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<text> <title> (1930s) Art:Thomas Hart Benton and the U.S. Scene </title> <history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1930s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Time Magazine December 24, 1934 Art: Thomas Hart Benton and the U.S. Scene </hdr> <body> By last week, the U.S. art season was at its peak. In Manhattan there were no less than 70 exhibitions in progress. The public could see and buy practically anything it wanted. On 57th Street Edward Bruce was exhibiting the landscape technique and Chinese perspective he developed under the watchful eye of Maurice Sterne. Sir Francis Rose, Gertrude Stein's latest painter-protege, was showing his sultry canvases. The Museum of Modern Art was aflame with Van Goghs, Cezannes, Toulouse- Lautrecs. At the New School for Social Research Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Robert Brackman, John Sloan and Alexander Brook were impressing their pupils with their craftsmanship. In Chicago, the Art Institute was showing Degas and Manet prints. Pittsburgh was sending its big Carnegie International exhibition to Baltimore. San Franciscans were peering thoughtfully at Sculptress Malvina Hoffman's Races of Man. Los Angeles was holding its second annual California Modernists Exhibition. In Northampton, Mass., Smith College girls were giggling before Man Ray's Surrealist photographs. Presented with their best year in five, dealers were again beginning to take cocktails with luncheon. The public's interest in art was proved by museum attendances which were uniformly up over last year. In one month in Manhattan, Feragil Galleries' annual Artists' Relief Exhibition netted more than $2,000 with pictures priced at $5 - $50. U.S. sales of the year were a Charles Willson Peale Washington to the Brooklyn Museum (price undisclosed); an early Rembrandt of Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet to the Chicago Art Institute; Jean Antoine Watteau's Mezzetin to the Metropolitan Museum for some $250,000. The 1934 U.S. art turnover easily topped $126,000,000. (In 1928, peak art year, the turnover was approximately one billion dollars.) As usual, top prices went for Old Masters whose value has survived many a depression. In London and Manhattan auctions the 18th Century English portrait painters stood their customary ground as stolidly as oaks. But in U.S. sales of contemporary paintings, observers noted a significant difference. This year the French schools seem to be slipping in popular favor while a U.S. school, bent on portraying the U.S. scene, is coming to the fore. In 1913 France conquered the U.S. art world. At the famed Manhattan Armory show arranged by the late Arthur B. Davies, the U.S. public got its first big dose of the arbitrary distortions and screaming colors which were making France's crop of artists the most spectacular in the world. The War took the public's mind temporarily off art but at its end French artists were sitting on top of the world. U.S painters, unable to sell at home or abroad, tried copying the French, turned out a profusion of spurious Matisses and Picassos, cheerfully joined the crazy parade of Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism. Painting became so deliberately unintelligible that it was no longer news when a picture was hung upside down. In the U.S. opposition to such outlandish art first took root in the Midwest. A small group of native painters began to offer direct representation in place of introspective abstractions. To them what could be seen in their own land--streets, fields, shipyards, factories and those who people such places--became more important than what could be felt about far off places. From Missouri, from Kansas, from Ohio, from Iowa, came men whose work was destined to turn the tide of artistic taste in the U.S. Of these earthy Midwesterners none represents the objectivity and purpose of their school more clearly than Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton. At 17, Artist Benton have up a job as surveyor's assistant in the lead and zinc district outside Joplin to do newspaper cartoons. A bad art student in Chicago, he went on to Paris where he speedily absorbed and copied all the latest French fads. Six Wartime months in the U.S. Navy knocked French Impressionism out of him, prompted him to develop a style of his own which he first exhibited in a series of realistic water- colors of the activities around Norfolk, Va. Today Thomas Benton's fame rests chiefly on three murals. One is in the Library of Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art. Another is in the New School for Social Research. The third and best known, a huge panorama painted for the Indiana Building at the Century of Progress Fair, is now stored in an Indianapolis warehouse because the State lacks a suitable place to exhibit it. All three have a nervous electric quality which is particularly Benton's and which his pupils often try but fail to imitate. Painted from recognizable observations, all three portray such typical Americana as revivalists, bootleggers, stevedores, politicians, soda clerks. Benton has had ample opportunity to study the U.S. he loves to paint. He was born in Neosho, Mo. in 1889. Says he: "My father [Congressman Maecenas Eason Benton] was a lawyer and politician. He came from Tennessee shortly after the Civil War, riding a horse and knocking the snakes out of his path with a long stick. He was a great-nephew of Thomas Hart Benton, the Senator from Missouri and Andrew Jackson's lieutenant. My family table talk was