Benton Walls

High under the eaves of Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art an exciting room was opened last week: a reference library with walls decorated by Thomas Benton in tempera on specially prepared gesso panels of his own invention. If not the best. Artist Benton is certainly the most striking muralist in the U. S. His vibrant, squirming panels in the New School for Social Research (TIME, Jan. 5, 1931) still arouse agitated cluckings from the critics. The Whitney Museum panels depict the usual Benton subjects: crap shooters, burlesque queens, revivalists, mechanics, farm hands, gangsters, stock brokers--the whole entitled "The Arts of Life in America."

Critic Royal Cortissoz complained: "A reading room . . . presupposes 'the still air of delightful studies.' In violation of that, Mr. Benton so devises his work that it is calculated to smite with the force of a physical collision the reader who happens to raise his eyes from his book." To such criticism Artist Benton replies by denying the accepted theory of most muralists: that a mural should supplement and strengthen the architecture of a room. He thinks murals should have "real meaning" of their own. Many experienced librarians object to murals in their buildings, point out that the better they are as works of art, the more they interfere with the library's efficiency. The yellow marble stairs of Boston's Public Library are often made impassable by art lovers gazing at the pale frescoes of Puvis de Chavannes. So many gapers crowd the delivery room to see Edwin Austin Abbey's legends of the Grail that readers have difficulty getting books.

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