Art: Rebel Against Rebellion

Back in the 19303, Thomas Hart Benton boasted that his pictures—like those of his fellow Midwesterners Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry—were "illustrative, storytelling and popular in content, or so intended." Cocky, hot-tempered and unruly, Tom Benton talked loud and stood proud, and his fame was solid. But as a new generation's vibrant distortions and vivid abstractions transfigured the U.S. art world, museum directors began to shuffle his canvases into cellar crypts, and his name vanished from the critics' scripts. Benton did not help his cause by denning a museum director as "a...