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Art for America
Race in Thomas Hart Benton's Murals, 1919–1936
AUSTEN BARRON BAILLY
| In 1933, Thomas Hart Benton published a short essay in Indiana, A Hoosier History to accompany the reproductions of his recently completed Indiana Murals. Powerfully entitled "A Dream Fulfilled," Benton's essay actually addressed the specifics of the Indiana Murals only in the last two paragraphs. Instead, the artist focused on the development of his dream to paint a history of the United States, writing that "[t]his mural painting of Indiana sees the realization of a project that I have had in mind for fifteen years. In 1919 I set about making a history of the United States ... I saw that for all the talk on the subject there could be no American Art unless its form was generated in the midst of meanings and values that were American."1 |
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The project to which Benton refers in his essay and this opening quote is his American Historical Epic (1919–1928).2 The "self-commissioned" Epic was Benton's earliest attempt at the kind of large-scale, commissioned public murals for which he became famous in the 1930s.3 Although he had no building in which to house the project, Benton conceived of a series of up to seventy-five mural panels, divided into chapters covering the entire history of the United States from its discovery through the 1920s. "Discovery," "Palisades," "Aggression," "Prayer," "Retribution" (chapter one); "Clearing the Land," "Planting," "The Slaves," "The Witch" (chapter two); "The Pathfinder," [plate 11] "Over the Mountain," "The Jesuits," "Struggle for the Wilderness," "Lost Hunting Ground" [plate 12] (chapter three) are the original titles of the fourteen completed American Historical Epic mural panels, first conceived in 1919 as History of the United States.4 Publicly exhibited in New York between 1923 and 1928, the murals did not lead to a commission for Benton, and he never sold a single panel from the series. After nearly a decade of work, he abandoned the project. |
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In the Epic, Benton treated American historical subject matter in provocative ways. He initially tried to determine "meanings and values that were American" by ignoring the conventional patriotic, celebratory, and heroic rhetoric of both historical narrative and mural painting. Benton instead focused on the nation's violent past with respect to black and Native Americans, and created exaggerated, elongated, even stereotyped or caricatured figures of Indians, white settlers, and black slaves, which he superimposed over invented scenes of American history. He also recast the nation's most celebrated historical themes—discovery, religion, westward expansion—as its most ambivalent and revealing moments by confronting the racial inequities embedded in the popular experience of these histories. |
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As he noted in his Indiana essay, "History was not a scholarly study for me but a drama.... The recorded parts of conventional history were, in my conception, subordinated to the more tremendous facts of common existence where man and his tools, under the constant pressure of every-day need, changed the face of a continent and became themselves something different in the process. And it was to this something different, the final involved and contradictory complex of American life, that I consecrated my history."5 Underlying these descriptions of his Epic is Benton's ongoing subtext, one he never openly articulated but to which his art attests: For Benton, America's "drama," America's "tremendous facts of common existence," its "pressure," its "difference" from Europe, and its "involved and contradictory complex," were all found in the nation's race relations. |
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