TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/050189/05018900.040

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 110 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.