Thomas Hart Benton (1989)

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00:02:11Tom Benton was a small man
00:02:15with the vivacity and the pugnaciousness
00:02:19of a phantom rooster.
00:02:23He made great use of that wonderful mustache of his.
00:02:29Very sparkling eyes.
00:02:32Never saw him at a loss for a word.
00:02:36He had a great persona of the hard-drinking, tough guy
00:02:42who happened to be an artist, you know?
00:02:44His pride was to be able to drink with anybody
00:02:48and fight with anybody and fuck with anybody
00:02:51and so forth.
00:02:53Real he-man.
00:02:55The sheer perversity of Tom Benton
00:02:57in terms of his own culture is pretty wonderful.
00:03:00The fact that he likes to put people on,
00:03:03the fact that he likes to be an outrageous old cuss,
00:03:06the fact that he likes to rub their nose in barroom nudes,
00:03:09the fact that he likes to challenge the morality
00:03:12of his own period is a lot of fun.
00:03:15Well, Tom Benton went out and looked at America
00:03:18like nobody did.
00:03:19He knew where America was and he knew what America was
00:03:23because he went out and mixed with the people,
00:03:26slept with the people, ate with the people,
00:03:28drew the people, won their confidence,
00:03:31and he didn't give a damn about high society.
00:03:36Now, that irritated a lot of people.
00:03:3925 years ago, one never dreamed
00:03:43there would be a revival of Benton.
00:03:46All of that, the whole attitude toward art
00:03:49that's embodied in his work, embodied in his writing,
00:03:53embodied in his career, seemed safely dead.
00:03:59He's loved as a person, and he's hated as a person,
00:04:03and then they transfer this over to his painting.
00:04:06Those who love him love his painting,
00:04:08and they know nothing about art, usually.
00:04:10Those who hate him are the people in the profession
00:04:13because he's made comments, public comments,
00:04:16statements about them, so they hate the man,
00:04:20therefore they won't look at his work,
00:04:22and they hate his work.
00:04:23It's unfortunate.
00:04:30He was a politician's son who scorned politics,
00:04:33yet struggled all his life to become a public figure.
00:04:38He was a sophisticate who pretended to be simple,
00:04:42a rebel who fled from his Midwestern past
00:04:45and then came to celebrate it in his art.
00:04:49He showed how an American artist could succeed
00:04:52and how he could fail.
00:04:55His paintings hang in museums,
00:04:57but his friends still celebrate his birthday each year
00:05:00in a Kansas City saloon.
00:05:04Thomas Hart Benton, who will be 70 next Wednesday,
00:05:08has been described as America's best-known contemporary painter
00:05:12who views his subject through the eyes of a social historian.
00:05:16He's also been referred to as rugged, outspoken,
00:05:19and unconventional.
00:05:21Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hart Benton
00:05:23live in this large native stone house
00:05:25in the southwest section of Kansas City.
00:05:28Good evening, Tom.
00:05:29Good evening, Ann.
00:05:30How are you?
00:05:31Pretty good.
00:05:32Tell me, what do you remember most
00:05:34about your boyhood in Neosho, Missouri?
00:05:37Shows in the barns, swimming in the creeks,
00:05:40riding horses, so forth.
00:05:42Well, that kind of a country-jerk life.
00:05:45It was extremely entertaining.
00:05:47You always remember it with some regrets.
00:05:49Maybe the progress that we've had has wiped all that out,
00:05:52and other people won't have the chance to regret it.
00:05:54But I remember it anyhow with a pleasurable regret.
00:06:04He was born in Neosho, Missouri in 1889,
00:06:08the first and shortest of four children,
00:06:11and was named for his great-uncle,
00:06:13Senator Thomas Hart Benton.
00:06:15He was the champion of Manifest Destiny,
00:06:19Missouri's first senator,
00:06:20a man who stood six feet four
00:06:22and who wounded Andrew Jackson in a duel.
00:06:26It was a big name to live up to.
