Fletcher C. Benton (February 25, 1931 – June 26, 2019) was an American sculptor and painter from

San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

. Benton was widely known for his kinetic art as well as his large-scale steel abstract geometric sculptures.

Life

Born in the coal, nugget and iron-producing district of southern Ohio, Benton was a successful sign painter as a youth. After serving in the

United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...

, he graduated from

Miami University Miami University (informally Miami of Ohio or simply Miami) is a public research university in Oxford, Ohio. The university was founded in 1809, making it the second-oldest university in Ohio (behind Ohio University, founded in 1804) and the 10 ...

, Oxford, Ohio with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1956. Thereafter he moved to San Francisco, and began as an instructor at the California College of Arts and Crafts and then went to Europe, traveling by his motorcycle through Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium and France; he spent some time in Paris and then in New York and later moved back to San Francisco. Benton was a part of the Beatnik movement in San Francisco during the ‘50s and ‘60s working as a sign painter by day and an expressionist artist (painting) by night. In 1961, he had a solo exhibition at the California Palace Legion of Honor, showing his portraits of fellow artists like David Simpson and William Morehouse. Frustrated with the limitations of paint on canvas, Benton began to work with movement in geometric pattern pieces and boxes which he was familiar with from his work in commercial signs. This was at the beginning of the kinetic movement; Benton worked largely in isolation, unaware of other efforts of kinetic artists. His early works of this series were exhibited at Gump's Gallery in San Francisco. In the late 1970s, he abandoned kinetic art, switching to more traditional media for sculpture: bronze and steel. These works are designed to be viewed from all angles and have often been characterized as new constructivism; he worked in this style until his death in 2019. Some of his most popular series in this style are the Folded Square Alphabets and Numericals, Folded Circle, Donuts, and Steel Watercolors. Benton has large-scale steel sculptures permanently installed world-wide including San Francisco's Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, Grounds For Sculpture sculpture park in Hamilton, NJ, the city of Cologne, Germany, the city of Berlin, among others.

Public Collections

Barbarossaplatz-Steel-Watercolor-Triangle-Ring

His work is included in the collections of the:
Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California
*

Vanderbilt University Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million ...

, Nashville, Tennessee *

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., the United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was des ...

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

Minneapolis Institute of Art The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is an arts museum located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Home to more than 90,000 works of art representing 5,000 years of world history, Mia is one of the largest art museums in the United State ...

Grounds For Sculpture Grounds For Sculpture (GFS) is a sculpture park and museum located in Hamilton, New Jersey. It is located on the former site of Trenton Speedway. Founded in 1992 by John Seward Johnson II, the venue is dedicated to promoting an understanding of ...

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

* Stanford Museum of Art *

Albright-Knox Art Gallery The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly known as the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, is an art museum at 1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York, in Delaware Park. the museum's Elmwood Avenue campus is temporarily closed for construction. It hosted e ...

Denver Art Museum The Denver Art Museum (DAM) is an art museum located in the Civic Center of Denver, Colorado. With encyclopedic collections of more than 70,000 diverse works from across the centuries and world, the DAM is one of the largest art museums between t ...

The Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is a nonprofit, tertiary, 886-bed teaching hospital and multi-specialty academic health science center located in Los Angeles, California. Part of the Cedars-Sinai Health System, the hospital employs a staff of over 2 ...

, Los Angeles *

Laumeier Sculpture Park Laumeier Sculpture Park is a 105-acre open-air museum and sculpture park located in Sunset Hills, Missouri, near St. Louis and is maintained in partnership with St. Louis County Parks and Recreation Department. It houses over 60 outdoor sculptu ...

Klingspor Museum The Klingspor-Museum is a museum in Offenbach, Germany, specializing in the art of modern book production, typography and type. It includes a collection of fine art books from Karl Klingspor, one of the owners of Klingspor Type Foundry in Offe ...

, Offenbach, Germany * Rockefeller Collection *

Sheldon Museum of Art The Sheldon Museum of Art is an art museum in the city of Lincoln, in the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. Its collection focuses on 19th- and 20th-century art. History Sheldon Art Association In 1888, The Sheldon Art Assoc ...

* Boulevard Jacqmain corner in Brussels Belgium *de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, Fletcher Benton, ''Going Around the Corner with X'', 2008, painted steel, Gift of the artist with assistance from

Paula Kirkeby Paula Zolloto Kirkeby (née Paula Ruth Zolloto; 1934–2016) was an American art collector, art donor, and the director and founder of a commercial art gallery. She was a co-founder of Smith Andersen Editions, 3EP Ltd. Press, and Smith Andersen G ...

, in honor of William Rewak, S.J., 2013.4.1.

Works

*'' Tilted Donut Wedge with Two Balls'', Besselpark, Berlin *''Donut No. 3'',

St. Louis, Missouri St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi River, Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the Greater St. Louis, ...

(Replica of ''Titled Donut Wedge with Two Balls)''

Awards

In 2008, Fletcher Benton was a recipient of the

International Sculpture Center The International Sculpture Center is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 1960 by Elden Tefft and James A. Sterritt at the University of Kansas. It is currently located on the old New Jersey Fairground in Hamilton, New Jersey Its goal is ...

's Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.International Sculpture Center website
'Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award page'
Retrieved 24 January 2010. In 1993 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Miami University at the Miami University Art Museum. His sculpture Folded Circle Two Squares was the founding piece and one of the signature sculptures of the Miami University's 3 acre Sculpture Park which now features works by Mark di Suvero, Nancy Holt, and others. In 1995, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters by the University of Rio Grande, located in Gallia County, Ohio.

References

Interviews

KQED Spark segment on Fletcher Benton. Original air date: March 2008

Karlstrom, Paul. Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Oral history interview with Fletcher Benton, 1989 May 2–4

. Original airdate: October, 2010. .