Grass-Roots Giant

By R.H.

"His work didn't mean anything to me. But he did exactly what he wanted to do, every day for 85 years, and how many of us can claim that much?" In its way, that young Manhattan artist's comment on Thomas Hart Benton, who died of heart disease in his studio in Kansas City, Mo., last week, was not a bad epitaph. In the course of a career that spanned seven decades (from his first job as cartoonist for a local paper in Joplin), Benton became the most popular 20th century American artist. His belligerently folksy murals, full of the pleasures of the hoedown and the Fourth of July picnic, the innocence of hillbilly Arcadia and the rigors of the frontier, were the very furniture of patriotism. And Benton's popularity was largely the result of a character he cultivated, or home-grew, for himself: the coarse-talking, no-nonsense man of the people, the Pa Kettle of American art.

A Reformed Modernist. Part of his persona was his view of modern art. He regarded it with the contempt that an old blues pianist, after 30 years' rattling the ivories in a Kansas whorehouse, might reserve for ten minutes of John Cage silence. No guts, no drawing, no life: nothing but wind and delusion. Benton made no bones about his idea that nearly everything in art since the Fauves had been rubbish at best, and at worst the fruit (so to speak) of a homosexual conspiracy to rob the U.S. of its primal manly culture. The American museum, he grumbled, was "a graveyard run by a pretty boy with a curving wrist and a swing in his gait." Modern art was unintelligible to the people. Yet, in the end, one wonders if the tribunal to which Benton submitted his work and attitudes was not some jury of average, sensual Midwesterners but rather the ghost of his father, a stumping, swilling, iron-throated Ozark Congressman whom he revered. "Dad was profoundly prejudiced against artists, and with some reason. The only ones he had ever come across were the mincing, bootlicking portrait painters of Washington who hung around the skirts of women at receptions and lisped a silly jargon about grace and beauty. He couldn't think of a son of his having anything to do with their profession." Perhaps the sallies against modernism, the fag baiting and the cornball machismo were ultimately meant to propitiate Dad and make him look kindly on his son's immense and clumsy love of painting.

But to a mass audience, the old regionalist's pronouncements were oracular. He was, after all, a reformed modernist: up to 1918 he had painted "lifeless symbolist and cubist pictures," full of "my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns." He had studied in Paris, the Antichrist's lair. So he could be believed. The rhetoric never altered; he was too ancient a drummer for that. The circumstances of his career did, and violently. For a brief time, the decade ending in 1939, he--with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood--bestrode and dominated the taste of America. His emergence, however, was also a revival: it had to do with nostalgia, for Benton started painting his genre scenes of country American life just at the moment when the industrial metropolis, rather than the land, was turning out to be the central fact of American existence. His vast figure compositions, creaking with every cliche of academic design, bulging with heroic prelapsarian muscle, were balm to a traumatized society. So was his belief in keeping art free of the French, or at any rate foreign, stylistic pox.

When modernism could no longer be kept out, Benton's reputation (outside the Midwest) went into an abrupt decline, and the internationalists had their belated revenge on the man who had called them "an intellectually diseased lot, victims of sickly rationalizations, psychic inversions and God-awful self-cultivations." By 1965, the only fact a self-respecting art historian would have deemed worthy of note about even the best of Benton's work, like The Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley (1934), would have been that the lank boy in the foreground, playing a mouth organ, was a portrait of Benton's ex-pupil Jackson Pollock.

Revisionist Nostalgia. But Benton lived long enough to feel the coming of another revival. His easel paintings now fetch up to $90,000, a fat $40 book on him was published last year, and next year's Bicentennial will pour gallons of revisionist nostalgia upon the American regionalists--Benton included. Yet it seems unlikely that future generations will extract much aesthetic pleasure from Benton's big machines. They look like populist camp and are likely to keep doing so. Benton's revival has less to do with his art than with the grass-roots Americana he celebrated, which has gone forever. Besides, they don't make them like Thomas Hart Benton any more, not with that salt and crust and feistiness and scrappy bouncing bigotry. It is not much solace to reflect that we still have plenty of artists whose work, though in a different way, is just as rhetorical and simple-minded as his. R.H.

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