There was probably no better time for Thomas Hart Benton to write his autobiography than in 1937. An Artist in America describes the artist’s life and thoughts, his tumultuous place in the art world and plans for further glory with a bravado that could have been conjured only by an artist at the top of his powers and at the height of his renown. By the mid-1930s, Benton may well have been the most famous artist in America and, for all his squawking about money in his book, perhaps the best paid. However, Benton, who was born in 1889, was to live another 38 years, and during that time much of the certainties of his world evaporated and his reputation went with them. The Modernism that he eschewed in Paris and Manhattan (“a purity divorced from the common ways of the day,” “adrift from the currents of our land and contemptuous of them,” the “high temple of aesthetic pose and lunatic conviction”) gradually took over the galleries and museums in one wave after another: Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Pop Art, Fluxus, Body Art, Performance Art, Happenings, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Process Art, and on and on. Within those 38 years and subsequently, Benton became an historical artifact, reflective of a period of American art and history that the postwar world felt well rid of.
Of course, all artists reflect their times; according to the old Roman adage, art has a long life, but some art looks dated within a relatively short period. Benton had outraged sectors of the contemporary art world, but it was not so much because of his art, with the possible exception of a reclining nude he exhibited that excited the locals (it “had so drawn the male population of the city that a rope had to be thrown around the area where the picture was hung”), but as a result of his abrasive personality. Reveling in his hard-drinking, man-of-the-people persona, Benton particularly attacked the manhood of people with whom he disagreed.
Between the forces of the narrowly conservative and the doctrinaire radical, another influential force thrives in the city. This last is even more completely withdrawn from the temper of Americans than either of the others….It comes from the concentrated flow of aesthetic-minded homosexuals into the various fields of artistic practice. Aestheticism in its more fragile forms seems always to accompany sexual aberration when that is represented by the simple predominance of feminine characteristics rather than the cultivated vices of bisexualism. In the case of the latter, male sexual buffooneries, accompanied by a more or less open sadism, offset any exaggerated artistic delicacy. But in the homosexual circles of artistic New York there are few who, like the gentleman in the Klondike poem, are ready to jump anything from a steer to a kitchen mechanic. Our New York aberrants are, for the most part, of the gentle feminine type with predilections for the curving wrist and outthrust hip. (p. 265)
Certainly, there is a context to this display of prejudice and nastiness. Benton was quite aware of how marginalized artists were in American society, and he made it his business to “cowboy up” the image of the artist in America. His book is a travelogue of the country, respectfully describing Main Street America somewhat in the style of a politician promoting the values of common people (“These [Mississippi River] people would not, as a rule, trade their wandering life on the water for any certain security. They know that the price of security is a loss of freedom….”) and how much of a regular guy he was to understand all this and get on with so many common types (“What is called society is, of course, like the froth on a glass of beer, of no consequence”). Benton was rough-and-ready; he could drink with gamblers and parley with wealthy art patrons like Albert Barnes and Julia Force; he had had girlfriends and then a wife; he had been to Europe but knew that America was best. And, dammit, he could paint.
“So, you’re an artist, Shorty?” one of my tormentors asked skeptically.
“Yes, by God! I am” I said. “And I’m a good one.”
He was also not a bad writer, offering reflections on his own life and experience, descriptions of people and places, mixing in homilies and aphorisms and boasts, always maintaining the salt-of-the-earth persona. The battle Benton waged with the stereotype of the artist as effete and lazy was repeated by others – for example, Jackson Pollock’s Wyoming background became an early point in his favor, and Barnet Newman always demanded to be photographed in front of his paintings wearing a jacket and tie in order to demonstrate the fact that he really was at work.
Benton’s preoccupations with American style seem so foreign because they have so little relevance to our own time. Establishing something that was an “American art” proved to be an obsession for artists of the first four decades of the 20th century, but abstract expressionism quickly became the leading style not only in the United States but throughout the industrial world. Rural life, and the values it reflected, lost appeal as the population shifted to cities. What might before have seemed purely aesthetic values – abstract ideas, self-expression as an end in itself, artistic taste as a barometer of intellectual achievement – became widespread throughout the culture. People wanted something new, and artists were providing it.
