America on the move: The Benton murals find a home

Thomas Hart Benton's 'America Today'

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An era of human brawn: Thomas Hart Benton, “Instruments of Power” from “America Today.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
An era of human brawn: Thomas Hart Benton, “Instruments of Power” from “America Today.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) is remembered, and dismissed, as the most famous of the Regionalist painters who flourished in the 1930s. Benton didn’t like New York, and New York didn’t like him. He claimed in later years to have no use for modern art, which would presumably have included the work of his one-time student, Jackson Pollock. He kept working through a long life, but he was classed strictly as a rube.

Benton did himself no favors, but his retreat may have been a strategic one. From our present perspective, it is possible to see postwar Abstract Expressionism as a continuation by other means of the epic representationalism espoused by the Regionalists and sponsored, with a more urban touch, by the Works Progress Administration. Many future Expressionists kept body and soul together in the ‘30s on WPA commissions. A close inspection of their evolution toward abstraction in the 1940s reveals this continuity in detail, and a clever curator could make a quite revelatory show about it.

Benton would have none of this and was proud to be considered a reactionary. But he was anything but a backward or unsophisticated painter early (or, for that matter, later) in his career. His great mural sequence, America Today — commissioned by the socially and educationally progressive New School for Social Research and executed in 1930-31 — shows an artist clearly influenced by Cubist and Futurist aesthetics, and not untouched, in his neo-Mannerist figuration, by German Expressionism as well. In short, Thomas Hart Benton was, if not a Modernist, nonetheless someone fully of his time, and determined, in America Today, to capture it in all its kaleidoscopic pageantry and variety.

America Today hung in the New School until 1982, when the school decided to sell it. There was enough appreciation of the work’s value to launch a campaign to save it for New York, and the AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company acquired it for the lobby of its corporate headquarters — an ironic destination, since Benton was a convinced socialist. When the company decided to renovate the lobby, it donated the series — ten panels in all — to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which, after the current introductory exhibit, will put it on permanent display. Some art stories do have a happy ending, at least outside of Philadelphia.

Impact of industrialization

The murals set out to depict America from coast to coast, from New York subway straphangers to desert gas stations. The overwhelming impression, as in the murals of Benton’s friend Diego Rivera, is of the impact of industrialization. On the one hand, industrialization represented energy, speed, and the concentration of previously unimagined force and power; on the other, it usurped the landscape, homogenized regional differences and traditions, and overwhelmed those it did not simply mechanize. Workers are depicted as outsized, heroic figures in the murals, but the very gigantism of their scale suggests a dehumanized assimilation to the imperatives of the machine.

Superficially, then, the effect of the murals as a whole is to project a vigorous society engaged in an unprecedented experiment in social redefinition and self-transformation; looked at more closely, it suggests anxiety, anomie, and a careening juggernaut more than slightly out of control. The Great Depression just taking hold when Benton started work on America Today would give point to these apprehensions. One can find hints of it in the series — the great machine running down — but the overriding sense is nonetheless one of headlong momentum. Even in crisis, American capitalism appears here as a force beyond nature and one capable of subjugating it. Rivera, equally fascinated by industrialization, saw it as an all-devouring Moloch; Benton is equivocal, enthralled by the dynamism of the industrial process even as he documents its human and environmental cost.

Snapshot of a bygone era

Eight decades on, the great plants are shuttered and decayed, and the hum of capitalism is in the boardroom, not the factory. The immense vitality that America visibly displayed through the 1950s has vanished; we are no longer the workshop of the world. America Today is in that sense very much a thing of yesterday, the snapshot of an era when human brawn seemed elevated and multiplied, even as it was simultaneously distorted and diminished by the power of the machine. This makes the Benton murals a historical document, not so much for what they depict as for the politico-aesthetic vision behind them.

But it is also a significant artistic achievement. In structure and color, the panels spill over into one another, creating a single dynamic effect of its variegated subject matter. This is in no small part due to the aluminum leaf wood molding designed for Benton by Joseph Urban, which jaggedly segments each of the murals, creating overarching, curvilinear rhythms of their own within the frame of the whole. In lesser hands, the result could be crowded if not chaotic, but Benton — as the preparatory drawings for the murals on display with them show — had from the beginning a firm conception of what he wanted to achieve. The result bristles with the energy and abundance of its subject, while at the same time casting a critical eye on the runaway materialism of a raw and vulgar civilization, ceaselessly transformative but without ultimate aim.

In addition to the drawings, the exhibit contains other period works that set off the murals, notably John Steuart Curry’s famous portrait of a prophetic John Brown and Jackson Pollock’s own Pasiphaë, a critical step in his transition to abstraction. As for Benton, rooted in Renaissance pictorialism as he ultimately was, America Today was as far toward abstraction as he cared to go. For most of the rest of his career, he would work on commissions depicting public subjects, although, in a nod to the Depression, he produced cheap popular lithographs as well. He doesn’t easily lend himself to a retrospective, although he merits one. But America Today is an enduring masterpiece that, now rightly restored to its central position in the history of early 20th-century American art, should make us rethink the full scope of its achievement.

Above right: City Activities with Dance Hall from America Today

What, When, Where

Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural Rediscovered. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York, through April 19, 2015. 212-535-7710 or www.metmuseum.org.

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