Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975)

The painter, writer, and musician Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, the scion of a famous Missouri political family. From an early age Benton showed remarkable skill as an artist, a talent his mother encouraged but which his father deplored, since he wished his son to focus on politics or law. Nevertheless Benton persuaded his father to send him to art school in Chicago, followed by further study in Paris and New York. Benton soon tired of academic routines and drifted toward various modern styles, in part through the encouragement of the modernist American painter, Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

Until the early 1920s, Benton was generally viewed as a modernist and ran through the gamut of modern approaches. The turning point in Benton's career came in 1924, when he returned to Missouri to visit his dying father, whom he had not seen in years. The talks he had with his father and with his father's old political cronies filled the artist with a desire to reconnect with the world of his childhood.

In 1930 Benton produced an enormous mural program, America Today, which received a great deal of attention. In 1934 his fame was clinched when he was featured on the cover of Time magazine--an honor never before awarded to an artist. The article in Time linked Benton with two other Midwestern artists, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood. From that point on, Benton was known to the public as the leader of the "Regionalist Movement", which opposed European modernism and focused on scenes of the American heartland.

In 1935 Benton left New York, where he had lived for more than twenty years, and resettled in Kansas City, Missouri, assuming a teaching position at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1941 he was fired from the institute for making tactless remarks about homosexuals in the Kansas City art world. He remained popular nevertheless until the late 1940s, when his work came under attack by European-trained art historians and abstraction began to capture the attention of leading art critics. Ironically, the most charismatic figure in the new Abstract Expressionist movement was Benton's former pupil Jackson Pollock.

In addition to his work as a painter, Benton was a distinguished writer whose autobiography, “An Artist in America” (1937), became a bestseller. Also a gifted musician, he collected folk tunes, played the harmonica on a professional level, produced a record for Decca, and invented a new form of musical notation for the harmonica that is still used by music publishers.

Benton died in his studio on January 6, 1975, while completing a mural intended for the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee.

The Arts of Life in America:

Arts of the City, 1932

Tempera with oil glaze, 96 x 264 in. (243.8 x 670.6 cm)

Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1953.19)

Arts of the South, 1932

Tempera with oil glaze, 96 x 156 in. (243.8 x 396.2 cm)

Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1953.20)

Arts of the West, 1932

Tempera with oil glaze, 96 x 156 in. (243.8 x 396.2 cm)

Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1953.21)

Indian Arts, 1932

Tempera with oil glaze, 96 x 84 in. (243.8 x 213.4 cm)

Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1953.22)

Political Business and Intellectual Ballyhoo, 1932

Tempera with oil glaze, 56 x 113 in. (142.2 x 287 cm)

A. W. Stanley Fund (1969.12)

The Arts of Life in America was executed in 1932 for the Whitney Museum of American Art, then located at 10 West Eighth Street, New York. The Whitney consisted of four linked town houses, and Juliana Force, the director, lived in an enormous rambling apartment on the fourth floor of the compound. Benton's murals were intended for the library of this private area, which became the public reading room when they were finished.(1)

Benton's first commissioned mural, “America Today”, had focused primarily on America at work. Consequently, in this next mural program, he concentrated on America at play, entitling his design “The Arts of Life in America”. The subject represented a conscious attempt to bridge the gap between the high arts, such as painting and classical music, and the popular arts of ordinary Americans. Indeed, much of the mural depicts activities that would not be considered arts in the usual sense. As Benton wrote in the publication that accompanied the unveiling of his murals:

The "arts of life" are the popular arts and are generally undisciplined. They run into pure, unreflective play. People indulge in personal display; they drink, sing, dance, pitch horseshoes, get religion, and even set up opinions as the spirit moves them.

These popular outpourings have a sort of pulse, a go and come, a rhythm; and all are expressions--indirectly, assertions of value. They are undisciplined, uncritical, and generally deficient in technical means; but they are arts just the same."(2)

Benton presents American life as a kind of carnival and assumes the pretense of social detachment. Yet the design is filled with provocative juxtapositions that contrast wealth and extravagance with depravation and squalor. In the “Arts of the City” panel, a bum rummages through a trashcan while fashion models parade beside him, in a painful comparison between beauty and ugliness. A crippled man with crutches and a jaded chorus girl pulling on her stockings are placed beside their more glamorous “doppelgangers” on a movie screen, in a startling juxtaposition of the glamorous fantasies of film and the painful realities of life. In still another ironic lineup, the social order of society is suggested by a trio consisting of a gangster with a gun, a mobster, and a society gentleman. The heights of their respective hats--cap, bowler, and tophat--evoke their social ranking, yet each is clearly dependent on the others.