00:06:31Tom was very pugnacious, even as a young person.
00:06:36He was very sure that he was always right,
00:06:39and he was very talkative, and at meals,
00:06:43my father would sometimes send him away from the table
00:06:46because he insisted on what I do and what I will do,
00:06:52and it was always, as my father said,
00:06:55I, I, I, and my father called him Big Eye.
00:07:02His father, Colonel Mycenaus Benton,
00:07:04was a combative, hard-drinking politician
00:07:07who was four times elected to Congress
00:07:09as the Little Giant of the Ozarks.
00:07:12My father was a political figure in the state,
00:07:16and when I was a kid,
00:07:17he used to take me on his various campaigning trips.
00:07:20Whether he was campaigning for himself
00:07:23or for some other candidate,
00:07:24I would go, and I got acquainted very early
00:07:28with a kind of flamboyant early political life of Missouri.
00:07:35Benton's mother, Elizabeth,
00:07:37was 19 years younger than his father,
00:07:39a beautiful, pious, high-strung Texan
00:07:41with artistic aspirations
00:07:43who loved Washington society
00:07:45and despised her husband's Missouri constituents.
00:07:49His father and mother were totally incompatible,
00:07:54and they had irreconcilable differences all the time,
00:08:00and it almost seems as though Tom's mother
00:08:06would side with him against his father
00:08:09just to spite the father.
00:08:14From the first, Tom loved to draw,
00:08:17rushing trains, Indians in war paint.
00:08:24Custer's Last Stand was a favorite subject,
00:08:27copied from a print
00:08:28glimpsed through the swinging doors of a Main Street saloon.
00:08:34His mother encouraged his art.
00:08:36His father did not.
00:08:38He was determined that his son
00:08:39would become a lawyer and a politician.
00:08:42That I should even think of becoming an artist
00:08:44gave him a sense of outrage, Tom remembered.
00:08:47It would never do for a Benton to descend so low.
00:08:53He struggled against our father all the time.
00:08:56He wasn't struggling against anybody else in the house,
00:09:00but he was our father.
00:09:02Our father had ideas about what he was to do in the world,
00:09:06and they were not Tom's ideas.
00:09:09At 17, Tom left home and got a job as a cartoonist,
00:09:13lampooning local citizens for the Joplin American.
00:09:17One night, he was seated in a saloon,
00:09:20was looking up at this bar,
00:09:22behind the bar at the House of Lords saloon,
00:09:24and there was this huge naked woman in the painting,
00:09:27and the boy started, the older man started kidding him.
00:09:29They said, Shorty, what are you staring at that painting for?
00:09:33Implying that he was staring at the naked woman.
00:09:35He got very embarrassed and said, no, he wasn't.
00:09:37He said he was an artist,
00:09:39and he was just studying the artistic proportions of the painting.
00:09:43And the fellow started kidding me,
00:09:45and I told him I was an artist.
00:09:47And to prove it, they knew that they needed a draftsman on the paper,
00:09:52so they took me down there, and I got the job.
00:09:56I was 17 years old then.
00:09:58I got $14 a week. That was a big salary.
00:10:01So I thought I'd better stay with the arts and make money.
00:10:04That was about the last money I made for 20 years.
00:10:07He now demanded to go to art school,
00:10:12but his father packed him off to a military academy instead.
00:10:16Sure, it would drive the art out of him.
00:10:19It did not.
00:10:22He did well at English and football
00:10:25and brought dozens of illustrated letters home.
00:10:30But he piled up demerits, failed at mathematics,
00:10:33and was encouraged to go elsewhere.
00:10:37Finally, the colonel gave in,
00:10:39and Tom entered the prestigious Chicago Art Institute.
00:10:42He made a noisy impression.
00:10:45He refused to draw plaster casts,
00:10:47elbowed his way into classes reserved for older students,
00:10:50and assured a friend that his paintings
00:10:52would one day be as important as the funny papers.
