Metro Pulse/Artbeat/Thomas Hart Benton

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What:
On the Road with Thomas Hart Benton: Images of a Changing America

Where:
The KMA, 1050 World's Fair Park Drive

When:
through Sept. 24

Works by a celebrated regionalist artist come to Knoxville

by Heather Joyner

The art of Thomas Hart Benton is as American as apple pie—that is, if the pie is sliced in a variety of shapes and maybe served upside down with a dollop of crème fraîche and a shot of Jim Beam. It might be as consistent as pudding in terms of style, but the range of subject matter Benton's work addresses and the cultural changes it reflects make it rather complex...almost as complex as its creator.

Born in 1889 in Missouri, Benton led a contradictory life at times, one that lasted 86 years. The son of a congressman and a great-nephew of the U.S. senator for whom he was named, he wasn't at all interested in politics. Although he came from a privileged family, he worked as a young man to become one of the Ozark berry belt's fastest pickers and preferred whiling away afternoons at the swimming hole to spending hours within his parents' more genteel world. Benton lived in tony Washington, D.C., throughout his father's time in office and frequented the Library of Congress, but he never considered himself an intellectual. Despite being the first American artist to ever grace the cover of Time (in December of 1934), he often felt unappreciated and misunderstood.

The KMA's newest exhibit, On The Road With Thomas Hart Benton: Images Of A Changing America, features paintings, prints, and sketches that secure Benton's place as a significant figure in 20th century art. The show consists of 77 pieces and is not especially extensive given Benton's prolific career, but it should provide gallery-goers with a substantial notion of the artist and his work. On loan from a collection based in Kansas City, the images span five decades beginning in the 1920s and extending through the mid-1970s.

Before the flapper era and use of the term "American Scene" painting, before the "Regionalism" movement to which Benton is inextricably tied came into being, Benton was, on and off for three years, an actual scene painter and set designer for silent films. In an interview with Paul Cummings toward the end of his life, Benton said that starting in 1914 he was hired by director Gordon Edwards to create black and white backdrops that were "...done boldly enough [that they] looked like something real behind the actors." But Benton's experience as a professional artist included numerous other jobs, even one dating back to his teenage years.

The desire on Benton's part to create something "real" is key to his artistic drive, as are obstacles he faced during his youth—particularly within his own family. To fully consider his background and sinuous path toward fame would require far more space than is permitted in this column. After all, Benton did not arrive at depicting scenes of a vanishing America by accident or without being exposed to a variety of influences. But many influences were blessedly packed into Benton's early years, allowing him to move into full swing as an artist who knew what he wanted at a relatively young age.

According to Wilma Yeo and Helen K. Cook, authors of Maverick With A Paintbrush, after Maecenas Benton lost his congressional seat and moved his family back home, tensions between himself and his first son grew. More than ever, the younger Benton lost himself in what his father called "scribbling and daydreaming," producing countless sketches of Native American warriors and the Apache Chief Geronimo. After finding Geronimo "old and tired...his answers to onlookers' questions dull and automatic" (at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis), Benton's idealism was challenged, but his desire to become an artist was not—paternal objections be damned.

Benton later wrote in his autobiography (titled An Artist in America), "Dad was profoundly prejudiced against artists...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." Benton left home at 17 to work as a surveyor's assistant in Joplin, Mo., and soon stumbled into a job as a newspaper illustrator for the Joplin American. Despite earning almost four times as much drawing as he did surveying, Benton still had run-ins with Maecenas. Benton's parents finally agreed to enroll him in the Art Institute of Chicago rather than see him live the life of a "ruffian" in Joplin. It was there he became enamored of the compositional harmony of Japanese prints. A year or so later, Benton's father financed his study at the Academies Julien and Collarossi in Paris. Once independent, he worked tirelessly as an artist and was an influential teacher of painters including Fairfield Porter and Jackson Pollock.

Although he dabbled in Pointillism (the "scientific" approach to painting made popular by Georges Seurat, utilizing small dots of color) and experimented with a method called "synchronism," Benton could not let go of the notion that subject matter comes first. In the Cummings-Benton interview, he remarked, "I never did anything unless I had a subject. I didn't draw still lifes or flowers or things like that. It had to be...the blowing up of the battleship 'Maine,' and so on, or I wasn't interested...in my youth I never thought of pictures as an aesthetic expression. They were pictures of something."

We, as viewers, get to see images of black men chopping sugar cane, families devastated by flood, and revelers at the 1933 Chicago "Century of Progress" Expo. We're provided a visual history of our culture that, unlike most of Norman Rockwell's work, is not always populated by happy, shiny people. Benton may celebrate smalltown America's values, but he also represents Depression Era anxiety and a compassion for victims of social inequity and hardship. Whereas Rockwell courted America, Benton was essentially discovered by the masses.

Benton's style has been called "compulsive and technique-bound," but one must acknowledge its distinctiveness. I, myself, find Benton's lyricism and perfect composition distracting...even cloying at times. Yet I do not deny his mastery of both paint and ink. Canvases like "Sugar Cane" from 1943 and lithographs like 1951's "Study—Kaw Flood" echo the stunning and iconic presence of Benton's better murals (which, unfortunately, cannot be presented at the KMA). Whether he thrills us or not, Benton, like Melville or Whitman, is quintessentially American. For that reason alone, we should see and know his work.