Thomas Hart Benton the Arts of Life in America

We tin larn a lot from a unproblematic preposition. Consider Thomas Hart Benton'southward 1932 series of murals (egg tempera with oil coat on linen), which he called "The Arts of Life in America," not "The Arts of America" or "The Arts in America." He wanted to show how art—most prominently music and dance—defined our vigorous, heterogeneous nation as it sank into the Great Depression. He wanted to celebrate, with an enthusiasm worthy of Walt Whitman, the exuberant, tender, earthy, fifty-fifty vulgar highs and lows of American beingness.

And he did so by as well rendering a homage to the Former Masters, especially to the colors of Rubens, the serpentine figures of El Greco, and the elongations of the Italian Mannerists, all of whom he had studied in 1909 during his European travels equally a boyfriend; and another homage to his near contemporary Diego Rivera (1886-1957), whose murals influenced him upon his return to the States.

Benton (1889-1975) and his work went out of style as Abstract Expressionism came into vogue in the 1950s, but the bicycle has turned, and we can now take a fresh look at America'due south greatest populist painter.

In 1932, at the meridian of his popularity, and while Benton was still living in Manhattan, the original Whitney Museum, which occupied four side by side townhouses on Westward Eighth Street, deputed the vast "Arts of Life in America" murals, eight sections in all, to decorate the library walls in the apartment of Juliana Force, the museum's director, which was part of the complex.

Its subjects—people eating, singing, drinking, dancing, playing cards, playing music, tossing horseshoes, praying, gambling, flirting—represent all strata and races of American life. Ane panel includes a white preacher in 1 corner, and an impoverished black mother in another. It also includes the first garbage pile in the history of mural painting. (Benton took flak from outraged traditionalists for this.) In a smaller panel, the lunette "Political Business and Intellectual Ballyhoo," Benton cast a sardonic center on his Greenwich Village Socialist friends. Some critics found the murals rough and brash, the figures brassy and coarse rather than energetic and Michelangelesque. (Some of them have a cartoonish quality that foreshadows Philip Guston. )

In 1949, the Whitney was planning to motion to new quarters and the murals were packed away. Benton'south brand of populist realism was considered passé. In 1953, Sandy Low, director of the New Britain Museum of American Fine art, paid $500 for iv of the original panels and transported them to Connecticut. A smaller 5th section—the lunette—came later.

The 'Arts of the Due west' console from Benton'southward mural serial

Photograph: T.H. and R.P. Benton Trusts / ARS, North.Y.

In New Britain they fill an unabridged room, on opulent, salmon-colored walls that volition presently be repainted in a more subdued bluish-gray shade. The figures burst forth, swirling in sculptural groupings, and in vignettes suggesting allegories. Energy and tenderness, vitality and despair, go hand-in-hand. Violence and sadness are never far off (this is the Depression, afterward all), both as subjects and in the painter's technique: His brilliant primary colors, sometimes deliberately garish, and his distortions of the human figure are boundless.

The 3 richest and largest panels are geographically labeled: "Arts of the South," "Arts of the City" (by and large, one infers, New York), and "Arts of the West." (A fourth is chosen "Indian Arts.") Hither is America'southward fullness: animated, playful, desperate, empathetic, weird. In an essay on this piece of work, Benton wrote that his chosen arts are popular, "undisciplined" and "run into pure unreflective play." That was their appeal to him. His ain discipline and genius found a way to picture such play, to piece of work within the limitations of space ("Arts of the City" occupied a wall at the Whitney with two French doors in it), and to populate a room with as much gusto as Michelangelo populating a ceiling.

A viewer can step back and look at the entirety of a console, or move closer and focus on the individual characters and cameos. In "Arts of the City," for case, at that place's a trio of menacing figures in the foreground: a top-hatted, fat-cat broker continuing backside a Damon Runyonesque cigarette-smoking guy, wearing a bowler, whose mitt rests lightly on the shoulder of a pistol-packing thug. It's perhaps an apologue of criminal commercialism in 3 steps, from investment to theft. Elsewhere there are bathing beauties, radio singers, hoofers, people engaged in intimacies and downright sexual assail. Like shooting fish in a barrel to overlook on the left: a man peering into a garbage tin.

"Arts of the S," with its controversial trash heap, and an outhouse beside a rural church building on the upper left, as well features a fire-and-brimstone preacher like Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry on the upper right in front of a sign that says "Go Side by side to God." A black mother and her girl occupy the lower left. The kid holds a bowl of soup in one hand and a dandelion (symbol of dreams? of ephemerality?) in the other. Her breadbasket is swollen—a sign of malnutrition. Is promise delusional? Who can tell?

Benton was an accomplished ethnomusicologist and harmonica player. (He recorded for Decca Records.) He knew about the music he depicted, and in the swirls of color in "Indian Arts" he tried to reproduce about synesthetically the pulsing rhythms of his key tribal dancer.

He also used friends and family equally models, including one—his studio assistant—to whom he gave daily instructions to go his paints prepare and to fix his canvas. That young man appears in the left-hand lesser corner of "Arts of the West" equally a harmonica-playing figure in blue overalls His name was Jackson Pollock.

—Mr. Spiegelman writes about books and the arts for the Journal.

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