00:10:57When an older student teased him about his size,
00:11:00he pushed him down a coal chute.
00:11:05I become more and more conscious,
00:11:07Tom wrote to his mother from Chicago,
00:11:10that in me lies some unexplainable power
00:11:13which sometime in the future I will be able to unchain
00:11:17and which will make me rise far above
00:11:19the level of the ordinary mortal.
00:11:22His teachers agreed and urged his parents
00:11:25to send him to Paris to study.
00:11:34It was 1908.
00:11:36Paris was the home of Picasso, Braque, Matisse,
00:11:40all young men and revolutionizing the way artists saw the world.
00:11:45My genius notions were dispelled in a hurry, Ben remembered.
00:11:50The quarter was overrun with geniuses.
00:11:53I was merely a roughneck with a talent for fighting,
00:11:56but not for painting.
00:11:59Tom rented a tiny studio, grew a mustache,
00:12:02installed a mistress, and spent hours at the Louvre.
00:12:06He disliked his classes, disliked his own work,
00:12:09drank and talked a lot.
00:12:11He was known in Paris as Le Petit Balzac.
00:12:16When his mother came to visit and found out about the mistress,
00:12:20she took her boy home.
00:12:22He returned to Missouri wearing a stylish black suit
00:12:25and flourishing a walking stick.
00:12:28Neosho had never seen anything like him.
00:12:31The colonel sent him to New York.
00:12:35He once said that the artist's life was the best in the world
00:12:40if you could get through the first 40 years.
00:12:45In New York, Benton had few prospects and no money.
00:12:52He stole paints from Macy's,
00:12:54bailed at portraits and calendar art,
00:12:56painted movie sets, worked as an extra,
00:12:59served a stint in the Navy,
00:13:01and survived a stabbing by an irate girlfriend.
00:13:06He entered the world of radical art and politics,
00:13:09but he didn't know Alfred Stieglitz and the editor Max Eastman.
00:13:13He joined the John Reed Club and the People's Art Guild
00:13:16and befriended communists,
00:13:18but always remained on the outer edges of things.
00:13:23A friend remembered that he never smiled.
00:13:27Always he continued to paint.
00:13:29He imitated Pissarro, Cezanne, and Kandinsky.
00:13:33He tried Impressionism, Pointillism, Cubism,
00:13:36Constructivism, Symbolism, Synchronism.
00:13:39None of it satisfied him.
00:13:42I spent 15 years on my beam end, he remembered,
00:13:45rocked by every wave that came along.
00:13:48I floundered without a compass in every direction.
00:13:53Benton's work as a modernist, I thought, was really very strong.
00:13:59I would never have put him up in the first class,
00:14:04but it was apprentice work.
00:14:06It was the work of a young artist discovering new ideas,
00:14:10which clearly scared the life out of him
00:14:12because he made certain later on
00:14:14that he never had to deal with a new idea ever again.
00:14:17Benton experimented most with synchronism,
00:14:20combining brilliant colour with the exploded forms of the Cubists.
00:14:26But he was also drawn to the compositional principles
00:14:30Rubens, El Greco, Tintoretto, especially Tintoretto.
00:14:37In about 1919, it was really the breakthrough for Tom Benton
00:14:43when he found a way to build clay models
00:14:46as a basis for his paintings.
00:14:48In his studies, he discovered Tintoretto,
00:14:50and Tintoretto's making of little wax figures
00:14:53and putting them on a stage and lighting them,
00:14:56achieving an effect that he could then get into his paintings.
00:15:01Once he had this basis for his paintings,
00:15:04he could then apply it to just a parade of historical recollections
00:15:10and the American myths that he incorporated in his great murals,
00:15:15all through the projection of three-dimensional form
00:15:19based on those three-dimensional models.
00:15:21And for the next 55 years, Tom Benton didn't do a painting
00:15:25unless he first did it in clay.
