Benrimo's career runs along the seam between two of the most significant currents of mid-twentieth-century American art, the New York commercial-design and Bauhaus-influenced teaching world of the 1930s, and the Taos modernist circle of the 1940s and 1950s, and his late painting belongs fully to both.
Benrimo's early life was shaped by the loss of his San Francisco childhood. The 1906 earthquake destroyed not only the family's home but the body of drawings and notebooks he had accumulated as a young aspiring artist, and the family's move to New York placed him, at nineteen, in a new city with no prior body of work to build on. The decision to pursue art was made largely without formal teachers; his subsequent study gave him technical exposure rather than a single mentor, and the body of his early visual education came from his own looking.
The Armory Show was the decisive event of that early period. The exhibition's introduction of Cubism, Fauvism, and the broader European avant-garde to American audiences provided the foundation on which his later work would build, and the modernist aesthetic he absorbed there underlay his subsequent commercial-art and stage-design practice in New York across the following two decades. The commercial work paid the bills; it also gave him a sustained working knowledge of color, composition, and the practical demands of design.
His teaching at Pratt placed him at the centre of the most important early American institutional adoption of Bauhaus methodology. The German school's emphasis on the unity of design, craft, and fine art had reached the United States only recently, through Albers's arrival at Black Mountain College and through the arrival of other Bauhaus emigrants, and Benrimo's introduction of those methods was among the earliest serious institutional attempts to incorporate them into American art education.
The move to Taos was the turning point of his life. The decision to leave commercial work and the institutional teaching position behind and to commit himself to studio painting full time placed him within the Taos modernist circle that was then forming around the older Bisttram and Dasburg generation and the wider literary and artistic community organized around Mabel Dodge Luhan. The body of work he produced over the next nineteen years moved through Cubist construction, Surrealist invention, and pure non-objective abstraction, drawing on classical and architectural references in ways that distinguished it from the more strictly nature-derived abstraction of his Taos peers.
His position today is that of a key but underrecognized figure of the New Mexico modernist tradition, and the body of work and archival material he left has continued to be exhibited, studied, and collected steadily in the decades since his death. The Smithsonian holdings of his and his wife Dorothy's papers remain the principal documentary record of his life and career.