“Arts of the South” also contains a startling juxtaposition of scenes. The foreground of the mural is taken up by a garbage pile--the first garbage pile in the history of mural painting. Just behind this heap is a scene of a black mother feeding her small child, who has paused in his meal to blow wishes on a dandelion. Surely this motif refers to the poverty and mistreatment of African-Americans in the South: the child must be wishing for a better life.

Benton's satire was particularly strong in two additional panels, “Unemployment, Radical Protest, Speed” (Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Va.), and “Political Business and Intellectual Ballyhoo”. “Unemployment, Radical Protest, Speed” shows a speeding car, train, and railroad train; a strike; a striker who has just been shot; snipers firing from a rooftop; and two models parading in front of a plate-glass window. Benton's juxtaposition of scenes verges on the surreal but his meaning is plain: he wishes to contrast the enticements of capitalism, such as fast cards and new clothes, with the brutal methods used to maintain social control.

The most original--and by far the most controversial--panel of the series is “Political Business and Intellectual Ballyhoo”, in which Benton expressed contempt for many of his former leftist friends and allies. The artist had recently learned to play the harmonica, and he provided a key to the painting with some bars of music and a line of lyrics from a popular song that went:

Oh, the eagles they fly high in Mobile.

Oh, the eagles they fly high in Mobile.

Oh, the eagles they fly high,

They will shit right in your eye.

Oh, the eagles they fly high in Mobile.

Thus the eagle at the top of the painting--evidently a symbol of American government--is dumping a flood of ballyhoo through a megaphone onto the figures below. These figures are a combination of cartoon characters and caricatures of Benton's former leftist associates. Most of the painting is devoted to members of the "Left," who naturally take up the left-hand side of the painting. They are arranged in two registers, an upper register filled with cartoon characters and a lower one devoted to the editors of well-known New York publications.

The cartoon characters can be identified as Mutt and Jeff, Lord Plushbottom and the Professor (from Moon Mullins), and Mickey Mouse. In one way or other, all these figures are used as symbols of comical stupidity. Jeff holds a sign indicating that he belongs to the “Literary Playboys League for Social Consciousness”; this sign touches two slogans below that read: “The Greenwich Village Proletarian Costume Dance” and “Expressing American Class Solidarity”. In other words, Benton is dismissing Greenwich Village socialism as a social game rather than a serious movement.

Surrounding these cartoon buffoons are idiotic slogans from magazines, newspapers, or fliers. “From the writings of the Found”, reads one visionary sheet. “New York [News]: Love Nest [Mu]rder”, reads another headline. “Regenerative [Pot]entialties The New Woman”, reads a third.

Below these slogans and cartoon characters stand caricatures of the editors of the “New Masses”, the “Nation”, and the “New Republic”. Blurbs come out of their mouths. "The hour is at hand," declares the “New Masses”. "You don't know half of it dearie," says the Nation. "Really merely quantitative," says the “New Republic”. Thus, the general tone of each magazine is characterized: the “New Masses” with its absurd predictions of imminent revolution, the “Nation” with its supposedly knowing exposés, and the “New Republic” with its intellectual smugness. The right of the painting is taken up by a single figure, a dummy on a broomstick (placed in front of a domed government building) who presumably stands for the hollowness of conservative American politicians. A slogan to this figure's right, “We the Representatives of the People”, identifies who he is. The phrase “We nominate FDR”, symbolizes the banality of his political thinking.

At the lower right is the advertising slogan: “OK. Don't be a trillium / They call it halitosis / 5 out of 6 have it." The phrase is clearly utterly inane, but, Benton suggests, perhaps no more so than those of politicians or leftist intellectuals.

When Benton's mural was unveiled, it received a good deal of publicity, thanks in part to the promotional efforts of the Whitney Museum. The reviews covered the full spectrum of responses. Edward Alden Jewell, writing in the “New York Times”, regarded the murals as "a conspicuous success" and noted that Benton "has transformed a room that to begin with must have looked uneventful enough into a place of positive

enchantment."(3) Jewell was the only critic who judged Benton's murals to be entirely successful. Most other writers spoke favorably of the paintings but were somewhat dismayed by the vulgarity of Benton's subject matter and the brashness of his technique. They also wondered if his paintings were suitable for a reading room.(4)