00:15:36He made the decision after he'd really gotten involved in content
00:15:40and began to think about meaning
00:15:42and the importance of meaning to his audiences
00:15:45and to himself, what he wanted to say with his painting.
00:15:49He abandoned the more theoretical aspects of things
00:15:53and began to deal with more three-dimensional,
00:15:56Baroque storytelling kinds of things.
00:15:59I proclaimed heresies around New York, Benton remembered.
00:16:04I wanted more than anything else to make pictures,
00:16:07the imagery of which would carry
00:16:10unmistakable American meanings for Americans.
00:16:14He believed in America,
00:16:16he believed in the spirit that was in the country,
00:16:19and he felt that the art should come from the country.
00:16:24To be clear like the American soul is
00:16:29and articulate in a simpler way,
00:16:33not abstract, but down-to-earth and real.
00:16:38I set out painting American history, as Benton said,
00:16:42in defiance of all the conventions of our art world.
00:16:48And he started work on a series of big canvases,
00:16:52which he called the American Historical Epic.
00:17:00History was not facts to him,
00:17:03but translated into the activities of people doing things.
00:17:09History had to be alive, it had to be colorful,
00:17:13it had to be moving, it had to say something.
00:17:16Oh dear, I see leaping figures, yes.
00:17:19And I see Indians with tomahawks and so on, he liked that.
00:17:25Those that went into the lore and legend of American history, yes.
00:17:31He was trying to put art to some human end,
00:17:35to serve some human purpose,
00:17:39to make Americans somehow alive
00:17:43to some deep dimension of their own reality.
00:17:48I think that's a great purpose for art to serve.
00:17:52He wanted people who would read funny papers to like the pictures.
00:17:57He really did.
00:18:01In 1924, Benton was called home to Neosho.
00:18:05His father had throat cancer.
00:18:08They reconciled their differences at the old man's bedside.
00:18:13I cannot say what happened to me while I watched my father die
00:18:18and listened to the voices of his friends, Benton wrote,
00:18:22but I know that when I got back east,
00:18:25I was moved by a great desire to pick up the threads of my childhood.
00:18:30I'm not a psychobiographer,
00:18:33but I do think a good deal of Benton's adult character
00:18:36grew from his relationship with his father,
00:18:39who was a populist senator
00:18:41who did not like eastern interests nor international interests,
00:18:45and I know did not like modern art at all.
00:18:48And Benton became, in effect, like his father after his father died.
00:18:53From then on, he would roam the American countryside whenever he could,
00:18:58north, south, east, west.
00:19:00I stuck my nose into everything, he said,
00:19:03and produced thousands of drawings of the people he met
00:19:06and the places he saw.
00:19:08A friend called them a mountain of Americana.
00:19:11He would mine that mountain all his life.
00:19:16After Paris and so on, he'd been throughout America
00:19:20just making drawings of the life of people out in the Midwest.
00:19:25Drawings which to me had the character of Mark Twain in literature.
00:19:32I mean right out of American life,
00:19:35and a part of American life that had not been put into the arts.
00:19:43While teaching night classes at a public school,
00:19:46Benton fell in love with a beautiful student, Rita Piacenza.
00:19:51She was an Italian immigrant and a Roman Catholic.
00:19:54Benton's family was appalled.
00:19:57So was hers.
00:19:59We thought that he didn't have a job,
00:20:02that he was painting, he couldn't sell,
00:20:06and Rita had to support him.
00:20:10You know, Italians, they have a very funny way about,
00:20:13they expect the man to support the wife,
00:20:16not the wife to support the husband.
00:20:19They got married anyway.
00:20:21Rita made hats and modeled them while Tom painted.
00:20:30Now we lived a simple life, my God.
00:20:33I lived in New York City at the time,
00:20:36in a flat that had no heat.
00:20:39I had to carry coal up five flights of stairs,
00:20:43and we had kerosene lamps.
00:20:45That's right in the middle of New York City.
