Word: shows
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
Instead, the exhibit treats TV as a chapter in American social and economic history: it shows how the medium worked its way into the American home and what changes it wrought there. In the view of curator Larry Bird, who wrote the show's text, television was not just a masterpiece of marketing, it was a key shaper of the postwar consumer age. TV helped induce Americans, still reeling from the Depression and a world war, to start buying again...
...artists, engineers and enthusiasts gathered for their big show, the computer-graphics experts had special reason to celebrate. Late last month two of their own, John Lasseter and William Reeves of Pixar, a computer manufacturer in San Rafael, Calif., won the first Academy Award given for a totally computer-generated film -- a short subject called Tin Toy that starred a rambunctious baby and a windup music man. Says Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research, a small Redwood City, Calif., company that makes the equipment used to help people enter a computer-generated world: "This is the year that this stuff...
Thomas Hart Benton is admirable for his cussedness and independence, but these qualities are no guarantee of good painting, as a 100th-anniversary show in Kansas City proves. Benton's stylized regionalist scenes, writhing with down- home figures in buckskins and gingham, are caricatured and pumped and tarted up until the eye wants to cry uncle...