Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975)
He wanted to be an artist. His father, who considered art an unmanly trade, was furious; the two were never close again. But with the support of his mother, Lizzie, a strong-minded woman with social ambitions, Benton embarked on what would be a long, awkward and episodic cultural education.
Still in his teens, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on illustration and newspaper cartooning. But he soon became interested in painting and decided to head to Paris, where he landed with little money, no French and only a vague idea of how to wield a brush. He stayed for three years, splitting his time between copying old masters in the Louvre and immersing himself in a modern art scene that was, in the years before World War I, on the boil.
Benton’s character, as depicted by Wolff at this point, will remain consistent: a combination of combative self-confidence and profound uncertainty. In Paris, he played the roustabout bohemian to the hilt, wearing artsy clothes, acquiring a mistress, reading Ruskin and Hippolyte Taine, drinking all night, getting into fights. But his painting was shaky, as he tried out a range of styles — Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism, abstraction, one after the other, often in combination — with dispiriting results. Whenever he felt he was on to something, he slapped himself down, in a self-destructive pattern that would take other forms later on.
The experimentation went on for years after he returned from Paris to the United States, this time to New York City. Yet once back on native turf, he gradually became a different, definite kind of artist, mostly through a process of rejection. Out went the Left Bank wardrobe, the mistresses, Ruskin and Taine, and interest in any European painters apart from old masters. He decided that he despised most modern art, and the artists who made it. Emboldened by newfound confidence, he insisted on sharing his views, as well as an enemies-list-in-formation — Alfred Stieglitz and the young Stuart Davis topped it — with whoever would listen.
It’s possible to read all this as a defensive tactic, a pre-emptive repudiation of a game he suspected he had lost. At the same time, he was finally coming into his own. By the early 1920s, he had worked out a distinctive brand of stylized realism inspired in part by the twisty figures of Mannerist and Baroque artists like Jacopo Pontormo and El Greco. And he had found an application for that style in the vision of a populist, working-class America remembered from his childhood. [From a book review by Holland Cotter in the New York Times Book Review dated July 1, 2012]
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