PAINTER
Overrated The question of the most overrated American painter is a ticklish one
and needs to be defined carefully. If our criterion is prices in the marketplace, I
would nominate Childe Hassam. Hassam produced some marvelous paintings
but also a great number of duds, and I'm always astonished by how much money
the bad paintings fetch when they come up for auction.
Underrated I nominate Thomas Hart Benton, whose name cannot De spoken by
most art historians without a sneer, or discussed without an abusive comment
placed next to it. Benton's America Today, which mixes firsthand observation of
American life with cubist and Marxist theory, is certainly America's best mural
painting, rivaled only by Benton's next-best mural, A Social History of Missouri in
the State Capitol in Jefferson City. Benton also produced easel paintings of
impressive quality, ranging from Persephone, his sensuous Surregionalist
exploration of what men feel when they look at naked women, to adventurous
abstractions, such as the Synchromist painting known as Bubbles, which was
once owned by H. L. Mencken. Despite the popular misconception that he was a
hillbilly yahoo. Benton read widely, spoke French, drank in modernism at its
source in Paris, and devised a step-by-step method of constructing abstract
compositions that provided the basis for the drip paintings of his most famous
pupil, Jackson Pollock. His talents were not limited to painting. Benton was a
gifted musician, who collected folk tunes, performed on a record released by
Decca. and invented a new form of musical notation for the harmonica. He was
also a marvelous writer. His memoir, An Artist in America, which Sinclair Lewis
praised, at limes rivals the prose of Mark Twain and is certainly the best book
ever written by an American painter.
In short, Benton was a fascinating, widely traveled, richly cultured man, one of
America's finest painters but also much more than that. I would not necessarily
claim he was America's greatest painter, but he is certainly the most abused and
underrated major American artist — one who deserves much nicer, more
thoughtful and more accurate treatment than he has received.
By Henry Adams, Professor of American art history at Case Western Reserve
University
Henry Adams is the author of Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist.
Source: American Heritage, Oct2005, Vol. 56 Issue 5, p74, 1p