Rebel Against Rebellion

Back in the 19303, Thomas Hart Benton boasted that his pictures--like those of his fellow Midwesterners Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry--were "illustrative, storytelling and popular in content, or so intended." Cocky, hot-tempered and unruly, Tom Benton talked loud and stood proud, and his fame was solid. But as a new generation's vibrant distortions and vivid abstractions transfigured the U.S. art world, museum directors began to shuffle his canvases into cellar crypts, and his name vanished from the critics' scripts. Benton did not help his cause by denning a museum director as "a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait."

At 69, Artist Benton is still cocky and rebellious, still thumbs down even the impressionists, and still puts in a ferocious day's work in his Kansas City (Mo.) studio in a converted stable. Because of an allergy, he has switched from egg yolk, once his favorite medium, to acrylic resin; because artificial light bothers his failing eyes, he paints only in daylight, often keeps his evenings illuminated with just a log fire.

Rocky Ground. For each work he spends months in research, more months in building up a mathematically scaled clay model, still more months at the easel or on the scaffold. A minute error can be heartbreaking. In a recent scale model, Benton had painted a birchbark canoe being set on the ground by a group of Indians. "People looking at it would ask right off what kind of damn fool Indians would be dragging a birchbark canoe across rocky ground. That changed the mural's entire design and set me back weeks. I had to do the model all over again."

Last week Missouri-born Artist Benton was meticulously documenting each projected detail for two new murals for two individualistic patrons who know their own minds: ex-President Harry Truman, who authorized a $60,000 mural for the Truman Library in Independence, and New York's Robert Moses, who wants a smaller ($21,000) piece for the New York State Power Authority administration building in Niagara Falls.

"I didn't want to do any more murals," says Benton. "Painting a mural is a lot of moving and climbing around all over the thing. It's just too damned much work. But the Truman thing seemed so important, and then they all wanted me to do the second." A good mural, Benton feels, "must have a world of depth into which you can move. That kind of art is at a low ebb. Ages ago, artists were in demand to make images of a people's God. The artist was a necessity, even though he might have been a slave. His work status was high, but his social status was low. Today the artist has a higher social status, but fewer jobs."

Big Talk. A longtime foe of esthetes, Benton insists that "dough is the only thing that really inspires an artist--I guess because artists never have much of it." Clad in loafers, blue jeans and an open-neck flannel shirt, he labors a strenuous eight-hour day seven days a week, allows only his black-and-silver German shepherd in his studio because "he never criticizes what I am doing." All the other distractions, including pipes, of which he has more than 100 models, are taboo during work hours. Instead, he chews tobacco.

The work day over, Benton still has bounce to spare. He easily handles four bourbon highballs before dinner, invites all his friends to join him. "I like to get drunk," he says, "and talk big."

By the time his 70th birthday rolls around in April, Benton expects to be attacking the wall of the Truman Library. Says he: "I am going to take all the time I can get to finish these, so I won't fall on my face. But I'll deliver them, all right."

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