Visual Arts: The Art of Thomas Hart Benton — Patriotic Correctness

Benton’s art looks very much of its time, especially this selection of work that relates to cinema. Don’t let that fool you.

Thomas Hart Benton, "Hollywood," (partial view) 1937-38. Photo: Jamison Miller.

Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood, 1937-38. (partial view) Tempera with oil on canvas, mounted on board, 56 x 84 inches. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Bequest of the artist. Photo by Jamison Miller. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood, at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, through September 7.

By Franklin Einspruch

There is no sin in art except to be boring. But didacticism is a big enough indulgence to count as a sin, or threaten to. American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood at the Peabody Essex Museum calls upon us to ask how much didacticism renders art intolerable, just as too much salt renders water undrinkable.

First, a warning. Benton’s art looks very much of its time, especially this selection of work that relates to cinema. It connects to the methods and themes of American illustration in a way that was lost in the ascendancy of postwar abstraction, and was never entirely regained except in the form of ironic quotation.

Don’t let that fool you. Much of the contemporary art presented to us as worthy of the museum is didactic, and thus Benton is a more direct ancestor to it than his star pupil, Jackson Pollock. The work of Kara Walker, to which the resemblance to Benton’s is incidental but nevertheless evident, does not leave the audience much room to come to its own conclusions about racism. (Racism is a bad thing, in case you were undecided.) Neither do some of her viewers. When visitors to A Subtlety, Kara Walker’s sugar sphinx installation in Brooklyn last year, comported themselves with insufficient gravity, one self-appointed enforcer yelled a tirade at them. “I feared the mostly white visitors would not see me or the violent history the art reflected,” as he explained. Another suggested that “deep reverence may not be white people’s spiritual gift.” (Maybe we could learn some from this guy.)

Similar moral outrage and simplistic racial animus drive Benton’s Invasion (1942), in which Hirohito’s ape-mouthed soldiers are attacking an American family on their homestead. A boy lies in his blood as they force his mother’s legs apart and bayonet his grandfather right in the mouth. (Japanese military aggression in World War II was a bad thing, in case you were undecided.) The image is unalloyed jingoism but, as the critic Robert Hughes noted, there are really two PCs, political correctness and patriotic correctness.

Invasion was part of Benton’s “Year of Peril” series, an unabashedly propagandistic mural cycle intended to rouse American desire to fight the Axis. As he explained in a film clip displayed in the exhibition, his travels around the country as a lecturer brought him into contact with a citizenry he thought too complacent about the evil threatening them at Pearl Harbor and perhaps still further inland. His pride of country is unimpeachable, but as art this series is ridiculous. In Again, a trio of brutes, flanked by flags bearing the swastika, the rising sun, and (one presumes) the bundle of reeds, together drive a lance into the side of a recrucified Jesus. A Luftwaffe fighter shoots rounds into the wound from the black sky above for good measure. Benton’s colors are tacky and his rendering makes both figures and landscape look like they’re made out of rubber. “Year of Peril” goes to show that patriotic correctness is as toxic to art as political correctness. Ultimately they are two sides of one dyspeptic coin.

Thomas Hart Benton,  "Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek, "1967. Photo: courtesy of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, Indiana.

Thomas Hart Benton, The Lost Hunting Ground, 1927-28. From the mural series American Historical Epic, 1920-28. Oil on canvas, 60 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Bequest of the artist. Photo by Jamison Miller. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

To its credit, though, the series proves that Benton was absorbing the lessons of movie-making if not always putting the learning to good use. Benton had a theatrical temperament that drew him to emulate the gesticulating compositions of Michelangelo. In the ’20s he found work as a scenic painter in the burgeoning film mecca of Fort Lee, New Jersey, of all places. The combination of Renaissance and modern drama informed the look of his series depicting the early settlement of America. Most of these finally ended up at the Nelson-Atkins and are on loan from there, with a few lending gaps filled in with reproductions on canvas. The whole of it is a striking masterwork of Art Deco painting, pushed over the top at the PEM by a crowded installation, outsize labels with Deco typefaces, and walls painted the color of tomato soup. Despite what you’d think from his portrayal of the Imperial Japanese Army, Benton recognized that much ill was done to the Native Americans. Lost Hunting Ground (1927-28) shows a pigtailed Indian, his back bent in resignation, looking on as whites raise a cabin and till a field in the distance.