Second Edition
Abstract Expressionism hit the art world like an earthquake in the late 1940s and early ’50s and, like an earthquake, it left a number of institutions in shambles. Among the ruins were American realist (regionalist and social realist) painters who had dominated the galleries and museums displaying work by contemporary native artists. Interest in their work evaporated. They saw all of their most cherished beliefs about art upended. Art no longer needed to address itself to the concerns of the common man, depicting in recognizable imagery aspects of their lives and work and values. The new art was concerned with color and formal problems of art, implicitly rejecting mass political efforts for personal solace and expression. At the time and even today, the argument has been raised that abstract expressionism served the interests of a more politically conservative McCarthyist climate by eschewing social concerns and establishing a more elite (and wealthier) audience.
Arguments over artists’ intentions aside, the new art did pose a very practical problem for those social realists who still believed in their art but sought to make a living. “The big change in the art world damn near buried me,” painter Jack Levine (1915-2010) stated, adding that the market for his works shrank considerably for a number of years. Some artists — most notably Philip Guston (1912-80) — jumped ship and became abstractionists. Others slogged on and hoped for a change in the winds of the art world.
“I felt more and more that I was not painting in the popular mode,” Lee Jackson, who first gained prominence in the 1930s with his social realist images of life in the city, said. “It felt like the air you breathed, the ground you stood on was suddenly pulled out from under you and left you dangling. I felt deflated as people all around me who had been doing social realism suddenly began doing abstraction. For a lot of us, it was a period of self-searching and disappointment.”
Some social realists attempted to combine their social concerns with the new emphasis on color as an expressive entity in itself and on the more formal concerns (flatness, the painting surface, lack of illusionism) of the abstractionists. Isabel Bishop, for instance, showed new interest in the 1950s with movement in a painting as well as spatial relations between figures in a composition, and Ethel Magafan’s (1916-93) pictures became considerably more abstract. Ben Shahn (1898-1969) was another painter who refused to eject politics from his work, yet he too began to focus less on specific instances of social or political injustice by the 1950s and more on broader allegorical themes of humanity. Some scholars have also noted a greater interest in more formal, compositional problems of art. His widow, Bernarda Bryson-Shahn, stated that the artist “recognized that abstract expressionism had a great formal power, and he was certainly good friends with people like [Alexander] Calder, [Willem] de Kooning and [Franz] Kline. What bothered him was that abstract expressionism had no political meaning.”
Certainly, most of the social realist artists — such as Philip Evergood, William Gropper, Robert Gwathmey and Stefan Hirsch — continued in the same vein of painting, refusing to allow changes in fashion to dictate their style or subject matter, but the price of that decision was to become relatively or totally obscure. “I wouldn’t sink so low,” Jack Levine remarked when asked if he had ever tried an abstract painting. A number of the social realists refused to believe that the interest in abstraction was not a spoof, a scam that would soon pass, allowing their work to be appreciated once again. Devoted dealers continued to display the ongoing work of the social realists for what was becoming a niche audience, but, for most art enthusiasts, it was as though an entire school of artists had mysteriously died. Perhaps abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky captured the feeling best, judging the art of the 1930s “poor art for poor people.” Books on 20th century American art reinforce that impression by highlighting these painters’ work in the 1930s and never after.
Modernist and postmodernist art tends to be urban art, while by and large traditional realists have directed their attentions to countryside America. It is for this reason that critics have tended to see realist art as sentimental and nostalgic. These two perspectives are symptomatic not only of differing ideas about art, but of competing visions of America. When the New York School of abstract expressionism began not only to dominate American art, but actually replaced Paris as the epicenter of contemporary painting, a major shift took place: American culture became identified with a long line of Western art and the cities that produced it.
