Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood
Peabody Essex Museum
(Salem, MA)
Through September 7,
2015
Planning a trip to Salem, Massachusetts? Don't wait until October
when you have to share the streets with every 14-year-old self-styled Goth
queen in New England. Go now before the fabulous "Thomas Hart Benton and
Hollywood" exhibit closes at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM).
Part of the fun of this exhibit is trying to unravel the
enigmatic Benton (1889-1975). He's often clumped with regionalists such as
Grant Wood, though he was far less sentimental; or with WPA muralists, though
he was producing large-scale public art a decade before the Great Depression
hit and painters became government employees. He was the offspring of
conservatives—his grandfather was a US Senator who advocated Manifest Destiny,
and his father a Confederate during the Civil War and a racist and imperialist
thereafter—but Thomas flirted with socialism in his youth and he routinely
painted Native Americans and African Americans in a sympathetic light. If he
owed an artistic debt to anyone, it was probably late Renaissance Mannerists,
especially Tintoretto, whose acidic colors made up so much of Benton's palette.
He was also familiar with modernism, which he admired and disdained in equal
measure, yet he donned his instructor's cap and turned out a famed pupil:
Jackson Pollock!
On the surface, Benton was a mythmaker who did on canvas
what John Ford did on the big screen. The similarities don't end there—both men
also exposed the darkness lurking behind elegiac surfaces. The first room of
the PEM exhibit is devoted the "American Epic" series Benton painted
in the 1920s, a giant rendering of the American saga from European discovery
through the taming of the frontier. The scale alone suggests triumphant
grandeur, but again the take is more John Ford than Walt Disney. Indians
sometimes appear as menacing, but just as often they are victims, and the
overall portrait of his grandfather's Manifest Destiny ideals is that of
progress bloodied by violence, and of enterprise mediated by chicanery..
PEM cleverly displays these panels in an open room with
theater chairs that invite you to view them as one might a film. Also like a
film, Benton forces viewers to suspend belief. His figures are not just huge,
they are rubbery and misshapen—arms that hang well below the knees, bent backs
that suggest bonelessness, and featureless faces on the perpetrators of violence.
His odd perspectives are everywhere, including the fact that one soon realizes
that he often paints everyone as if they were nude. Look at the ankles of the Native in the next picture. He seems to be wearing leggings, but where do they end? We see other figures whose buttocks, chests, and muscles are so pronounced that they appear clad only in body paint.
Illusion—the essence of Hollywood. Benton loved movies and
the movies loved him. I knew nothing of this connection before seeing the PEM
exhibit, but it was a fruitful one, which Benton clearly enjoyed—right down to
the act of painting himself and his wife in rakish poses suggestive of publicity stills. In Hollywood, Benton produced sketches used by directors to
block scenes, made 3-D clay mock-ups for set designers, painted backdrops, and
even made the marquee posters for classics such as of
The Grapes of Wrath. His journals noted the frenetic energy of
movie sets and expressed bafflement over why certain things were done. But
about those illusions, check out the next painting-- of a Hollywood set. Benton
frames the scantily clad actress with an arch, a looming camera boom, and all
manner of strong verticals and horizontals. Despite all the activity behind and
around her, the gaze is drawn salaciously toward her nearly nude body—so much
so that we almost miss Benton's joke: a bare-breasted woman sitting at the
bottom to the canvas casually adjusting her hair. Make the audience see what you want
them to see—no wonder Hollywood called Benton to its bosom—as it were. 
By the time World War II rolled around, Benton was inspired
by popular culture, especially film, comic books, posters. He played his part
in pumping out propaganda, but compare his images of black soldiers to sterile
government images in which boxer Joe Louis appears in we-must-all-do-our-part
guises. And look at this image of a young man peering back before he ships
out—it's lifted from a World War One silent film. Indeed, his most famous war
image, "Sowers" is an update of World War One propaganda posters associated
with what was commonly called "the rape of Belgium."
The Benton exhibit is excellently curated and full of small
revelations. And how often does one get to use "small" and
"Benton" in the same sentence? Hurry! Don't miss this exhibit.
Rob Weir
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