00:20:51When their first child, Thomas Piacenza Benton,
00:20:54known as T.P., was born,
00:20:56he slept in a dresser drawer.
00:20:58My mother visited their apartment,
00:21:01which I guess was very close to the definite,
00:21:05full-fledged definition of abject squalor and chaos
00:21:09and no adornments, no amenities.
00:21:12And my mother said to Rita,
00:21:14I don't understand how you can live under these conditions.
00:21:19To which Rita replied with confidence
00:21:22and a touch of hauteur,
00:21:25my husband is a genius.
00:21:28Oh, boy, Rita Benton.
00:21:31Boy, what a woman.
00:21:35I had more fire in that fat Italian lady
00:21:39than I ever saw in any woman.
00:21:42And I loved Rita,
00:21:44and I think anybody who knew Rita loved Rita Benton.
00:21:50Benton was off and away sketching for months at a time
00:21:53and hated interruptions when at home.
00:21:56Tom is the worst husband and worst father that ever lived,
00:21:59Rita once told a friend.
00:22:01No American woman could have been married to Tom.
00:22:05Tom had his moments when he got discouraged,
00:22:09and he'd tear up a painting, never going to paint again,
00:22:13and Rita would have him out in his studio
00:22:16the next morning painting again,
00:22:19and she encouraged him greatly.
00:22:22She'd go out and look at his painting,
00:22:25and she'd say, Tom is fantastic.
00:22:28Wiley told me that if it wasn't for...
00:22:32It's been very hard to live with your sister all these years.
00:22:37It's hard for a woman to get along.
00:22:40But if it wasn't for her,
00:22:44I was a bum, I will still be a bum,
00:22:47and I will never thank to my name.
00:22:55In 1929, Rita somehow talked the president
00:22:58of the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village
00:23:02into letting Tom paint 9 mural panels for a boardroom there.
00:23:06It was his first big commission.
00:23:08His only payment was the price of the eggs
00:23:11that went into preparing his paint.
00:23:17America Today was the theme.
00:23:24It may not be art, Benton said, but it is history.
00:23:29America Today.
00:23:31What's wonderful about America Today
00:23:34is the complexity and the energy.
00:23:37Just a huge, brawling number of figures
00:23:40all jostling one another for your attention.
00:23:43I like that. I like the energy level.
00:23:46America Today. America Today. Today. Modern.
00:23:49America Today is probably the most muscular
00:23:52and the most artistic of all time.
00:23:55America Today is probably the most muscular painting
00:23:58that Benton ever did.
00:24:00The way it was set up in the New School,
00:24:03it was so close to you that you were confronting figures
00:24:07that seemed bigger than you were
00:24:10with these very hot, aggressive colors,
00:24:13these purples and oranges.
00:24:15It was a new technique completely in mural painting
00:24:19of actually taking reality
00:24:21and making mural art directly out of it.
00:24:24Here's a man who took the whole face of America
00:24:28and tried to make a work of art out of it.
00:24:33It was too crowded, no question, artistically speaking.
00:24:37But after all, a superabundance of vitality
00:24:41is something you don't just slough off.
00:24:45He shows you prize fighting.
00:24:47He shows you ladies going to the movies,
00:24:50sneaking off for the afternoon.
00:24:52He shows you preachers yowling on street corners.
00:24:55He shows you Salvation Army bands.
00:24:58Almost everything becomes a kind of gaudy entertainment
00:25:02that Benton looks at.
00:25:09In America Today,
00:25:11Benton has slipped in all kinds of sly references
00:25:15about his New York friends.
00:25:17For example, there's a scene
00:25:19where his one-time friend Max Eastman
00:25:22has shown ogling a girl in the subway
00:25:25but not giving up his seat.
00:25:27To make it even more salacious,
00:25:29the head of the girl in the subway
00:25:31is a notorious stripper
00:25:33who would have been pretty well known
00:25:35to the New Yorkers at the time.
00:25:37Abstractionists denounce Benton
00:25:39for trying to tell stories with his paintings.