Benton had a plenitude of only one talent, the ability to model geometric form. His color was charmingly moody at best. His paint application was mostly unnoticeable and the exceptions tend to count against him. But his sense of chiaroscuro and volume were so strong that the other shortcomings don’t matter much. The rich monochromes of early film landed on his imagination in a particularly resonant way, and his visual predilections explain why.

Exhibitions of his work at the Metropolitan Museum in the early ’30s won him renown, and in ’37 LIFE magazine sent him on an assignment to portray the movie industry in Hollywood. 400 pencil drawings led to 40 wash drawings and culminated in Hollywood, seven feet wide and crammed full of studio vignettes. Benton’s depiction, including what the catalog describes as a “caustic essay” by the artist, prompted LIFE to scratch the piece. His lack of reverence for the moguls if not the underlings is reflected in a note about the painting to his editor. “I wanted to give the idea that the machinery of the industry, cameras, carpenters, big generators, high voltage wires etc. is directed mainly at what young ladies have under their clothes.”

Thomas Hart Benton, "The Lost Hunting Ground," 1927-28. From the mural series American Historical Epic, 1920-28. Photo: Jamison Miller.

Thomas Hart Benton, The Lost Hunting Ground, 1927-28. From the mural series American Historical Epic, 1920-28. Oil on canvas, 60 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Bequest of the artist. Photo by Jamison Miller. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Indeed, the center of this ambitious arrangement in two-point perspective is a redhead in a pink brassiere that clings to her like a scent and provides as much opacity. A suited leading man kneels before her as lighting and camera crews look on. Over on the left another scene is being filmed. A man in a top hat, as he dips his dance partner, is for some reason about to be tomahawked in the back by an actor in a feather headdress. On the right an audio man and an electrician ply their trades. In the near background, actresses primp in the mirror. One of them is reading a newspaper with her feet up. In the far background still another movie is in the works, an epic with a city aflame in the distance.

This is also a didactic work insofar as Benton is giving us a judgmental overview of Hollywood. But it’s not all judgment, and thus not all didacticism, and the art as art doesn’t get chased off. If the action in front of the camera is farcical, the action behind it is not. Benton studies the generators and lights and audio gear with affection. The men running them are engaged in dignified work. This new and possibly disreputable medium nevertheless merits a visual treatment set up with the mathematical care that Piero brought to his religious works, he seems to tell us.

This exhibition contains much more that merits contemplation. Benton’s treatment of the black man would be an essay unto itself. (In short it was problematic but positive in the main, suggesting that some of Benton’s prejudices were complicated.) Technically the paintings revive a method of egg tempera and oil that would have been familiar to Raphael. The catalog authors betray a discomfort with Benton’s politics in ways that are telling at times. There is, in summary, much to chew on here, suggesting that the PEM, by mounting the first serious Benton exhibition in over 25 years, has fulfilled an overdue need.


Franklin Einspruch is a Boston-based artist and writer. His website is einspruch.com; follow him on Twitter @franklin_e.

6 Comments

  1. Ian Thal on June 30, 2015 at 11:20 am

    Similar moral outrage and simplistic racial animus drive Benton’s Invasion (1942), in which Hirohito’s ape-mouthed soldiers are attacking an American family on their homestead. A boy lies in his blood as they force his mother’s legs apart and bayonet his grandfather right in the mouth. (Japanese military aggression in World War II was a bad thing, in case you were undecided.) The image is unalloyed jingoism […]

    Yes, the piece is unsubtle wartime propaganda, but I have to question whether Invasion can be easily dismissed for “racial animus.” Obviously the depiction of Japanese soldiers murdering and raping members of a white American family does not represent an actual historical event, but the historical record shows that the Imperial Japanese Army committed such atrocities against non-combatants throughout the Pacific Theater of War — The Nanking Massacre, or “Rape of Nanking” (“Rape” is not used metaphorically here) in 1937 was only the most infamous example and was certainly one that would have been well-known to Americans when Benton painted Invasion.