One senses a feeling of bitterness in the second edition of An Artist in America which was published in 1951, two years after Life Magazine had profiled Jackson Pollock (“Is Jackson Pollock the Greatest Artist in America?”) in a cover story. Just as Jackson Pollock had a vocal defender, Clement Greenberg, who rose to fame with that artist, Benton had had his own champion, Thomas Craven, who lauded Benton’s murals and focus on American subjects. Greenberg’s writings remain in print and are still debated as live issues, quite apart from discussions of Pollock, while Craven’s Men of Art is now a used-book find.
The second edition of the book includes an additional final chapter entitled “After.” In it one senses that Benton sought to remind the New York art world, which he had so bitterly castigated fourteen years earlier, that he still breathed and painted. Lost is the cockiness of the first edition (“…a few people have, at times, expressed a belief that I was not the most desirable kind of fellow to have around. But, all in all, my differences with the home folks, when looked at in perspective, have not amounted to much”), although Benton still trumpetted about how famous and successful he is:
For nearly ten years I lived in a generally continuous glare of spotlights. Like movie stars, baseball players and loquacious senators, I was soon a figure recognizable in Pullman cars, hotel lobbies and night clubs. I became a regular public character. I signed my name for armies of autograph hunters. I posed with beauty queens and was entertained by overwhelming ladies like Hildegarde and Joan Bennett, I was continuously photographed and written about by the columnists. I received fan letters by the hundreds. Some of these, not so polite, told me where to get off. People wrote me from Europe, from Germany, Italy, and Spain and even from France and from far-off Japan, India and Siam. (p. 278)
Updating one’s autobiography, like one’s resume, is not uncommon, but the overall tone had changed substantially. Benton was now in his early 60s, perhaps more tired and less up for a fight. He described the move from one house to another, the birth of a daughter, his discomfort with nude beaches, an interest in music, how he has less energy than when he was younger (“Working all day and partying all night wasn’t my game anymore”) — “After” reflects the standard narrowing of the world as one ages and takes stock.
However the coda amounts to more than musings on his own life and aging. The last then pages bring him to the real personal story he wanted to tell, how the art world — his art world — had been hijacked by Modernists and idealists and purists. This last section begins with an apology: he regrets not including two artists, John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, from his first edition. He had been associated with these men, “linked under the now famous name of Regionalism. We were different in our temperaments and many of our ideas, but we were alike in that we were all in revolt against the unhappy effects which the Armory show of 1913 had had on American painting. We objected to the new Parisian aesthetics which was more and more turning art away from the living world of active men and women into an academic world of empty pattern.” Citing the “now famous name of Regionalism” is Benton’s first public recognition that he had become someone tied to the past, complete with a coinage.
Benton was certainly a very intelligent man, but the rough-rider persona he had long since cultivated hindered him from responding to his opponents with persuasion or sophistication. Name-calling and cursing were his favored approaches, which perhaps bought him some cheap laughs among the common folk he was trying so hard to impress (if they cared about his work or art in general) but won no arguments. The chapter ends somberly with a description of how Curry and Wood had become despondent over their falling place in the art world: His attack on contemporary art had become wholly emotional, as though to identify soulless art with heartless treatment of these warhorses. Visiting Curry shortly before his death, Benton sought to cheer up his former colleague,
“John,” I ventured, “You must feel pretty good now, after all your struggles, to know that you have come to a permanent place in American art. It’s a long way from a Kansas farm to fame like yours.”
“I don’t know about that,” he replied, “Maybe I’d have done better to stay on the farm. No one seems interested in my pictures. Nobody thinks I can paint. If I am any good, I lived at the wrong time.” (p. 321)
One can truly date the advent of modernism in America: February 17th, 1913, when the Armory Show opened at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, later traveling to Boston and Chicago, where it was seen respectively by between 250,000 and 300,000 people. This massive exhibit presented (for the first time, to most people) the work of Bonnard, Braque, Cezanne, Derain, Duchamp, Dufy, Gauguin, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Leger, Matisse, Picabia, Picasso, Redon, Seurat, van Gogh, Vuillard and a variety of other European modernists and their American counterparts — 1,600 works in all, mostly paintings.
