Benton’s Epics From the Soil : Exhibition at LACMA shows the Great Regionalist once again is speaking to Aemricans

The decade ended, the world seemed to crumble like a chimney falling in slow motion. The wreckage revealed grimy scraps of gilt-edged securities, broken bottles of bathtub gin, the fender of a yellow Stutz Bearcat--detritus of good times gone. Bony derelicts would soon rummage in the rubble to a harmonica tune asking, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? “

When the market crashed in ’29 people got scared of racy ideas that had fueled their roaring decade in the same way they would get scared again at the end of the ‘60s. Have we gone too far? Is all this misery God’s punishment for the hooch, the easy sex and rebellion against The Establishment? Neoconservative nervousness set in as it did again in the ‘80s traumatized over drugs, and AIDS and longing for the simple solutions of the old-time religion. The ‘20s had Father Coughlin, we had Rev. Falwell. They had the Scopes trial, we have abortion rights wrangles. Whatever, it’s still religion vs. science. Our legions of homeless and economic uncertainties are like theirs, except, of course, we don’t have a Depression. Not yet, anyway.

Trouble was international then, too. In Paris, Picasso started painting in his Neo-Classical manner. England looked at the discouraged realism of Gwen John and Walter Sickert. Hitler replaced modernism with Fascist Realism. Abstract art, associated with left-wing radicalism, was on the run. In the United States, the new hero was Thomas Hart Benton. His big, ropy murals depicting hillbillies and good old boys and girls of Heartland America reassured people that Yankee values were safe as strongboxes. Now once again we find easily accessible art agreeable. We have David Hockney.

Today, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opens a revivalist retrospective of Benton’s art. It manages to be artistically absorbing despite the necessary absence of his major works, the unmoveable murals. More importantly, it feels less like an art exhibition than the point in a historical cycle where the vectors of past and present come together--making new beginnings possible. There is something quite awesome about it.

The only thing that would make its significance clearer would be a back-to-back retrospective of the art of Jackson Pollock. Pollock is the invisible actor whose specter establishes the broader significance of this exhibition.

Benton was Pollock’s teacher, mentor, surrogate father and drinking buddy at New York’s Art Student’s League in the early ‘30s. The fact has long been known. Until now the relationship tended to be characterized as one where Pollock rebeled against a fuddy-duddy teacher. Today it looks different, thanks to the exemplary Benton catalogue by Henry Adams and to a controversial recent Pollock biography widely read in art circles, “Jackson Pollock: An American Saga” by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Rolled together, the two books and the exhibition show that Benton and his art were intensely modern at bottom and that Pollock and his art would have been all but impossible without the older man.

There was indeed a kind of mythic Oedipal struggle between them but it was less personal than generational, a fact that links both to the larger history of culture.

Benton led an artificially manufactured back-to-the-roots art movement called Regionalism whose other heroes were Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. People loved Benton’s salty, pugnacious manner and wrangled delightedly over bold murals his detractors called “tabloid art.” He once admitted, “I paint sometimes to get people to criticize my work.” He was so popular in 1934 he became the first artist ever to make the cover of Time magazine, leading Andy Warhol by decades with an artistic career fueled by publicity.

The earliest Bentons on view at LACMA prove him both talented and urbane. His Huck Finn image was always something of a pose. Born in Neosho, Miss., he was the great-nephew of Sen. Thomas Hart Benton. His father was an abusive, macho local politician who married an ambitious young beauty who goaded the old man into running for Congress. He won and young Tom grew up as much in the political climate of Washington as anywhere.

At 19, he went to Paris where he kept a mistress until his mother came and broke it up. He painted his sister Mildred in a realist style with a whiff of Gustav Klimt. He worked in the manner of Cezanne, the Impressionists and in the abstract “Synchronist” style of his imperious pal Stanton MacDonald Wright. A handsome late portrait shows real affection and admiration for his difficult old friend.

Serious family financial reverses forced his return to the States. He settled into his Hopeful Years in New York where he married Rita Piacenza, who suffered his egotism with good grace. She manipulated his career like a maestro. Traumatized by the death of his father, he started disappearing on long trips into Missouri and the Ozarks. He discovered the Italian 16th-Century mannerist Tintoretto. Benton absorbed his style and his method of working from clay models.

Benton was meticulous in his working habits. From all this he developed the distinctive regionalist style that critics scorned for its Old Master sources. Delacroix and Gericault are already in “People of Chilmark.” Later, you can see the influence of Brueghel and the Flemish Primitives.

By the end of World War II it was all over for Benton. His agrarian America was swamped by industrialized suburbia just as today mighty industry has become the rust belt and technology is king.

Benton was relegated to the status of a colorful has-been. He was accused of being a fascist, even though, in truth, he was a left-wing populist. Then, as now, his wrangles with fellow artists such as his arch enemy Stuart Davis took on nasty political overtones. In fact, it was only a territorial battle between abstract and figurative art, which were seen, respectively, as liberal and conservative.