    Yes, one could read the work as suggesting that the Japanese were brutal (given Benton’s tendency towards caricature), but it could just as easily be read as imploring white Americans to view the Chinese, Koreans, and Filipino victims of Imperial Japan as being like themselves. It can’t be easily dismissed simply as a recycling of the racist “yellow peril” trope of late-19th to mid-20th century western pop-culture.

    • Franklin on July 1, 2015 at 8:57 am

      I don’t dispute that reading. Nevertheless it’s one thing to recognize the extent of Japan’s brutality in WWII, and another to portray its soldiers as extras from The Planet of the Apes. The latter might be justifiable, understandable, and in accord with the times and the context. But the political expression, and not just the simian portrayal of the Imperial Army but the histrionics of the whole scene, finally knocks the art out of the thing. That’s a lesson I’d like to see more widely understood by contemporary artists.

      • Ian Thal on July 1, 2015 at 11:55 am

        The scale and brutality of the atrocities that Japan was committing at least as early as 1937 (prior to what most consider the start date of WWII) ground Benton’s caricatures in a political reality that the Third Reich’s anti-Semitic propaganda, for example, lacked.

        An examination of Invasion needs to balance historical accounts of Japan’s war crimes with how Benton’s use of caricature was informed by the racial stereotypes that were in circulation at that time. We cannot afford to dismiss one simply because of the existence of the other.

        • Franklin on July 1, 2015 at 5:52 pm

          I’m less interested in whether the caricatures are grounded in reality and more interested in whether they’re enabling as art in this case. In my estimation they’re not, and that is not contingent on the acts of the Japanese army, but on Benton’s considerable but finite artistic abilities and the unreliability of his taste. Caricature and political expression can enable art, they’re just not enabling it here.

          That raises the question of why. I think it has to do with the problem of didacticism that I got into above. Both you and Charles Giuliano seem to think that I’ve improperly balanced concerns against each other. In his case “[t]here is a balance between critical and technical analysis” that I have apparently fouled up and in yours I did not “balance historical accounts of Japan’s war crimes with how Benton’s use of caricature was informed by the racial stereotypes that were in circulation at that time.” I stop short of saying that I may make any claim about these works but I certainly think I can make the above claims.

          Invasion is not a good painting and Again is even worse. If you think these are good paintings, make that case. If you think what I’ve said about didacticism in art is incorrect, make that one. If you think they’re not good paintings but that they’re justified by Japan’s atrocities in China or other iniquities, then I would say that you’re conflating political and artistic justifications.

          • Ian Thal on July 2, 2015 at 1:25 pm

            I already described Invasion as “unsubtle wartime propaganda”. Propaganda is an important subject of academic study, and should be treated as such by art historians. I’m not “conflating the political and artistic” — I’m just expecting that the work be understoo in the larger context of both Benton’s work, and WWII propaganda in general.

            My point is that dismissing this particular work as being driven by “simplistic racial animus” takes it out of the historical context both of atrocities committed by Japanese forces against civilians, as well as the manner in which the fighters of both enemy and allied nations were portrayed in American propaganda.

            For instance, as animalistic as Japanese soldiers were often portrayed, so were German soldiers — indeed, we need only look at Benton’s The Sowers composed in 1942, the same year as Invasion — yes, the work is equally unsubtle, but it makes your thesis that Benton was driven by racial animus problematic — these Germans are nothing like the “Aryan ideal” that appeared in German propaganda.

            Furthermore, in the larger context of American propaganda during WWII, Asian nations that were allied against Japan, as with the Chinese and Filipino fighters were typically portrayed in an ennobling manner much as the white American soldiers who typically were shown in American propaganda.

  2. J. Stack on March 10, 2017 at 5:06 pm

    Hello: I have have lived and worked with Benton’s “Year of Peril” paintings for 10 years at The State Historical Society of Missouri, and I attended the Kansas City and Milwaukee openings of the “American Epics-Benton and Hollywood” exhibition. Sadly I missed the Salem opening and this blog was just brought to my attention. Although I am friends and associates with many of the authors of the catalogue and have great admiration for the organizer of the exhibition, Austin Barron Bailey, I was disappointed in the interpretations bof Benton’s WWII paintings the essay on “Negro Soldier” was shockingly uninformed, filled with misinformation and wrong-headed innuendo–but this comment is not about that. Below is my take on the “Year of Peril” pictures, which I believe are quite complex.