Along with these mixed reviews, Benton also received a thoroughly scathing assessment from Paul Rosenfeld, an associate of Alfred Stieglitz, in the “New Republic”. Rosenfeld, however, so overstated his case that his review sounds prudish and comical. Describing the original room as a "quiet little place," he protested that because of Benton's murals, "the frightened visitor" was no confronted by "super-life-size Michelangelesque figures . . . squirming forward and up and making as if to spring out and land full force upon him." According to Rosenfeld, Benton had sought to demonstrate "that the arts of life in America are thoroughly crude, gross and ungracious." "We have lost more than we gained," Rosenfeld concluded, adding, as if to double the insult, that the paintings represented "an advance" over the murals in the New School.(5)

Even though Benton received substantial official recognition for the murals--the Architectural League awarded him a gold medal for the outstanding mural painting of the year and the “Nation” called the work the most significant artistic achievement of the year(6) --hostility toward Benton's paintings seems to have grown, particularly among the radical Left. To Benton's annoyance, a group of students and teachers at the Art Students League passed around a petition urging the destruction of the Whitney murals. In addition, when Benton appeared for a question-and-answer session about the murals at the John Reed Club in New York, the session ended in a chair-throwing brawl.(7)

In 1934 Benton's painting also received unwelcome notoriety. In the trial over the custody of ten-year-old Gloria Vanderbilt, the Vanderbilt lawyer sought to establish that Gertrude Whitney was unsuited to act as guardian for Gloria because her museum housed immoral art. His central example was Benton's mural, with its cast of gamblers, bootleggers, gangsters, chorus girls, and prostitutes. He specifically labeled it as "Communistic"--though why he used this word is not exactly clear.(8)

Juliana Force died in 1948, and the following year the Whitney Museum began making plans to move. The curatorial staff no longer valued Benton's murals. Consequently, a small crew of workmen arrived at the Whitney in December 1953, dismantled the murals, passed them through a skylight onto the roof, and lowered them to a truck waiting outside. As if to forestall the possibility that someone might have second thoughts, the truck immediately started for Connecticut. Riding in the cab with the driver was Sandy Low, director of the New Britain Museum. The bold raid on the Whitney represented the high point of his career. For a purchase price of a mere five hundred dollars, the New Britain Museum had acquired a priceless Benton mural cycle.(9) To celebrate the unveiling of the murals in New Britain, Low arranged a major retrospective of Benton's work. Over the years, Benton and his wife made a number of small gifts to the museum, and at the time of his death Benton left the museum two of his paintings. Benton's fondness for the museum is revealed in a letter he wrote in 1959: "The New Britain Museum is my favorite museum among all the museums in our country. The reasons for this are plain--over the years it has been the most friendly museum for me and my efforts. When other museums were getting rid of these, the New Britain Museum was supporting them--buying them and hanging them on its walls."(10)

HA

Bibliography:

Thomas Hart Benton, “An Artist in America” (New York: R.M McBride, 193&); Karal Ann Marling, “Tom Benton and His Drawings” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985); Henry Adams, “Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989); Henry Adams, “Thomas Hart Benton: Drawing from Life”, exhib. cat. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990); Erika Lee “Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

NOTES:

1. Avis Berman, "The $500 Masterpiece," “Northeast Magazine, Hartford Courant”, August 23, 1992, p. 13. For the most complete description of the room, see Edward Alden Jewell, "Art in Review: The Arts of Life in America Are Portrayed in Murals of New Library at the Whitney Museum," “New York Times”, December 6, 1932, p. 3. For the tangled circumstances regarding the commission of the murals, see Adams, “Thomas Hart Benton”, pp. 178-84.

2. Thomas Hart Benton, “The Arts of Life in America”, exhib. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1932), p. 4.

3. Jewell, "Art in Review," p. 3; see also "The Arts of Life in America," “New York Times”, December 11, 1932, sect. 9, p. 11.

4. Ralph Flint, "New Benton Murals at Whitney Museum Now on Exhibition," “Art News” 31 (December 24, 1932): 9; "Benton Depicts America Aggressively for the Whitney Museum," “Art Digest” 7 (December 15, 1932): 5; Henry McBride, "Thomas Hart Benton's Murals are Rated No. 1 in an Honor List for the Year," “Sun”, December 31, 1932, p. 22.

5. Paul Rosenfeld, "Ex-Reading Room," “New Republic”, April 12, 1933, pp. 245-46.

6. "Abou Ben Benton," “Art Digest” 7 (January 15, 1933): 6; McBride, "Whitney Museum Decorations," p. 22.

7. Thomas Hart Benton, “An American in Art” (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1969), p. 68.

8. Arthur Le Duc, "Painters Deny Whitney Art Perils Child," “New York Evening Journal”, November 9, 1934, p. 9.

9. Berman, "$500 Masterpiece," p. 11.

10. Benton to Charles B. Ferguson, March 14, 1969, NBMAA files.