The Family of Thomas Hart Benton Is Suing a Missouri Bank for Allegedly Losing Track of 100 of His Artworks

A legal battle is brewing over the estate of
painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), a
key figure in the American Regionalist movement.

The case pits the artist’s daughter, Jessie Benton, and her
three children, against Kansas City’s UMB Bank, run by the Kemper
family, prominent art patrons who lend their name to the city’s
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in the Circuit Court of Jackson
County, Missouri, the Benton heirs accused the bank of mismanaging
the artist’s multimillion-dollar estate. The Benton family claims
they were charged hundreds of thousands of dollars to build
climate-controlled facilities for the artist’s work, only to have
the works stored elsewhere. The complaint alleges that for 40
years, the bank did not provide the family with regular appraisals
of the estate’s assets, and has lost track of at least 100 artworks
by Benton.

“Despite our extensive efforts to address [the] issues
presented, the Benton family and its representatives have chosen to
resolve alleged issues through litigation,” UMB said in a statement
provided to the Wall Street
Journal. “We take our role as a trustee for art and other
assets seriously, and will directly address and defend the
misguided allegations made in the lawsuit.”

For an artist’s estate to be managed by a commercial bank,
rather than his or her family, an art gallery, or a dedicated
artist’s foundation, is unusual. But UMB’s former chairman, R.
Crosby Kemper Jr., who died in 2014, was a major collector of
Benton’s work. (He was also a cofounder of the Kemper museum.) His
son, Mariner Kemper, has run the bank since 2004.

Before Benton died, he and his wife, Rita, both set up trusts
with UMB with a now-deceased lawyer serving as trustee. Their two
children, Jessie, now 80, and T.P., who died in 2010, were the
trusts’ beneficiaries.

When Rita died just three months after her husband, Jessie,
mother to three young children, didn’t question the financial
arrangements. But over the years, her concerns mounted,
particularly when the bank did not provide a list of their holdings
of Benton’s work, or information about what pieces had been
sold.

Desert Artist, a
Benton painting his family says was willed by the artist to a
foundation linked to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, instead wound
up at the Kemper, where it is catalogued as a gift of Bebe and
Crosby Kemper. As of press time, neither side had responded to
inquiries from Artnet News.

A master of figurative painting, Benton depicted the everyday
lives of working-class Americans, from farmers to factory workers.
His work can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, among other
institutions.

According to the Artnet Price Database, the auction record
for a work by Benton is $4.89 million, set in 2015 at Christie’s
New York with the sale of Ozark Autumn. It’s one of
15 pieces by Benton to fetch more than $1 million at auction.

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Missouri Bank for Allegedly Losing Track of 100 of His Artworks
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