Thomas Hart Benton's "America Today" Mural Goes to Met On New Year's Day 1931, a new and radically different building opened amid the town houses of West 12th Street: Joseph Urban's International-Style New School for Social Research, with one room in particular as a star attraction. Thomas Hart Benton, the American realist painter, had lined the third-floor boardroom with nine panels of what would be a 10-panel mural, "America Today," depicting a panoply of pre-Depression American types, from flappers to farmers, steel workers to stock market tycoons. Lloyd Goodrich, a prominent art historian, pronounced it a breakthrough that heralded a new approach to mural painting, "of actually taking reality and making mural art directly out of it." Eight decades later, "America Today," now considered one of the most important and famous examples of American scene painting, is languishing in storage. That will change, however, because AXA Equitable, the insurance company that bought it nearly 30 years ago, has decided to donate it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Met is really the perfect home for it," said Mark Pearson, AXA's chairman and chief executive, in a telephone interview. Of all the institutions the company considered, "the Met has the scale for it and the greatest number of visitors." Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Met, called the gift "a win-win for New York and for art lovers everywhere," and offered another reason the museum made sense for the work. " "America Today" is a period room," he said, "and the Met is a museum of period rooms." The only problem is that the museum is so squeezed for space that the mural's first public appearance after the handover won't be until at least 2015, when the Met takes over the Whitney Museum of American Art's landmark Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue (after the Whitney's move to the meatpacking district). "America Today" is to go on view there as the first artwork that Met officials have confirmed will hang in its temporary satellite space, which the museum will have for at least eight years. But just where in the Breuer building it will go has not been determined. Sheena Wagstaff, the Met's new chairwoman of Modern and contemporary art, said it was too early to say. Mr. Campbell said the mural would eventually move from the Breuer building to somewhere in the Met itself, and Ms. Wagstaff explained that she saw a "a number of natural homes in different parts of the Met" for it. " "America Today" is more than just an example of American life," she said. It embodies the tension between European tradition and a new American stylistic idiom and is a demonstration of a number of different social issues that go far beyond North America. Since the mural is in storage, the Met is showing what it will look like in a room setting in a special link on its Web site, along with images of the individual panels. Benton, who died in 1975, said he had taken his inspiration for "America Today" from traveling around the country in the 1920s and drawing what he saw. "I'd just go around, sketching and talking to people," he told an interviewer in 1968. You could talk to people quite easily then. I don't find that same easy contact now, and I don't think it's just because I'm older. I think young people feel it too, and that's why there's all this rebellion. As to whether "America Today" had had a political agenda, he said emphatically, "No, the mural wasn't supposed to be a work of social protest at all, just a report on American life before the Depression." The 10 panels - most of them seven and a half feet high and of varying widths - depict a panoramic sweep of rural and urban life on the eve of the Great Depression. They capture both the prosperity and the poverty of the 1920s. There are images of industrial power in scenes of a train steaming ahead and water rushing from a dam. There are also images of coal miners and burlesque dancers, prizefighters, straphangers and even a pair of lovers perched on a park bench. Benton received no fee for the commission. "I did it for nothing, just expense money," he said. But it led to eight other murals which paid me very well, so it was a good thing for me. Its critical success became the impetus for the Works Progress Administration mural programs of the later 1930s. Over the years, the space whose walls it covered was converted from a boardroom to a classroom and then a seminar room; crowds, smoke and an unstable climate all took their toll. Benton restored the work twice, first in 1956 and again 12 years later. By 1982 the school, needing to raise money for its endowment and realizing that "America Today" was a valuable asset, decided to sell it. Edward I. Koch, then mayor of New York, and others were vocal in their desire to keep "America Today" intact, in New York and on view to the public, which AXA committed to do when it bought the work two years later for what was said to be $3.1 million (a staggering sum in those days). For 10 years the mural dominated the lobby of the company's headquarters at 787 Seventh Avenue, and when AXA moved, in 1996, the panels moved with it, adorning the lobby of 1290 Avenue of the Americas, at 52nd Street. But in February, with Vornado Reality Trust, the building's owner, planning to renovate its property, the mural was put in storage. "The lobby of our building is actually not owned by us, and the developer wants a different look," Mr. Pearson said. He added, "It's such an iconic piece it needs to be somewhere it can be well looked after, in a climate-controlled environment and seen by a bigger audience." Mr. Campbell, for one, is eagerly awaiting the mural's return to public view. "When we take over the Breuer building," he said, ""America Today" will be a star installation."