Art of 1951 Miss. flood up for timely auction

NEW YORK - As the swollen Mississippi River threatens residents of the South, a 1951 painting is a reminder of another devastating flood 60 years ago.

"Flood Disaster" by American painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton is scheduled to be auctioned at Sotheby's on Thursday. The presale estimate is $800,000 to $1.2 million.

The painting was created to highlight the extent of the damage caused when the Kansas and Missouri rivers swelled to 70 times their normal size on July 13, 1951, killing 17 people and displacing more than 518,000 residents.

In a further effort to shed light on the flood victims' suffering, the Missouri artist made a lithograph of the painting and sent a copy to each member of Congress urging them to expand a flood relief appropriations bill. It did not pass, and many of Benton's lithographs wound up in the trash.

President Harry Truman had estimated the damage at more than $1 billion, and reluctantly signed a $113 million flood relief bill.

An Associated Press photo that ran in The New York Times on Oct. 15, 1951, shows Benton holding the lithograph while looking at his painting and initial sketch.

The painting shows two wrecked houses, a mangled car and a washing machine covered in mud on the shore of the Kansas River, looking toward Kansas City. A woman, man and child are pictured walking up to their destroyed home.

Benton was Jackson Pollock's teacher at the Art Students League of New York. He was the son of a U.S. congressman and the grandnephew of a U.S. senator, who was his namesake. He was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement with such artists as Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry.

Sotheby's declined to identify the seller. It said the painting came from an East Coast collection.

Mississippi River closure could cost millions

The auctions comes amid flooding in the Midwest and South that has forced thousands of evacuations, done millions of dollars in damage, and shuttered 15 miles of the mighty Mississippi to commercial traffic, at an estimated cost to the U.S. economy of $300 million per day.