    THE ERASURE OF THOMAS HART BENTON’S “YEAR OF PERIL” SERIES FROM THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN ART: IMPERIALISTIC ANXIETY, POST WAR FORMALISM, AND THE CANONICALLY INCORRECT MR. BENTON

    On “Army Day,” April 6, 1942, Reeves Lowenthal’s Association of American Artists Gallery in New York opened an exhibition featuring the newest creations of celebrated American Regionalist, Thomas Hart Benton. “The Year of Peril” exhibition consisted of eight imposing, vibrant, and disturbing paintings representing the painter’s response to the horror and anxiety engendered by the United States’ entry into World War II. Immensely successful, upwards of 75,000 people saw the exhibition, and thousands more viewed the paintings in a newsreel that played in cinemas across the U.S. and Britain. Abbott Laboratories in Chicago purchased the paintings, and used them in an extensive propaganda campaign of posters and pamphlets. The images were so famous during the war that Benton claimed in his autobiography that they were his best known compositions. Why, then, are these paintings virtually unknown today?

    The paintings hang in the public galleries of The State Historical Society of Missouri on the campus of the University of Missouri in Columbia, but geographical marginalization alone does not explain their fall from fame. Building on recent re-evaluations of “The Year of Peril” by Henry Adams (2012) and more general reappraisals of Benton by Austen Barron Bailey, Leo Mazow, and others, I argue that politics and the crisis of representation that followed World War II rendered “The Year of Peril” particularly confusing and embarrassing to a postwar generation of artists, critics, and art historians. As American politicians cast themselves as both the destroyers of imperial fascism and the purveyors of a new imperialistic pax Americana, Benton’s raw representation of both the threat of totalitarianism and the disturbing “side effects” of American victory made many people uncomfortable.

    In truth, “The Year of Peri” is anti-war, war propaganda. Benton represents the nightmare scape of a collective American id in 1942. Here the horror of war in both experience and imaginations transforms the populace into amoral killers inspired to participate in vengeful acts that are themselves horrific. There are no heroes or American flags in “The Year of Peril.” Although the alarmist messages in the pictures served as effective propaganda in the anxious first year of the war, by 1944 neither Abbot Labaratories nor the U.S. government felt Benton’s messages matched those of the nation. Benton’s pictures forced viewers to “see” the ugly side of their own wartime urges without providing an uplifting patriotic narrative of inherent “American Exceptionalism” to justify the death and destruction that attended U.S. wartime success.

    Moreover, in the post war period, the rise of formalism led the leading lights of the art world to avoid addressing complex historical, cultural, social and political subjects directly. The focus on non-representative form and process rendered Benton’s exploration of uncomfortable and complex issues related to war, revenge, and imperial violence unfashionable and “canonically incorrect.” For the past seventy years, Benton’s pivotal reflections of the American psyche at war have been ignored, dismissed, and undeservedly disparaged as jingoistic propaganda.

    I argue that the contemporary artist whose vision of WWII most closely resembles Benton’s is Quentin Tarantino. Just as many spectators’ interpret Benton’s “Year of Peril ” far too simplistically, many critics have dismissed Quinton Tarentino’s “Inglourious Basterds” (sic) 2009 WWII film as a shallow entertaining romp that appeals to humanity’s visceral interest in violence.

    I interpret both Tarantino and Benton’s cartoonish vision of history as metaphors for typically American patriotic and nationalistic views of history and foreign affairs. Tarentino’s hero is American soldier Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) a swaggering, imaginary (and unlikely) American war hero: brave, daring and brash, but simplistic in his moral views and totally tone deaf to foreign cultures (this point is made comic when Aldo impersonates an Italian). Aldo also is not averse to cruel torture, a characteristic that can be equated with neo-conservative politics from John Birch to Donald Trump (Americans often argue that torturing certain enemies is o.k. because these enemies are uber-evil Nazi-like villains).

