Thomas Hart Benton
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THOMAS HART BENTON, born in 1889 in Neosho, Missouri, comes of a family prominent in state and federal politics. Going to Paris in 1908 for three years and becoming a close friend of Stanton Macdonald-Wright, he attempted in his early work to combine Synchromism and classic composition. But after the first World War he rejected the modernist philosophy, and began painting American history in a style based on Renaissance concepts of design.
During ten years, from 1924, Benton travelled widely through the rural South and Midwest, on foot and by car, observing people and places, and making thousands of drawings. This region was still virgin territory for art, untouched since the nineteenth-century genre painters. Benton's drawings, alive with native character, became the raw material for his paintings from the late 1920's, which form a panorama of the America he loves best--the primitive, backwoods America of mountaineers, dirt farmers, negro cotton pickers, small towns, revival meetings, moonshiners, mules and hillbilly musicians. He has a zest for the folk flavor of this America, its crude toughness, its old-fashioned virtues and sins. He pictures it with the sympathy of one who belongs to this soil, and at the same time with that wild flamboyant humor that has come down from the pioneers, from the Mississippi boatmen and Mark Twain. No objective realist, he is an artist with a mission, determined to express his concept of what is most American.
His style was far from literal naturalism. He cares chiefly for the concept of a thing, its animating principle; and he takes liberties with proportions and relations in a way that reminds one of the early Italian primitives. He had a strong sense of the grotesque, not only in people but in objects and even the face of nature: shacks have as much animation as their inmates, a tractor is an aggressive animal, hills become miniature mountains. This caricatural vein harks back to American graphic humorists from Nast to the comic-strip artists. Everything in his pictures is concrete and tangible, can be touched and grasped; and every form is governed by emphatic rhythmic movement. The keynote of his style is a furious energy, crowding into the picture every possible ounce of plastic existence.
Benton's gifts were especially suited for mural painting, and in a series of ambitious murals executed from 1930, he achieved a synthesis of his conception of sive in their substance and power. Though quite counter to prevailing trends, they have qualities that should outlast the taste of the moment.
Benton: I've had many aims. Some are esthetic, formative, like those involved in the three-dimensional composition I practise where relations between things are set up on advancing and receding planes of an imaginary deep space. Some are procedural, directed to brilliancy, impact and permanence in the use of colors, mediums, grounds, etc. But my chief aims have been more social, more publicly directed. I believe I have wanted, more than anything else, to make pictures, the imagery of which, would carry unmistakably American meanings for Americans and for as many of them as possible.
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