#hardcover#art#nonfiction Description Margot Peet was nearly 90 when an art historian interviewed her about studying with the iconic artist Thomas Hart Benton six decades earlier. Knowing Mrs. Peet to be a museum patron and socialite who painted for pleasure, the scholar was surprised to discover that she was also a gifted artist of exceptional talent and achievement, yet unknown outside of her lifelong home, Kansas City. To some, Kansas City seems an unlikely place for artistic genius, a town spawned by riverboats and railroads. Though ignored by savants on the East and West Coasts, it has played important roles in the history of art in America and it thrives as a cultural capital of the Middle West. Discovering Margot Peet, The Artist and the Art World of Kansas City writes the record on both counts and in two narratives one about the person, the other about her milieu. Marianne Berardi s critical biography recounts the life and appraises the oeuvre of this unsung genius, a woman of parts. Margot Peet s love of painting was nurtured by a favorite aunt, and later by three notable teachers, the last and the most influential of them Tom Benton, then America s most famous artist. Peet combined both discipline and her innate gifts to work brilliantly in oil, watercolor and pastel. A grande dame and a mother, she was driven to make art both by boredom with her status and by despair over a private tragedy that has driven other women to distraction. By definition an amateur (she rarely sold her pictures), Margot Peet created deft portraits, sublime garden landscapes and vibrant floral still-lifes that display the highest degree of excellence and finish, as Dr. Berardi writes. All this in Kansas City, her font and inspiration not the farming hub and corny setting of musical comedy, but a dynamic metropolis whose early 20th-century civic leaders made a cosmopolitan oasis on the edge of the prairie in America s heartland. Henry Adams s authoritative appreciation of Kansas City gives this neglected cultural capital the overdue credit it deserves as a portal of art history in America and a cradle of our culture. Having nurtured superstars from Jean Harlow to Walt Disney, as well as such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Calvin Trillin, Evan S. Connell and Richard Rhodes, Kansas City was home to artists Frederic Remington, George Caleb Bingham and Thomas Hart Benton (among others). In the 20th century it became a center of world art in its museums, most notably the Nelson-Atkins, indisputably one of the most distinguished art institutions between the Coasts. The Nelson-Adkins Museum of Art counts among its treasures the finest array of Chinese art and objects outside of China in addition to important European and American collections. Margot Peet and 20th-century Kansas City fit hand in glove. Or to put it precisely, the city s cultural climate in both its hothouse society and hardscrabble nonconformity provided the perfect environment for this gifted woman who overcame heartbreak, created art for the love of it, and become an unforgettable painter with a brilliant color sense and starched sensitivity. Both the artist and her milieu are revealed in this double-barreled book of singular distinction, which was printed in exquisite color by a press in Hong Kong. Designed by the distinguished bookman Robert L. Wiser who has produced prizewinning volumes for Library of Congress, Smithsonian and Freer/Sackler Galleries as well as for Chronicle, Abrams, Abbeville, Rizzoli and other trade publishers, Discovering Margot Peet features 150 illustrations, a bibliography and full index.