Thomas Hart Benton was one of the founding fathers of the artistic movement known as Regionalism. This term came into common usage in December 1934 when Benton appeared on the cover of Time magazine as putative leader of a drive to repudiate European innovations in modern art, includingabstraction, and to concentrate instead on things American. Because abstraction was closely associated with the artists’ enclaves of New York City and because the American artists closest to Benton in pictorial content—John Steuart Curry of Kansas and Grant Wood of Iowa—were already known for a kind of back-to-the-heartland sensibility, Thomas Hart Benton acquired a reputation for being an anti-urban painter.
Although he did make some intemperate remarks about New York museum directors as he prepared to leave Manhattan and go home to Missouri in 1935, Benton was not a foe of the city. Instead, he widened and deepened Americans’ appreciation of the urban scene to include not only New York but also places like Memphis, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Tulsa, and St. Louis—and Kansas City, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.
In the years immediately before World War II, as the face of urbanism and industrialism began to assume the configurations of the postwar world, Benton was there, with sketchbook in hand, showing old regional centers in transition and new cities of blast furnaces, cracking towers, and high-tension wires rising out of the cornfields and cotton patches of the nineteenth-century frontier.
In murals that he painted before and after he left New York, Benton probed the character of cities, the terms of their modernity, and how they differed from the rural crossroads of the American past. A brilliant series of mural panels that he painted for the New School for Social Research in 1930 is a case in point. The New York City segments show life as a vast, yowling panorama of chorus girls and movie palaces, Coney Island amusements, skyscrapers, ocean freighters, and lurid neon. Work is subordinate to spectacle. But as the wall unrolls westward and southward, different visions of other kinds of cities appear in vignettes of surveyors laying out factories on empty plains and giant concrete grain silos rising abruptly over farmsteads. Benton shows a nation in a tearing hurry to become one vast, urban agglomerate, from sea to shining sea.
Benton’s agent warned that if he drew and painted things exactly as he saw them on his annual tours around the country, he ran the risk of becoming dated. Wouldn’t a 1935-vintage blast furnace seem merely quaint to a 1995 viewer? Thomas Hart Benton failed to heed that advice, and his reputation has suffered as a result. Viewers recoil in horror today from his depictions of the lurid industrial infernos that spelled jobs and progress to the cities of the jobless 1930s. Naughty images of glamour girls of easy virtue on the prowl no longer speak sweetly to the excitement and pleasure offered by the city. But Benton’s views of America’s cities, big and little, depict the infinite promise such places once held, and the reason why young painters from rural Missouri once flocked to them with stars in their eyes.
