Casey Nelson Blake

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Casey Nelson Blake | Thomas Hart Benton and the Melodrama of Democracy | The Indiana Magazine of History, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Thomas Hart Benton and the Melodrama of Democracy

I paint sometimes to get people to criticize my work," Thomas Hart Benton once said, and if that was his intention he certainly succeeded.¹ Even during the 1930s, the decade when he achieved his greatest popular and commercial success, Benton repeatedly came under attack from people who advanced arguments familiar to those who study public art controversies today. As Kathleen A. Foster explains, critics of the Indiana Mural cycle objected to its inclusion of controversial historical events—depictions of the 1920s Klan and of rock-throwing strikers, for example—and denounced its allegedly "high-brow" style as unsuitable for a public work. The very selection of Benton as artist for the state pavilion at Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress International Exposition upset Hoosiers who mistakenly saw him as a "New Yorker" likely to "make Indiana a boob again."² Benton's friend Lewis Mumford had a similar perspective on the artist's selection, though his appraisal of the result had a somewhat difference valence. Mumford delightedly informed his readers in the New Yorker that "the colossal mural Thomas Benton painted for the State of Indiana ... is almost as if H. L. Mencken should have been chosen to write the official history of Alabama."³ Wilbur Peat, director of the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, was prescient in his warning. "One thing is certain—his murals are going to make a lot of people mad."⁴ They did. And judging from the ongoing debate about the Klan scene, they still do.	1
The controversies did not let up when Benton moved on to his murals cycle for the state capitol building in Missouri, where he was a native son.⁵ [plate 13] Again, critics complained of historical inaccuracies, mean-spirited exaggerations of their state's flaws, and what they saw as the imposition of a cosmopolitan worldview—whether modernist or socialist—on local traditions. A prominent Kansas City businessman told a reporter for one of that city's newspapers: "They do not show Missouri in a proper light. Missouri is not proud of hangings and Negro honky-tonks. She is not proud of the whipping of slaves, the slave block and Jesse James holdups."⁶ The Independence newspaper protested, "Missouri is not a houn' dog state. The whole thing is sordid and rather disgusting and it's more like a cartoon which picks out and emphasizes the weaknesses and extravagance of early Missouri life and leaves out the mighty purposes, the strong characters, the ideals of men and women who built Missouri." A Tulsa, Oklahoma, paper concurred: "Mr. Benton has lied about Missouri. He has desecrated its capitol walls declaring that Missouri's social history is one of utter depravity. That is a lie—Missouri's social history is a story of growing refinement and nobility."⁷	2
Complaints of this kind differ in their particulars from criticisms leveled in recent years against public art installations, particularly abstract, non-representational works.⁸ But in many respects Benton's critics raised issues that have flared up in public art controversies ever since: the artist's relationship to his or her audience; the appropriateness of a given work as a civic symbol representing local traditions and aspirations; the unfamiliarity of many members of the public with avantgarde modes of representation; insensitivity to racial histories that hurt and shame; and the age-old tension between our desire to represent ourselves as we are and our tendency to idealize ourselves as we wish to be. To his credit, Benton went out of his way to answer critics in print and public meetings—something that most of his successors in the modernist public art movement of the late twentieth century failed to do. It is not clear how successful those efforts at persuasion were in the end. Matthew Murray, the Works Progress Administration administrator for Missouri, eliminated favorable references to the mural from the WPA state guidebook. When members of the Federal Writers Project protested the changes, Murray responded: "'I wouldn't hang him on my shithouse wall. Why don't you write about our beautiful roads instead? Now there's something really worth writing about.'"⁹	. . .

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