TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050189/05018900.040

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.3 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 80

Tarted Up Till the Eye Cries Uncle


Reviving the vulgarity of Thomas Hart Benton

By Robert Hughes


    If ever an American artist had seemed dead and buried a
decade ago, along with the movement he had led, that man was
surely Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). True, his huge murals
writhing with buckskinned, blue-jeaned and gingham-clad
Americans were still to be seen in situ in the Missouri State
Capitol, Jefferson City, and the Truman Library, Independence,
Mo.; his name might still be invoked in Kansas City, where his
latter years were spent; and most students of American art
history knew that he had been the teacher (and to no small
extent, the substitute father) of Jackson Pollock at the Art
Students League in New York City. But actual interest in the
Michelangelo of Neosho, Mo., was fairly low, which mirrored the
poor esteem into which American regionalism, the populist art
movement that in the '30s had tried to assuage the miseries of
the Depression, had slumped. From the late '40s onward,
regionalism had come to look cornball, and its project, which
was to rescue American art from the supposed corruptions of
Europe and New York, almost comically dated.

    But nostalgia and a market boom bring most things back
eventually. In 1983 the Whitney Museum of American Art revived
Benton's old co-regionalist, Grant Wood, with a retrospective.
Six years later, it is Benton's turn, with a show of some 90
works at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Curated
by the museum's Henry Adams, who wrote the well-researched and
highly readable accompanying biography, Thomas Hart Benton: An
American Original, it will run until June 18, then travel to
Detroit, New York and Los Angeles through July 1990.

    The show confirms what one had already suspected. It is
bound to be a hit, because Benton was a dreadful artist most of
the time. He was not vulgar in the tasteful, closeted way of an
Andrew Wyeth. He was flat-out, lapel-grabbing vulgar, incapable
of touching a pictorial sensation without pumping and tarting
it up to the point where the eye wants to cry uncle.

    Yet Benton's is a curious case because, despite all the
hollering he and his admirers produced about down-home values
and art for the common man, he was no kind of naif. He had
studied in Paris before World War I and was closely tied to the
expatriate avant-garde there, especially Stanton
Macdonald-Wright, whose "synchromist" abstractions were among
the most advanced experiments being done by any American
painter. In New York in the early '20s, Benton dressed (as one
of his friends would remark) like "the antithesis of everything
American," and had a peripheral relationship to Alfred Stieglitz
and the circle of his 291 gallery.

    Benton's own abstract paintings may not have been quite up
to the level of Macdonald-Wright's, though it is difficult to
judge them fairly, since he destroyed so much of his early work
"to get all that modernist dirt out of my system." But it was
abstraction that underwrote the system of Benton's later
figurative paintings -- an abstraction based on bulging,
serpentine figures derived from Michelangelo. From him, and from
mannerist sources like Luca Cambiaso's block figures and El
Greco's twisty saints, Benton assembled the theory of kinetic
composition that would eventually alter the walls of the
Midwest. It would alter abstract painting itself, since his
preoccupation with surge and flow got across to Pollock and,
much etherealized, led to Pollock's invention of "all-over"
abstraction. In his own work, however, what it mainly produced
was rhetoric.

    Benton left New York for good in 1935, returning to
Missouri. By then the regionalist movement had formed around his
"heroic" pastoral vision, and he felt obliged to repudiate the
city, whose art world was, he announced, a veritable Sodom of
fanatics like Stieglitz and "precious fairies" who "wear women's
underwear." Yet an odd thing about regionalism, as Adams shows
in amusing detail, is that it was the only art movement ever
launched by a mass-circulation magazine. Regionalism's promoter
was a small-time Kansas-born art dealer named Maynard Walker,
who sensed that the resentments of America, battered by the
Depression and bitterly suspicious of the East, could be
harnessed in the field of art. Cultural populism would sell, he
demonstrated, provided it were shown welling up from the
undefiled American heartland.

    The artists who embodied it best were Benton, Wood and John
Steuart Curry. They hardly knew one another. But it happened
that Henry Luce was looking for a patriotic circulation builder
for the Christmas 1934 issue of TIME. Walker was duly
interviewed, Benton's self-portrait went on the cover, and
American regionalism was born. "A play was written and a stage
erected for us," Benton would later remark. "Grant Wood became
the typical Iowa small towner, John Curry the typical Kansas
farmer, and I just an Ozark hillbilly. We accepted our roles."

    The further irony was that regionalism, supposed to be the
expression of American democracy, was in its pictorial essence
the kissing cousin of official Soviet art in the '30s. If
socialist realism meant sanitized images of collective rural
production, new tractors, bonny children and muscular workers,
so did the capitalist realism proposed by Benton and Wood. Both
were arts of idealization and propaganda. In aesthetic terms,
little that Benton painted for the next 40 years would have
seemed altogether out of place on the ceilings of the Moscow
subway. Apart from this, the whole matter of Benton's racism is
still up in the air. His paintings of blacks look condescending
because he never figured out how patronizing his desire to
"ennoble" them was, but at least he was equally hard on whites,
those gangling hayseeds and pudgy politicos.

    In any case, Benton could hardly draw anything without
caricaturing it. That was part of the reason for his popularity
-- as it is with an artist like Red Grooms today. You cannot
help liking Benton for his lack of cant, his indomitable energy,
his cussedness and independence. But as his work proves, these
qualities, though admirable in themselves, do not guarantee
major art.