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Introduction
The Benton Murals of Indiana
KATHRYN LOFTON AND MATTHEW PRATT GUTERL
"History was not a scholarly study for me but a drama"
Thomas Hart Benton, "A Dream Fulfilled" (1933)1
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| In 1933, an ambitious muralist, Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), rapidly completed an enormous cycle for the Indiana Hall at the Chicago Century of Progress International Exposition. Even in an era distinguished by the work of such great muralists as Jose Orozco, Aaron Douglas, and Diego Rivera, Benton's Indiana project stood out for its mammoth scale, its political temper, and its artistic impact. The artist's notoriety in the wake of the appearance of the Indiana Murals landed him on the cover of Time magazine. He went on to become one of the nation's most respected and influential artists, completing a lengthy series of sweeping historical murals elsewhere. But he would never repeat the speed, scale, and intensity of the Indiana Murals project. |
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With the closing of the fair, Benton's twenty-two panels disappeared. The exposition was a fleeting event, and so much of what seemed important in 1933 was simply packed up and stored away or discarded. It might have been that way for the Indiana Murals, and they might never have resurfaced, except that a few years later Indiana University president Herman B Wells tracked them down, plucking them from the Manufacturer's Building at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. A self-styled visionary responsible for the Bloomington campus's grandiose Fine Arts Plaza, Wells hoped to make the installation of the mural panels at IU a central feature in his campaign to expand and beautify the campus. But the panels were so enormous, so tall and wide, that no single building on campus could display them simultaneously. Since 1940, then, the great bulk of the mural panels have been broken apart. What was shown in Chicago as an unbroken line of Regionalist history is now split into three discrete venues: the IU Auditorium, the University Theater, and a classroom in Woodburn Hall. Controversial in their day, they serve even now as the focus for continued dispute. |
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Today, the controversial aspect of the mural sequence has little to do with its rough-hewn women or its dignified working folks. It has everything to do, however, with a single feature of one panel—Cultural panel 10, "Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press," or "the Klan mural," as it is colloquially known on the Bloomington campus. There, Benton set a cross burning in the background of the panel—the tawdry Indiana past, fading to memory—and prominently foregrounded a hospital scene, with an attentive white nurse providing a meal to a black child in an integrated hospital. [see plate 9] The juxtaposition and placement encouraged interpretive ambiguity. And, thinking nationally, other campuses house far more troublesome artworks—the Tiffany window extolling the Confederacy in Ventress Hall on the Ole Miss campus, for instance, or Dartmouth College's Hovey murals, representing rumdrunk Native Americans. Still, the mere presence of a burning cross in a public classroom has encouraged generations of students to sit-in, to march, to vandalize, or to petition for the removal of this particular panel. |
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