Benton was accused of being a racist. His paintings of blacks have an element of caricature but so do his paintings of everybody. The racist thing rubbed off on him from his friend, the critic Thomas Craven, who called photographer and Modernist entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz “a Hoboken Jew without knowledge of or interest in the historical American background.”

What is true is that Benton was an enthusiastic boozer who--although married with children--harbored deeply mixed feelings about women and despised homosexuals, especially of the arty sort.

When he left New York, disgusted, to return to Missouri in 1935 he wrote, “If young gentlemen or old ones either want to wear women’s underwear and cultivate extraordinary manners it is all right with me. But it is not all right with the art they affect and cultivate.”

By the ‘50s, art students were trained to put Benton in the same category of popular-artists-to-be-scorned as Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth. Benton, the man, hung on until 1975 when he died of a heart attack in his Kansas City studio. At 85, he was enjoying something of a revival and had just completed a big mural called “The Sources of Country Music.”

But the art world’s new hero was Pollock. Surely he had learned some of his surly macho behavior from Benton.

The exhibition makes Benton’s fundamental modernity inescapable. A set of large studies for “The American Historical Epic” reminds us of El Greco but basically the work could not have happened without Cubism. Benton articulated his space with curved lines that unite compositions like the snake in the “Laocoon.” Forms are sculptural but everything pops to the surface as one big claustrophobic arabesque. That’s where Pollock comes in. He had to have seen these pictures and subconsciously transferred the nervous dynamism of their basic composition to his famous “drip” paintings. Pollock and Benton shared a common compulsiveness. Tom’s was wound up tight, Jackson’s explosive and Dionysiac.

Benton’s paintings could not have happened without that quintessential modern art form, the movies. There is something of the American pioneer films of Gary Cooper and Susan Hayward in the history cycle. “Boomtown” looks like the set for some oiler flick with Clark Gable. “Hollywood” is only one of the pictures he composed using a cinematic montage technique to cross-cut to related scenes. Later he painted Burt Lancaster in “The Kentuckian” and Marlon Brando in “Streetcar Named Desire.” There’s something odd about the whole concept, like a novel written after a film. Compared to Edward Hopper’s brooding movie palace paintings, Benton’s seem exhibitionistic and a little jealous.

Even though Benton art comes on like a baroque freight train, it’s curiously elusive emotionally. There is affection in it but it’s like the work of a guy who always says, “I love you honey but your feet’s too big.” Mean around the edges.

Benton evokes the whole generation of Depression-era artists from Gropper to Shahn and the Soyer brothers. Form is mangled and work seems as haunted as the period. A work like “The Hailstorm” is so nightmarish you want to call the style “Surregionalism.”

Nobody has really defined Regionalism according to the feelings it projects. It’s haunted and inbred like meeting a small-town family whose good manners are all about hiding the skeletons in the closet. Benton did two big nudes in 1938-39. “Persephone” and “Susanna and the Elders.” Both deserve the contemporary description of one of the pictures as a “skinny-shanked, sex-starved Midwest teacher.”

In the catalogue Adams links them psychologically to Benton’s beautiful antiseptic mother and his dirty old dad, but they take on other meanings--the tainted voyeuristic snicker of Erskine Caldwell’s novel, “God’s Little Acre.” They transfer Titian’s grand manner European style to the Midwest and a great erotic tradition takes on a scolding, moralistic tone.

Benton’s art is neurotically modern, but it is also inescapable. It broadcasts a sense of authenticity to its times and its maker and lends credence to President Harry Truman’s belief that Benton was “the best damn painter in America.” His drawing was crabbed but amazingly accurate. He composed complex groups of figures with a unity and believability that remains unmatched. No artist today with pretensions to making a narrative art can touch him.

Besides, how can you hate him? He once said in a public lecture that the tune “Pistol Packin’ Mama” is “True art.”

Why is this important? After all art is just art and paintings is just paintings.

Blissfully, that is what this exhibition and the books prove wrong. Anyone interested in culture will be well rewarded for taking the trouble to plow through their combined 1,147 pages. Each humanizes its subject while placing him in the context of those roiling, complex times surrounding the Great Depression. Their art becomes so clearly crucial to their historical moment that it is as impossible to imagine the time without them as without Franklin D. Roosevelt or Joe Louis. The art so clearly grows from the soil of real events that it seems epic.

If all this fails to convince of the central creative and intellectual role of the artist in this culture, then it probably can’t be done.

Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. (213) 857-6000.

Hours: Tues.-Fri., 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat.-Sun., 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Opens today; ends July 22. Admission: $5 for adults; $3.50 for students with ID and seniors over 62, and $1 for children under 17.