Prior to the Armory Show, the most brisk market for art in America was for European Old Masters of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Henry Clay Frick, Samuel Kress, Andrew Mellon, J.P. Morgan and others used their enormous wealth to purchase paintings, sculpture and drawings by long-dead artists from impoverished European noblemen. In time, most of these works went to public museums, enriching Americans’ understanding of artistic traditions, although this buying gave the impression to artists, other buyers, and the public in general that contemporary American art was of little value.
The Armory show marked the start of contemporary art collecting in America, led by wealthy collectors who created their own museums to show the work of contemporary European and (later) American artists. In New York, there was Katherine Dreier’s Societe Anonyme, A.E. Gallatin’s Museum of Living Art (the first publication collection of Modern Art in the country, housed at New York University between 1927 and 1943), Peggy Guggenheim’s Museum of Non-Objective Art, and Gertrude Whitney’s Whitney Museum of American Art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, which under Director Alfred Barr became the leader in identifying major modernist art trends, was also established in 1929. In Pennsylvania, Walter Arensberg put together an impressive collection of modern art, which was made public in the 1940s and much of which now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and, in the neighboring town of Merion, Dr. Albert Barnes created the Barnes Foundation in the 1920s. The Armory Show also led, within a few years, to the establishment of new art spaces that exhibited both European and American artists. Being “up” on current trends in art became a sign of breeding, and associating with artists no longer was synonymous with slumming but was felt to be a must for the well-heeled.
In the 1930s a new schism cracked the American art world. The Great Depression turned the country more inward. America rejected artistic experimentation and European models, and many artists followed suit. Both Marsden Hartley and Max Weber, for instance, ceased their geometrical abstract explorations and returned to representational work. However, the Roosevelt Administration’s Federal Art Project (under the Works Progress Administration) employed more than 5,000 artists in public service jobs during this time, a number of whom continued to follow the artistic currents of European modernism, expressing themselves in the more progressive styles by the mid-1940s.
Third Edition
Abstract Expressionism was a turning point for American culture, providing the United States with its first full-fledged indigenous art movement with global influence, and it unleashed a tremendous amount of artistic energy that continues to this day. Whether one likes it or not, the painting and sculpture of the predominant art movements of the postwar era still look fresh and can excite as much controversy now as when these works were first exhibited. The same cannot be said about 1930s social realist painting or the work many of these artists executed after the Second World War, which tend to look dated. Art that is so based on an impassioned moment in time risks losing its hold on the viewer after that moment passes.
Clement Greenberg established two basic tenets that were widely adopted by museums and scholars alike:First, a painting should reflect its inherent flatness, giving up on the idea that it should offer the illusion of three-dimensionality. And, second, the subject of modern painting was the paint medium itself and the tensions between the colors and forms. The external world was no longer even a point of reference for works of art. Greenberg saw the recent history of art in terms of a general flattening of the painted image, and a growing concern with its medium, beginning with Manet, continuing with Cezanne and Picasso, leading to abstract expressionism and, finally, color field painting. He considered this arc of history proscriptive. Taking their lead from Greenberg, most modern art museum curators and directors organized their collections along the Manet-Cezanne-Picasso-Jackson Pollock axis. Artists not associated with this line of development, such as German Expressionists, dadaists, Surrealists, American regionalists, social realists and other forms of representational art, were usually afforded less museums, viewed implicitly as minor creators.
German Expressionism, dada and Surrealism eventually made a partial comeback, but most scholars and museum curators seem to have tacitly pronounced social realism and its practitioners dead, viewing the art of the 1930s in the United States without any influence on the art that came after. Politically-inspired art, especially in the form of installations and performances, gained currency in the 1980s and ‘90s, but (with the possible exception of the painter Sue Coe) there has been virtually no effort on the part of the more recent artists to reclaim their elders. And, in fact, the political art of recent years is so different in look and feeling that little carry-over can be identified. So avidly sought-after by museum curators and directors before the end of the Second World War, now most of these social realist paintings now are only to be found in the basement storage areas. Many of the next generation of curators and scholars were happy to see the end of an art that required rather little art expertise to appreciate and that looked out of place in galleries and museums.
