of the Wichita Art Museum), lectures on Benton at the Wichita exhibition opening. He poses for a newspaper photograph with West Side Express as the featured painting. (See Wichita Article “Documents” page.)

1990-99: 

“Chilmark” and the Benton drawing—from the Caroline Pratt estate—are both placed in permanent collections.

1993-1994:    

Painting is loaned for one year for exhibition at the Muskegon Museum of art in Muskegon, Michigan.

2002:  

Owners commence an in-depth research of the history and composition complexities of West Side Express.

Dec. 2002:  

With an owner present, the art forensics expert. Peter Paul Biro, examines the painting, in his Montreal studio and discovers a clear fingerprint fragment in original     paint.

2003:              

In February, Biro searches in several museums and in Benton’s preserved Kansas City studio for fingerprint matches. With an owner present and assisting, Biro and the observer find and photograph more than 50 paint and paper fingerprints—most are in the artist’s studio. Four match the painting print. This work is later validated by an RCMP forensics expert.

2003:

In July, an authentication report containing various items of hard evidence in support of empirical and factual findings of experts is completed.

2006:

In August and September, a condensed version of the authentication report is produced.

2011:

The painting is brought to the Cleveland home of Dr. Henry Adams in May of 2011 for his personal re-inspection.

Dr. Henry Adams writes a 6-page letter on June 28, 2011 noting the seminal importance of the painting. He also writes that a preliminary drawing for West Side Express is in a sketchbook he had seen. That book contained drawings for several other known Benton works issuing all from the years 1921 and 1922, thereby dating the painting to that period in the artist’s development. (See Dr. Adams’ Letter “Expert Views” page.)

2015:

In late April, an attenuated summation of 25 years of research by lay and professional scholars appears in the May-June issue of Fine Art Connoisseur. This introduces West Side Express and its seminal role in American and world art history to a national and international artworld audience.

2016:

As awareness of West Side Express continues to spread, academics and art scholars begin to reevaluate two cardinal tenets of 1930s art criticism regarding (1) whether, with this 1920-21 painting, the capital of avant garde directional innovation in modern art had moved from Paris to New York a full two decades earlier than previously thought; and (2) the true extent of influence that Benton had on the art of Jackson Pollock, making clearer Benton’s role in 20^th Century Modernism.