    In “Inglourious Basterds” Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a worldly polyglot Nazi, is also a caricature. He is the antithesis of the passionately patriotic, anti-intellectual American war hero. Landa has few patriotic instincts. He is a charming, dispassionate, internationalist, sophisticated and practical. He tortures his victims psychologically, but avoids the kind of vengeful cathartic physical torture committed by Aldo.

    Tarantino’s “alternative ending” for WWII (Aldo and a vengeful Jewish girl kill Hitler) reflects the distorted lens through which Americans view politics, nationalism and history . American “freedom fighters” overcome the “evil doers” in a satisfying blaze of glory. Tarantino irony-filled script is clearly a representation of a dangerous strain of American wish-fullfillment. Bold, uncomplicated, English-only-speaking Americans carry-out a war-ending mission that destroys Hitler.

    Simplistic neo-cons envision a similar end for the “War on Terror.” They would have Americans believe that the U.S. can win this “war” without any attempt to analyze or comprehend the enemy’s culture. All the U.S. needs to do is give neo-con leaders the resources to” blow up” the “bad dudes.”

    That ” Inglourious Basterds” is a critique of right-wing America’s vision of itself at war (as portrayed in westerns, Dirty Dozen-style films and Toby Keith lyrics) is made manifest by the movie’s constant thematic references to the media, films and film making: The Basterds mission is “operation kino” ( kino is the German world for film); one of the Basterds is a British film critic whose deadly gaffe threatens to sabotage the mission; a female movie star is a double (or triple) agent; a German Audie Murphy look-alike is a war-hero actor who plays himself in a “film within the film” called “Nation’s Pride” (a movie that presents an idealized Nazi view of WWII history (the movie more closely resembles Murphy’s “To Hell and Back” than any actual German propaganda movies produced during WWII); a Jewish cinema owner “rewrites” history by inserting an alternate ending (sound familiar?) into “Nation’s Pride”; and finally all are avenged as Hitler dies in a theater that shows German propaganda films. All these self-conscious references hint at Tarantino’s ironic message: The media (and films in particular) simplify ambiguity, turning war into fantasy and wish fulfillment.

    Benton’s “Year of Peril” is likewise a study of fear, horror, revenge fantasies, and their repercussions. Numerous ironic titles reflect the instability of cultural norms and expectations during wartime (“Starry Night” presents a horrific image of a man drowning in a sea on fire as his ship sinks under a beautiful night sky; “The Harvest” depicts a woman’s discovery of her dead husband and child after her home has been firebombed). The most Tarantinoesque image in the series is “Exteminate,” a vision of hulking ogres representing Japan and Germany being disemboweled by sadistic American soldiers. As we come face to face with our vengeful id in this painting, some viewers may question the concept of revenge and “just war.” The unease many feel on viewing this picture is a reminder of the power of propaganda to manipulate our world view in disturbing ways. Benton’s representation of war is sometimes surrealistic and sometimes cartoonish. These styles reflects an awareness of the artificiality and subconscious effects such imagery has on the collective imagination. Like Tarantino, he makes us conscience of the “uglyness” of our emotional thirst for revenge.

    Like Benton Tarantino’ subverts his cartoonish vision of WWII by inserting discomforting moments (horrific beatings, graphic scalping, etc.) into the narrative:. Many Hollywood war films (and 2-D propaganda) gloss over such gore. By forcing us to participate in the sadism, Benton and Tarantino compel us to confront our own feelings about violence, revenge and torture. This point is reinforced towards the end of “Inglourious Basterds”, as Hitler and the Nazis laugh and cheer at American deaths in the film “Nation’s Pride”. A few moments later, Tarantinto presents a similarly series of Nazi deaths, depicted in a way that might encourage some to cheer with similar gusto as Hitler is assassinated and a theater full of Nazis is destroyed by Jews.

    In conclusion, both Benton and Tarantino present us with visions connected with WWII that on the surface may seem to celebrate violence and revenge. However both contain numerous elements that undermine these seemingly ostensive messages with imagery, irony, and self-referential meta-criticism. As such they can serve as meditations on America’s existential anxiety about violence, war, revenge, and national exceptionalism.

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