Perhaps, social realism and American regionalism were themselves aberrations, dead-ends that certain artists pursued in the mistaken belief that the masses would rise if prodded by ever-more menacing images of capitalist bosses, or that there was something American in American artists’ work, a last gasp of isolationism in an increasingly global world. Of course, Impressionism too might have become a dead-end if subsequent artists had not continued the themes, styles and ideas that those artists had developed.
Perhaps, by 1968, when the third edition of An Artist in America was published, Benton understood that, too. A new final chapter was included – entitled “And Still After” – that begins in the manner of “After” with an effort to bring readers up-to-date on subsequent successes, praise, exhibitions, this and that. He still is ready to argue the value of his brand of realism (“I still felt that my pictures needed a human content, or something of life that suggested such a content, to be effective in more than a decorative way”), but that is not the point or focus of the new chapter, the last Benton would write. Almost 80 years old, he began to recast himself: His legacy was not just the artwork he left behind but his influence, particularly on Jackson Pollock, whose art exactly represents the type of Modernism Benton had been railing against for decades. “It is well known that Jackson Pollock began his first serious art studies under my guidance,” he began. “It is less well known that he was also, for nearly ten years, on very close friendly terms with me.”
Subsequent art historians have pointed up the strong influence that Benton’s rounded forms and manner of painting had on the early work of Pollock, as well as the effect of the older artist’s Americanism on how the future abstract expressionist leader would see his own role. Benton makes little allowance for a talent he could not understand – “Although, as I have said, Jack’s talents seemed of a most minimal order, I sensed he was some kind of artist. I had learned anyhow that great talents were not the most essential ingredients for artistic success” – but he hoped to smuggle his own reputation into the juggernaut that was Pollock and the New York School and Modernism in general. Benton described Pollock as a student and a house guest at Martha’s Vineyard, once needing to be bailed out of jail following a disorderly conduct arrest while drunk. The anecdotes do not obscure what Benton clearly hopes to identify as an artistic debt. “A good deal has been said lately about Jack Pollock’s indebtedness to me,” he noted. “Even after I had castigated his innovations and he had replied by saying I had been of value to him only as someone to react against, he kept in personal touch with me and with Rita.” Two famously cantankerous artists were able to make peace with one another, and that bond with youth brings Benton into the present: “With all this deep-reaching personal stuff in memory, I could not but feel a considerable satisfaction in Jack’s final success.”
Many artists, noted for their work during some short heyday, are better recalled as teachers by subsequent generations. Robert Henri, the leader of the Ashcan School, was a figure of power in New York’s art world until the Armory Show turned him into a has-been overnight. We subsequently think of him more as the author of The Art Spirit and the teacher of Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler, Guy Pene du Bois and a host of other artists than as an artist, primarily because his paintings don’t seem as interesting and dynamic as they did briefly. Now, they just look like dark scenes with figures, requiring a professor to explain why this was considered a big deal. In his own way and on his own terms, Benton identified what his future legacy would be and summarized it in his now twice-expanded autobiography. For the social realist and regionalist artists and for those who subsequently replaced them and were, in turn, replaced by yet another group with newer ideas, they learned that the art world holds open a window of opportunity for a brief period of time. Art is about universal concerns of life, the world one inhabits and the ability to express oneself, but life, the world and the meaning of self-expression change in increasingly brief spans of time. Since the Impressionists, no one style of art has dominated the art world for longer than a decade, and artists have found that they must seize their moments, tenaciously hold onto them or risk being passed by. In the years between the first and third editions of his autobiography, Benton learned about the vicissitudes of art world acclaim, writing about his experience of denying and then accepting his changed place in American art. No one else had ever done that before or since. No other artist has allowed his own life to serve as a lesson to other artists, and for that Benton is owed a deep measure of gratitude.