Thomas Benrimo was a key figure of the Taos modernist movement of the 1940s and 1950s, a self-taught San Francisco-born painter who carried the Bauhaus, Cubist, and Surrealist traditions of European modernism from New York commercial design and Pratt Institute teaching into the postwar Taos art world, where he became the first Surrealist painter working in New Mexico.
Thomas Duncan Benrimo (1887–1958) was an American modernist painter, born in San Francisco and a permanent resident of Taos, New Mexico, from 1939 until his death. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his early drawings and notebooks and prompted the family's move to New York City when he was nineteen. Largely self-taught, he studied briefly at the Art Students League and was decisively influenced by the 1913 Armory Show, the exhibition that introduced contemporary European modernism to the United States. He supported himself for nearly three decades in New York as a commercial artist, draftsman, and theatrical stage designer.
He taught at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1935 to 1939, where he was among the first American teachers to introduce the design and color methodology of the German Bauhaus into U.S. art education. In 1939 he moved to Taos and committed himself to fine-art painting full time, producing across the next nineteen years a body of work that moved through Cubism, Surrealism, and pure abstraction, and that drew openly on antiquity, traditional architecture, and the European modernist tradition. He is generally identified as the first Surrealist painter to work in New Mexico, and his Taos circle included Mabel Dodge Luhan, Andrew Dasburg, Rebecca James, and Emil Bisttram. The Smithsonian's Archives of American Art holds the Tom and Dorothy Benrimo papers, the principal documentary archive of his life and career.