Word: benton
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...