BENTON AND BOOMTOWN
by Joan K. Yanni
Everyone knows about Thomas Hart Benton's Boomtown (51.1). It's a favorite of kids who come to tour the Gallery. Even grown-ups like it. It is one of the most requested and reproduced paintings in our collection, and is pictured in middle and high school textbooks as well as in histories of art. So what's it all about?
Benton was in Borger, Texas, in 1927—a town in the Texas panhandle where oil had been discovered. Men flocked there to make their fortunes and return home rich, they hoped. There were no wives nor children nor picket fences in Borger—just men fighting to gain wealth, and ladies of questionable repute hoping to share some of it. Benton had an apartment on the second floor of the Dilley Building there, and the action in the painting is presented from that angle.
Undulating forms of people and cars contrast with the sharp verticals of the telegraph poles and derricks. A train rushes across the horizon, and black smoke moves dramatically out of the picture. The smoke comes from a carbon mill; its diagonal adds to the energy of the scene. Bright colors and swift brush strokes create further excitement. Benton considered Boomtown one of his best works and used elements such as the smoke, derricks and oil wells in some later paintings and murals.
Thomas Hart Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, in 1889. He grew up in a political family, the son of a US Congressman and grandnephew of a famous senator. Throughout his youth he listened to and took part in discussions of issues shaping the Midwest. Art was part of his early life, too. He took classes at the Chicago Art Institute and drew cartoons for a local newspaper when he was 17, then went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian. He became interested for a time in Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, but the paintings of El Greco, with their distortions of the human figure, were more of an influence on his style.
He returned to the United States in 1912 and settled in New York. Here he participated in the 1916 Forum Exhibition of American Painting. One of his paintings in the show was completely abstract, but for Benton, abstraction was merely an exercise on the way to mastering representational painting. He had already decided to create rugged, naturalistic art based on his rural background. In 1926, in order to support himself and his wife, Rita, he began to teach at the Art Students League where he became the mentor of Jackson Pollock.
Benton painted his first mural cycle, Modern America, for the New School of Social Research, NYC, in 1931. The mural, whose heroic figures and swirling color brought optimism to a land recovering from the Depression, was acclaimed. He went on to paint murals for the Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut, and the Whitney Museum. During the '30s he was one of the most influential and popular painters of Regionalism, along with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood.
Benton was the champion of realistic painting, never hesitating to attack the flattened, abstract style that he had abandoned. His pronouncements on the subject as well as his political views brought him into contention with abstract painter Stuart Davis (MAG's Garage Lights), and in 1933, their quarrel—nationalism vs. internationalism—appeared in print in the magazine Art Digest. Time magazine had printed an article eulogizing Benton and the Regionalists. Davis, in an article in Art Front, put down all the Regionalists for their "contempt for the foreign artist and his influence," and for painting "Civil War architecture…and Mother Nature acting tough in Kansas." He particularly attacked Benton, going so far as to accuse him of racist bigotry for his "gross caricatures of Negroes."
Benton did not choose to attack Davis, but answered 10 questions put to him by Art Digest. Avoiding personalities, his answers were lengthy and philosophical, and he concluded that the future of American art lay in the Middle West, "since it is less weighted with intellectual concepts of meaning, purpose, and rational progression."
Benton returned to the Midwest in the mid-1930s to teach at the Kansas City Art Institute. He continued to paint—smaller pictures of rural life as well as murals at the state capitol and at the Truman Memorial Library. (Truman had called him "the best damn painter in America.") His last work, a mural on The Sources of Country Music, for the Country Music Foundation, Nashville, was completed only hours before his death in 1975 in Kansas City.
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