If ever an American artist had seemed dead and buried a decade ago, along ! with the movement he had led, that man was surely Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). True, his huge murals writhing with buckskinned, blue-jeaned and gingham-clad Americans were still to be seen in situ in the Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City, and the Truman Library, Independence, Mo.; his name might still be invoked in Kansas City, where his latter years were spent; and most students of American art history knew that he had been the teacher (and to no small extent, the substitute father) of Jackson Pollock at the Art Students League in New York City. But actual interest in the Michelangelo of Neosho, Mo., was fairly low, which mirrored the poor esteem into which American regionalism, the populist art movement that in the '30s had tried to assuage the miseries of the Depression, had slumped. From the late '40s onward, regionalism had come to look cornball, and its project, which was to rescue American art from the supposed corruptions of Europe and New York, almost comically dated.
But 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 1990.
The 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.
Yet 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 and the circle of his 291 gallery.