00:25:42Social realists denounce the stories he was trying to tell,
00:25:46implicitly blaming capitalism for the Depression.
00:25:49Benton was unmoved.
00:25:51It was the sheer energy of America that compelled him.
00:25:57There's a sort of magical period in Benton's work
00:26:00from about 1928 to 1938
00:26:02where it seemed as though he could do no wrong as a painter.
00:26:06One after another,
00:26:08he was turning out incredibly memorable paintings,
00:26:12which I would characterize as masterpieces.
00:26:15There's something compulsive about him in that period.
00:26:19In the Indiana mural, for example,
00:26:22he was painting a wall 12 feet high and 250 feet long.
00:26:27That's to say, a wall the size of a city block,
00:26:31which he painted in less than a year with hundreds of figures.
00:26:46Benton's murals have really a remarkable uniqueness, I think.
00:26:51They actually seem to leap out of the walls.
00:26:55Part of this is due to color.
00:26:58Part of this is due to a remarkable depth perception
00:27:02that he had and could put on canvas.
00:27:05In many instances, bigger than life.
00:27:08These things conspire together
00:27:10to tell a story that leaps out at you from the walls.
00:27:14Another thing had to do with the type of perspective that he used,
00:27:19that he used a high horizon line,
00:27:22if you know what I'm talking about, the level of the eye.
00:27:26Be high in the picture and you look down on things.
00:27:30But perspective implies one vanishing point.
00:27:33What Tom did, he took liberties with that.
00:27:36He would move the vanishing point along on the same horizon line
00:27:42so that you could have a shifting vanishing point.
00:27:46Benton's vast mural for the Indiana exhibit
00:27:50at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair won him plenty of attention,
00:27:55but few friends in Indiana,
00:27:57because it included a coal miner's strike and a Ku Klux Klan rally.
00:28:02New York critics denounced it, too.
00:28:05He met his enemies, of course.
00:28:09On the one hand, there were the sophisticated people
00:28:12who thought in terms of a great deal of international art,
00:28:16particularly French art.
00:28:18The other was the social content school,
00:28:21as represented by people like Stuart Davis and Ben Shaw and so on.
00:28:26And in those days, the art world was very lively,
00:28:30an awful lot going on, all kinds of fights, kind of fun.
00:28:36I like realism in American art, but I don't like Benton's work at all.
00:28:42His colour was bad and he didn't draw well.
00:28:49I don't know why he became an artist.
00:28:51To me, there isn't any energy in those paintings of America today.
00:28:56It's a kind of cartoon version of what America was at that time.
00:29:04I remember something about what American city life was like in the 30s.
00:29:08It bore absolutely no relation to Benton's vision of it.
00:29:12Benton now took to lecturing on art and politics.
00:29:16Once at the John Reed Club,
00:29:18an agitated party member threw a chair at him.
00:29:22I think he was looking for the chaplain audience almost, in a sense.
00:29:28He felt that he could set certain strings vibrating among American people
00:29:36that would give art the immediacy that perhaps it had in the Renaissance,
00:29:43where it became a fighting thing.
00:29:46When somebody finished something,
00:29:49the whole damn population would turn out to see it.
00:29:53The thing about art, to me, is energy, power, plastic power,
00:30:00and the work of art itself.
00:30:03He had that quality, no question.
00:30:11Benton was not the only painter who was at odds with the New York art world
00:30:15and who dreamed of establishing a distinctively American art.
00:30:19Grant Wood in Iowa and John Stewart Curry in Kansas
00:30:23already worked in the Midwest.
00:30:39At that time, I considered them three important American artists,
00:30:44and he was one of them.
00:30:46Thomas Benton, Grant Wood, and Stewart Curry.
00:30:49They were the great American artists in those days.
00:30:54Political and aesthetic critics alike denounced them as mere regionalists,
00:30:59by which they meant narrow, isolationist, chauvinistic.
