Art: Benton After School

Last week a few days before Adolf Hitler, Thomas Hart Benton celebrated his 50th birthday with a big party in Kansas City, Mo. (see p. 18) and next day caught a train for Manhattan. The celebration there was even bigger—an over-all exhibition of his paintings from 1908 to 1939. His first one-man Manhattan show in seven years, it was installed in a blaze of light at the opening of a new Fifth Avenue gallery by Associated American Artists (TIME, Oct. 24).

Two years ago Thomas Benton wrote an autobiography (An Artist in America) telling what he knew about the U. S. Few artists have seen as much. Benton looked on in awe at his father’s breakfast table 40 years ago as the Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan, engulfed one poached egg on half a baked potato at every bite. He lived in raw Chicago in 1907-08, brawled and bragged among the artists of Greenwich Village and Montparnasse, worked in a Norfolk shipyard in the War, bummed thousands of miles through the South and West with an eye for the smoking valleys, the shanty boats on the rivers, the boom towns, tumbled farms and vast continental curve of his country.

In his painting, swarthy little Tom Benton was for years a self-confessed and monumental joke. In the last decade he has become a boisterous, likable candidate for the honor which awaits any artist who will seize and work mightily with the material of America. Benton has never painted a picture with the dramatic power of John Steuart Curry’s Line Storm or Tornado. Critics have found his color and texture slapdash and harsh compared to that of Iowa’s deliberate Grant Wood. But Benton’s style, an exuberant combination of cartooning draftsmanship, affectionate realism and tightly organized, undulating pattern, is the most imaginative and distinct of the three.

The new Benton show proved that it has done Tom Benton good to go to art school, even though it took his present teaching job at the Kansas City Art Institute to make him stay in one. Such simple little paintings as Rainy Day (see cut), done last year, impressed critics as new and less superficial renderings of what Benton has in his head. Most surprising, however, were a number of beautifully constructed still lifes with real depth and richness of texture. Said Tom Benton: “What there is in me to do I now know that I can do.”