entirely devoted to law and politics. Southwest Missouri was, and is yet in those parts in which the automobile road has not penetrated, a backwoods country with a characteristic backwoods culture. Turkey shoots, country school hoedowns, hunting (possum, squirrel, quail and other small game) and hay wagon parties were sports with which I was familiar." Benton, in his murals and easel paintings, earnestly and almost ferociously strives to record a contemporary history of the U.S. A short wiry man with an unruly crop of black hair, he lives with his beauteous Italian wife and one small son in a picture-cluttered downtown Manhattan flat. To critics who have complained that his murals were loud and disturbing, Artist Benton answers: "They represent the U.S., which is also loud and not `in good taste.'" "I have not found," he explains, "the U.S. a standardized mortuary and consequently have no sympathy with that school of directors whose experience has been limited to first class hotels and the paved highways. At the same time I am no sentimentalist. I know an ass and the dust of his kicking when I come across it. But I have come across enough of it to be able to discover interesting qualities therein." Thomas Benton has filled scores of notebooks with sketches of the U.S. scene which eventually find their way into his work. He boasts that all his burlesque queens, stevedores, Negroes, preachers, and college professors are actual persons. His vivid portraits of them are fast becoming collectors' items and the cost of Bentons has been steadily rising since the Navy put him on the right artistic track. Last week, Thomas Benton, who is usually jolly, had a special reason to be cheerful. He sold his oil, Cotton Town, to Marshall Field III. If Thomas Benton is the most virile of U.S. painters of the U.S. Scene, the honor of being a pioneer in the movement belongs to Charles Ephraim Burchfield, 41, a tailor's son from Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio. In his childhood Burchfield found nothing so fascinating as tumble-down houses, freight trains, railroad tracks. Today most up-to-date museums have Burchfields. Not so spectacular a draughtsman as Benton, Burchfield manages to invest his paintings with a calm if somewhat dismal dignity and an exceptionally acute feeling for light and space. He lives in an eight-room frame house outside Buffalo, N.Y. with his wife and five children, amuses himself by tending his garden and building frames for his pictures. A painter of the city is Reginald Marsh who was born 36 years ago to Muralist Fred Dana Marsh in Paris. As a tousle- headed boy (he is now almost bald) he went to Lawrenceville, later to Yale. In spite of his very proper education, Artist Marsh thinks "well bred people are no fun to paint," haunts Manhattan subways, public beaches, waterfronts, burlesque theatres for his subjects. The Metropolitan and Whitney Museums thought enough of his work to purchase examples. A friend who had not seen John Steuart Curry since he was a potent footballer at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa. 15 years ago would hardly recognize him today. Apple-cheeked, fat, bald, he now weighs 187 pounds, lives quietly in Westport, Conn. He is so sensitive about his art that he frequently decides to give it up. But Curry is generally considered the greatest painter of Kansas and of the circus in the U.S. His two most famed works Tornado and Baptism in Kansas won him important critical accolades in Chicago and Manhattan but only served to irritate his fellow Kansans who felt that such subjects were best left untouched. In 1932 John Ringling gave him permission to follow the "Greatest Show on Earth." The result was a spectacular group of canvases showing herds of elephants, the Flying Codonas, the Wallenda Family, Baby Ruth, the fat girl, etc. Curry's art is simple and dramatic. Whether he likes it or not no Kansan who has looked at his State or been to a circus can fail to recognize the authenticity of Curry's subjects. Latest Curry is a two-panel mural for the Westport High School. In Comedy Artist Curry has included himself and his wife, has gaily jumbled Charlie Chaplin on roller skates, Mickey Mouse, Mutt & Jeff, Shakespeare's Bottom, Will Rogers, Popeye the Sailor. In Tragedy Uncle Tom prays beside the bedside of Little Eva, Hamlet sulks, Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill scowl, Aerialist Lillian Leitzel drops from her circus partner's arms to death. The chief philosopher and greatest teacher of representational U.S. art is Iowa's chubby, soft-spoken Grant Wood. Like Benton, Grant Wood studied in France, turned out his share of Blue Vase, Sorrento, House in Montmartre, Breton Market. But in 1929 he radically changed his style. From his palette issued a series of rolling, tree-dotted Iowa fields done in a flat, smooth manner. His landscape of West Branch, Iowa got the birthplace of Herbert Hoover almost as much public attention as the infrequent visits of that President. Wood's credo: U.S. art suffers from a "Colonial attitude" to Europe, a feeling of cultural dependence upon the older continent. To combat this attitude Wood chose irony. His American Gothic and his spectacular Daughters of Revolution, three prim spinsters against a background of Washington Crossing the Delaware, were his first attack. This year, what most critics consider his most important painting, Dinner for Threshers, won no prize at the Carnegie International at Pittsburgh but was voted third most popular by the public. Simple and direct, the picture bears as genuine a U.S. stamp as a hotdog