Rita Benton experienced the peaks and nadirs of Tom Benton’s history for 50 years before we met.  She was almost as great a teacher as her husband. But her highest talent—born of necessity—was selling. She genuinely believed it a favor to allow buyers to buy Tom’s art from her inventory. Time bore her out. All that she sold appreciated dramatically and still does.

Yet she turned away all she thought unlikely to hold purchases for their heirs. This was effectively a pre-condition, almost always mentioned to each new postulant. Dealers were flat-out unwelcome, save for Robert Graham who had helped sell Tom’s work in the early days when times were lean. To all others she asked, “Where were you when we needed you?” Each was sent away empty-handed. They soon learned not to come.

Rita died in April 1975, 11 weeks after Tom. Mourners gathered in their home after each service—though far fewer came to the second one. While Rita lived, so also did Tom. There was joy in that. But her death marked an era’s end. All then was quiet and somber.

Robert Stroud, who had an interest in banks he ran on the island of Guam, was one of many Kansas City collectors of Benton’s art. His first love was sculpture. One large room near his office displayed Tom’s 15 or so cast images. None were huge. Each sat on its own pedestal. Rich paneling and elaborate lighting gave this room the sway of a museum.

Stroud was at Rita’s memorial service and at the Benton home. He mentioned then or soon after that Rita had given him a Colorado phone number in 1972 or later. She suggested he try to buy a Benton painting the Coloradans owned, mentioning that it had a train in it. He already owned a fine train painting (10-lb. Hammer) and told me he did not want another so he had not acted on her suggestion. He thought I might be interested, despite that neither of us was acquainted with the image. I took the number, thanked him for it and told him I would check it out and might or might not try to buy it.

There were two reasons for that initial level of interest. First, it was a train painting and trains were generally his most sought-after subjects.  A close second was the incongruity inherent in Rita trying to get one of her best customers to buy a Benton artwork from someone else. Why had she done that?

The answer came fifteen years later, in 1990, when Benton scholar Dr. J. Richard Gruber first saw the painting. He declared it important while telling me that he believed it dated from about 1920 instead of 1927, the date I assigned it in the Newman Gallery catalogue.

It was an honest error made from an abundance of caution. I knew 1927 was the date of “Bootleggers” a more mature (ergo later) Benton canvas that was (insofar as I knew then and now) Benton’s second major work with a moving train in a cityscape—a favored mural motif that he used often over the next 47½ years.  (See Henry Adams’ letter under “Expert Views” for an explanation of how the actual date was established.)

When I spoke with Mr. William Needham in Colorado, he assured me they had no wish to sell the train painting or any other of their Benton art works. I gave him my home phone number and asked him to call if they ever changed their minds regarding the train painting. He didn’t call and I forgot about it—still not having seen a picture of the image.

Fourteen years later, Mr. Needham called and we spoke for a second time. I was no longer in the market as a potential buyer, but agreed to place it for him if he wanted to consign it and his two other Benton artworks—a thing he was willing to do.

I first saw West Side Express when he brought it to my home along with a small second painting and a drawing. After examining them, I established fair retail values based on known recent sales of comparables and on my more than 20 years of on-going research and study of the market. We set my commission and signed a two-year sales agreement.

With these three art works and two other more extensive collections of Benton art similarly in hand, I curated the Newman Gallery show. It opened in Beverly Hills on May 17, 1990, coinciding with the traveling April 1989 Nelson-Atkins Museum’s Benton exhibition then at the Los Angeles County Art Museum—its fourth and final venue.

Mr. Needham called in mid-June. He had located a retail business he wanted to buy and could not conveniently wait until the Newman show had run its course. He needed to sell it immediately and asked me to buy it. I demurred, pointing out that I had made him aware of the retail value and we were poised to receive that full price if the painting sold in Los Angeles—adding that the gallery had added their modest 10% commission and set the price that much above what I was trying to realize for him.

To this, he responded saying he did not need to realize as much as that sale would produce. I asked how much he needed to close the deal and he produced a number that would net him 60% of the selling price we had set instead of the 80% I had promised.

By this time, viewers at the exhibition clearly were seeing the painting as a surprisingly mature example of Regionalism, four or five years ahead of that 1930s movement that Benton led and that boosted his reputation as a muralist. Dr. Gruber was sure it was closer to ten years ahead, which later proved to be correct. Further, it likely was Benton’s first moving train in a cityscape by either yardstick.

With those things in mind and with a little help from a friendly banker in Colorado that had a stake in the business sale there, a close friend and frequent business partner in Connecticut and I contributed equally to the purchase and bought the painting. In July a Japanese real estate magnate agreed to buy the painting in Beverly Hills, but later reneged on the deal when the Japanese Real Estate boom collapsed and seriously threatened his empire.

We spent the next 17 years researching the painting and working to understand certain of its then-apparent anomalies. (See the Authentication and Documents Sections.) Through all those years we persisted in seeing the train engine as the central subject, though this persistently left much unexplained in the foreground. Finally the over-sized steps led to a now obvious conclusion that all was being seen through the eyes of the little girl.

She then, at last, became the central subject. Over the next eight years all that appears on this website became slowly understood, and with each new discovery, the painting’s importance in the history of American and world modernism became more certain.

We laugh at ourselves, and at how readily readers of this website can receive 25 years of accrued insight in about 25 minutes at their computers. Today we see West Side Express as the touchstone for the two dominant paths of 20^th century modernism—one led by Benton starting in about 1921 and maturing by 1931 and the other led by Pollock starting in 1931 and maturing by late 1941. The diversity of 21^st century art is built on a gradual blending of all that flowed from those now more easily understood beginnings.

                                                                                                ____Fred W. McCraw