Erika Doss

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to Indiana Magazine of History online. About 650 words from this article are provided below; about 3746 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to Indiana Magazine of History, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to Indiana Magazine of History, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase this article in PDF form for $10.00.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of Indiana Magazine of History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Erika Doss | Action, Agency, Affect: Thomas Hart Benton's Hoosier History | The Indiana Magazine of History, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Action, Agency, Affect

Thomas Hart Benton's Hoosier History

My longstanding interests as a cultural historian have repeatedly turned to issues of public popularity: to how and why certain kinds or styles of art become popular among the American public, how public tastes and preferences change, and how public popularity has affected and continues to affect the course of America's visual cultures. By extension, they have focused on issues of cultural conflict and controversy—issues that are especially relevant in the story of Thomas Hart Benton's 1933 mural, A Social History of the State of Indiana.	1
Benton was the leader of the Regionalist art movement, a strain of American art that dominated from the late 1920s through the early 1940s, or the era of the Great Depression. He was probably the bestknown American artist of the era: depicted on the cover of Time magazine in December 1934; often covered in the pages of Life magazine and other popular periodicals; and even selected in 1940 by the Divorce Reform League as one of America's "best husbands" (along with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt).¹ Benton's brand of Regionalism was a narrative, anecdotal style of modern art rooted in the specific social and political conditions of the interwar era. Benton was adamant about creating a uniquely American art rooted in American life and legend: a style of art fixed on the American Scene and, as Benton painted it in his murals of the 1930s, focused on a dynamic national landscape of hard-working men and liberal political reform.	2
Throughout the years of the Great Depression, Benton's national imaginary—his visual articulation of the America he imagined and desired—was shaped around his personal political convictions regarding democratic liberalism and in particular, support for the 1930s New Deal. Indeed, the Indiana Mural, which Benton painted soon after Roosevelt was elected in 1932 and as he began his first term in office in March1933, embodies Benton's efforts to espouse the liberal politics of the New Deal through the modern art of Regionalism. It purposefully segued with the new president's New Deal aims and ambitions. As the artist explained in a letter to Richard Lieber, the man responsible for commissioning the mural, "the really momentous question of the day [is] that of our social and economic reorganization."² Or as Benton would later recall, "Regionalism was very largely affirmative of the social exploration of American society and resultant democratic impulses on which President Roosevelt's New Deal was based."³	3
Born in 1889 in Neosho, Missouri, Benton was the eldest son of a U.S. congressman with ties to populist and progressive politics. He was named after his great-uncle, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, the nineteenth-century champion of Manifest Destiny. "Politics was the core of our family life," Benton recalled in his 1937 autobiography An Artist in America, explaining how he was expected to continue in his family's political footsteps. "From the moment of my birth," he added, "my future was laid out in my father's mind. A Benton male could be nothing but a lawyer . . . only lawyers were equipped and fitted to possess political power."⁴ This Benton male, however, had other ideas. He remained committed to public life, but he did so in the realm of public art by synthesizing the inherited values of his politically engaged family with his particular brand of modern art, and by fronting his visual version of American politics in modern public paintings like A Social History of the State of Indiana. [plates 2–10] It was one of four major public murals that Benton painted in the 1930s, including America Today (1930–31, New School for Social Research, New York), The Arts of Life in America (1932, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) [p. 161], and A Social History of the State of Missouri (1936, Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City). [plate 13]	. . .

There are about 3746 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.