Thomas Hart Benton's Sanitized American Idyll
His ambition to capture the full experience of living in the United States had its limits.
Thomas Hart Benton: A Picture of America in its Entirety provides an opportunity to consider the Regionalist’s complex legacy. Born in 1889 into a prominent political family in Kansas City, Missouri, Benton was deeply concerned with the hardships of poor and working-class Americans and dedicated his practice to depicting their lives and country. The artist developed an accessible style that focused on the real American experience. But this small retrospective takes Benton’s ambition for granted without properly acknowledging the challenges of capturing the United States.
Populism became the double-edged sword that defined Benton’s oeuvre. Two paintings from the 1940s demonstrate the artist’s appreciation for Black American laborers as he traveled and sketched throughout the South in the first half of the twentieth century: one depicts sharecroppers picking cotton, while another shows laborers cutting sugarcane. Despite his knowledge of Black American history, Benton sanitizes the racist history and his own witnessing of Southern post-Civil War farming in these paintings by presenting it as a timeless agrarian ideal rather than a legacy of slavery.
Benton’s vision of the United States also appears in landscapes like The Desert (1956), which foreground still-life-like details such as dried wood and vibrant desert flowers against arid undulating mountains. In Conversation (1952), he paints a boy with a red cap walking along a picturesque trail lined with wispy trees. Here and in other paintings, the artist’s depictions are cloyingly idyllic — divorced from the reality of the American experience he sought.
Many of Benton’s compositions at Schoelkopf convey formal pleasures and elicit a compelling ambivalence toward the US, but others evoke a grating, kitschy Americana sensibility. And although Thomas Hart Benton could never capture the US in its “entirety,” his conviction that he could warrants our attention.
Thomas Hart Benton: A Picture of America in its Entirety continues at Schoelkopf Gallery (390 Broadway, Tribeca, Manhattan) through October 16. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
