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.

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 American Historical Epic, 1922-27, 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. With America Today his mature sculptural painting style—for which he is famed—had arrived. 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.

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:

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 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 for 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 his 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. 

By 1950, the artworld was polarized. Abstractionists clearly were on top. But Benton persisted. He led so-called representationalists—modernists that refused to abandon recognizable subject matter in a firm belief that artists yet unborn would find a need for it. A true visionary, he saw art as it would be in the 21^st century, an amalgamation of both modernist paths.

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.

1975:

Thomas Hart Benton dies in his studio on January 19^th at the age of 85.

1989:

West Side Express, originally from the Caroline Pratt estate, is offered to the painting’s present owners.

2011:

Dr. Henry Adams writes a 6-page letter 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 1921-22, thereby dating the painting to that period in the artist’s development.

2015:

The role of West Side Express as a foundation touch-stone for the mature art of both Thomas Hart Benton and, a decade later, for his student and friend, Jackson Pollock, is revealed in the May issue of Fine Art Connoisseur. This article—and the westsideexpress.net website noted therein—introduce West Side Express and its role in art history to a national and international art 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.