Tarted Up Till the Eye Cries Uncle

By ROBERT HUGHES

If ever an American artist had seemed dead and buried a decade ago, along ! with the movement he had led, that man was surely Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). True, his huge murals writhing with buckskinned, blue-jeaned and gingham-clad Americans were still to be seen in situ in the Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City, and the Truman Library, Independence, Mo.; his name might still be invoked in Kansas City, where his latter years were spent; and most students of American art history knew that he had been the teacher (and to no small extent, the substitute father) of Jackson Pollock at the Art Students League in New York City. But actual interest in the Michelangelo of Neosho, Mo., was fairly low, which mirrored the poor esteem into which American regionalism, the populist art movement that in the '30s had tried to assuage the miseries of the Depression, had slumped. From the late '40s onward, regionalism had come to look cornball, and its project, which was to rescue American art from the supposed corruptions of Europe and New York, almost comically dated.

But nostalgia and a market boom bring most things back eventually. In 1983 the Whitney Museum of American Art revived Benton's old co-regionalist, Grant Wood, with a retrospective. Six years later, it is Benton's turn, with a show of some 90 works at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Curated by the museum's Henry Adams, who wrote the well-researched and highly readable accompanying biography, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original, it will run until June 18, then travel to Detroit, New York and Los Angeles through July 1990.

The show confirms what one had already suspected. It is bound to be a hit, because Benton was a dreadful artist most of the time. He was not vulgar in the tasteful, closeted way of an Andrew Wyeth. He was flat-out, lapel-grabbing vulgar, incapable of touching a pictorial sensation without pumping and tarting it up to the point where the eye wants to cry uncle.

Yet Benton's is a curious case because, despite all the hollering he and his admirers produced about down-home values and art for the common man, he was no kind of naif. He had studied in Paris before World War I and was closely tied to the expatriate avant-garde there, especially Stanton Macdonald-Wright, whose "synchromist" abstractions were among the most advanced experiments being done by any American painter. In New York in the early '20s, Benton dressed (as one of his friends would remark) like "the antithesis of everything American," and had a peripheral relationship to Alfred Stieglitz and the circle of his 291 gallery.

Benton's own abstract paintings may not have been quite up to the level of Macdonald-Wright's, though it is difficult to judge them fairly, since he destroyed so much of his early work "to get all that modernist dirt out of my system." But it was abstraction that underwrote the system of Benton's later figurative paintings -- an abstraction based on bulging, serpentine figures derived from Michelangelo. From him, and from mannerist sources like Luca Cambiaso's block figures and El Greco's twisty saints, Benton assembled the theory of kinetic composition that would eventually alter the walls of the Midwest. It would alter abstract painting itself, since his preoccupation with surge and flow got across to Pollock and, much etherealized, led to Pollock's invention of "all-over" abstraction. In his own work, however, what it mainly produced was rhetoric.

Benton left New York for good in 1935, returning to Missouri. By then the regionalist movement had formed around his "heroic" pastoral vision, and he felt obliged to repudiate the city, whose art world was, he announced, a veritable Sodom of fanatics like Stieglitz and "precious fairies" who "wear women's underwear." Yet an odd thing about regionalism, as Adams shows in amusing detail, is that it was the only art movement ever launched by a mass- circulation magazine. Regionalism's promoter was a small-time Kansas-born art dealer named Maynard Walker, who sensed that the resentments of America, battered by the Depression and bitterly suspicious of the East, could be harnessed in the field of art. Cultural populism would sell, he demonstrated, provided it were shown welling up from the undefiled American heartland.

The artists who embodied it best were Benton, Wood and John Steuart Curry. They hardly knew one another. But it happened that Henry Luce was looking for a patriotic circulation builder for the Christmas 1934 issue of TIME. Walker was duly interviewed, Benton's self-portrait went on the cover, and American regionalism was born. "A play was written and a stage erected for us," Benton would later remark. "Grant Wood became the typical Iowa small towner, John Curry the typical Kansas farmer, and I just an Ozark hillbilly. We accepted our roles."

The further irony was that regionalism, supposed to be the expression of American democracy, was in its pictorial essence the kissing cousin of official Soviet art in the '30s. If socialist realism meant sanitized images , of collective rural production, new tractors, bonny children and muscular workers, so did the capitalist realism proposed by Benton and Wood. Both were arts of idealization and propaganda. In aesthetic terms, little that Benton painted for the next 40 years would have seemed altogether out of place on the ceilings of the Moscow subway. Apart from this, the whole matter of Benton's racism is still up in the air. His paintings of blacks look condescending because he never figured out how patronizing his desire to "ennoble" them was, but at least he was equally hard on whites, those gangling hayseeds and pudgy politicos.

In any case, Benton could hardly draw anything without caricaturing it. That was part of the reason for his popularity -- as it is with an artist like Red Grooms today. You cannot help liking Benton for his lack of cant, his indomitable energy, his cussedness and independence. But as his work proves, these qualities, though admirable in themselves, do not guarantee major art.