stand or baseball park. Shy Bachelor Wood, 42, hates to leave his native Iowa where his fellow citizens have been buying his pictures and singing his praise almost since he began painting. He is often convinced he is a better teacher than painter. In Munich, he once mastered in a few weeks the technique of glass painting when German artists insisted on making a bearded Civil War soldier (for a Cedar Rapids memorial window) look like Christ. No man in the U.S. is a more fervid believer in developing "regional art" than Grant Wood. Long before Public Works Art Project started the Government's $1,408,381 program to give work to more than 3,000 artists, Wood had established his own Iowa art colony in Stone City. There for little more than $50 an artist could live and learn for a six-week session. When PWAP was established Wood became its Iowa leader, taught Iowa artists to paint the "U.S. scene"--prime purpose of PWAP. Today he is trying to continue the work PWAP started. He and a group of students are preparing a series of murals for the Iowa State University Theatre at Iowa City. Wood's theory of regional art rests upon the idea that different sections of the U.S. should compete with one another just as Old World cities competed in the building of Gothic cathedrals. Only thus, he believes, can the U.S. develop a truly national art. Whether PWAP has sown the seeds of a national art no man can yet tell, but, beyond dispute, PWAP's investment has not only enormously stimulated the public's interest but has also revealed definite regional traits in art. Some of these districts and their characteristics: Chicago's leading artist is Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, 37, who likes to picture men whose skins are as wrinkled as a dirty handkerchief. His heavy baroque style brought him local fame when he applied it to a loutish, hunched figure called The Lineman. Other noteworthy Chicago artists: Malvin Albright, twin of Ivan, who sculpts under the name of Zsissly; Aaron Bohrod (pronounced Bo-rod) who does sketches of Chicago streets and coal yards; Jean Crawford Adams (landscapes); Archibald John Motley Jr., a Negro who gets a bright sculpturesque quality in his portraits of fellow Negroes; Frances Foy, whose specialty is city parks and streets. Detroit. Artist who has spent the most time with the most success portraying Detroit is a Philadelphian--Charles Sheeler. Commissioned by Edsel Ford in 1927 to do a series of meticulous, exact canvases that in black and white reproductions are almost indistinguishable from Photographer Sheeler's excellent camera studies of similar subjects. In spite of objecting to his photographic technique, most critics allow Sheeler a top place among U.S. painters of industrial scenes. Michigan's nearest approach to catching the U.S. scene in paint is a Flint school of artists led by Jaroslav Brozik which applies to industrial themes an impressionistic manner. Boston remains conservative. Ten years ago Artists Harley Perkins, Charles Hovey Pepper and Carl G. Cutler started a minor revolt against what they called the "Museum [of Fine Arts] School" which was then turning out replicas of John Singer Sargent. The revolt sagged. Today Boston's best artist concerned with the contemporary U.S. scene is Molly Luce, wife of Alan Burroughs, X-ray art researcher for Harvard's Fogg Museum. California. The Pacific Coast has given its fair share of fame to San Francisco Artists Lucien Labaudt, Otis Oldfield, Jane Berlandina, Charles Stafford Duncan. Lately from Southern California have come two sturdy contenders for the title "best in the West"--Los Angeles' Millard Sheets and Pasadena's Paul Starrett Sample. At 19, husky blond Artist Sheets deliberately set out to win prize money to finance his painting, made $2,500 from ten prizes in two years. Today, at 27, he is head of the art department at Scripps College, Claremont. His PWAP canvas Tenement Flats, showing gossiping women against a design of bleak, wash-strung flats, was chosen by President Roosevelt to hang in the White House. Huge Paul Sample, a onetime Dartmouth tackle, divides his time between California and Vermont. He has sometimes shown the influence of Benton and Wood, like many another modern says his favorite painter is Breughel. A professor of painting at University of Southern California, he won two successive National Academy prizes with completely unacademic pictures. Taos is in incredible country. The New Mexican sunlight is so intense that it casts shadows that would seem outrageous anywhere else. In Taos, reality is almost Cubism and Taos shadows are actually as elongated and mysterious as those in Salvador Dali's Surrealism. The Taos art colony was founded in 1898, today boasts some 54 painters. Most influential is barrel- chested Andrew Dasburg who looks like Beethoven and tortures himself in order to translate Taos light and form into oil paintings. Emil Bistran is slowly working away from representation to symbolism but has never yet failed to produce a lucid canvas. Kenneth Adams thinks the Southwestern artist should evolve a formal design from the distortions of light, displays a strong feeling for form. Probably no region in the U.S. can produce such distorted pictures as Taos and still claim that they record actuality. The fact that Taos artists are, as a rule, content not to exaggerate their region's natural exaggerations, puts them directly into the mainstream of U.S. representationalism along with Grant Wood and his Threshers, Burchfield and his gloomy houses, Benton and his squirming racketeers. </body> </article> </text>