00:31:03But Benton, Wood, and Curry came to be proud of the name,
00:31:07and when Time magazine wrote them up in 1934
00:31:10with Benton's self-portrait on the cover,
00:31:13they became the nation's best-known painters.
00:31:18Benton was head and shoulders above the whole regional school.
00:31:23I mean, much as I like Grant Wood's work,
00:31:26I don't think it has the same quality.
00:31:29Nor John Stewart Curry, who was my good friend.
00:31:32They were fine painters. Grant Wood was, in a way, an innovator, too.
00:31:38But not to the extent that Benton was.
00:31:42Thomas Benton, I think, transcended illustration.
00:31:47I mean, he transcended it.
00:31:50And he had a style of his own, a very impetuous kind of style.
00:31:55Very much his own. Nobody else painted like him.
00:31:58The same spirit.
00:32:01He called himself a regionalist,
00:32:04but he didn't paint one region of the country.
00:32:07He really roamed the whole country, from New York to Hollywood,
00:32:11from the obscure parts of the Ozarks in the Deep South
00:32:15to the big open spaces of the Great Plains.
00:32:19Benton really got all over America.
00:32:25In 1935, Benton published a furious assault
00:32:28on the city where he had lived and worked for almost 25 years.
00:32:32The hope of American art now lay in the heartland, he said.
00:32:36The New York art world was morbidly narrow
00:32:39and highly critical of innovation,
00:32:41and under the domination of homosexuals.
00:32:44He knew how to get onto the front page.
00:32:47It's better to be called a louse, anything,
00:32:50than not be mentioned at all.
00:32:52I mean, he became public news,
00:32:54not on the art page, on the front page.
00:32:57What I see in his art
00:33:00is the work of a man who really shrank
00:33:06away from what I consider
00:33:09the largest tasks of art in this century.
00:33:13He had a glimpse of it in Paris and in New York.
00:33:18He made an attempt at it, and he wasn't equal to it.
00:33:22So he packed his bags and went back
00:33:25to where he could be a big figure in a small world.
00:33:36I often say there aren't any real New Yorkers.
00:33:41They all came from the Middle West.
00:33:44That's not strictly true, but it's amazing.
00:33:49There's a great deal of force in the Middle West.
00:33:53It is the United States.
00:33:56The shores are the borders.
00:34:01Things go on in very lively fashion
00:34:05in San Francisco and New York City,
00:34:09but they aren't the United States.
00:34:12Now, at age 45, Benton went home to Missouri
00:34:16to become head of the painting department
00:34:19at the Kansas City Art Institute.
00:34:22It's the story of the hero's return.
00:34:25It's the story of the teenage boy
00:34:28who left his hometown to pursue other directions in life,
00:34:33to reject the political world of his father,
00:34:38and then eventually came back home again,
00:34:41but came back home in his own terms.
00:34:44Tom, just what is it that took you back to Kansas City
00:34:48after spending so much time here in New York?
00:34:51Well, Ed, the first thing was that the state of Missouri
00:34:55raised enough money for me to pay to Merrill in the state capitol,
00:34:59and I thought that'd take me a couple of years,
00:35:02so we just moved out here to do it.
00:35:05There are other reasons, however.
00:35:07I was a little bit fed up with the constant quarreling
00:35:10and bickering in the aesthetic atmosphere of New York
00:35:13in which, as an artist, I was forced to live.
00:35:16So partly the return was a flight from the various idioces of that.
00:35:25guitar & harmonica play in bright rhythm
00:35:56I was commissioned to make a history of Missouri
00:36:00but a particular kind, a social history,
00:36:05a history of the life of the people of Missouri,
00:36:09those who actually made Missouri.
00:36:12guitar & harmonica play in bright rhythm
00:36:26Most murals are painted with one subject,
00:36:30and this mural is different in the fact
00:36:33that it deals with a multiplicity of subjects,
00:36:36and it was a considerable technical problem
00:36:39to get them all in here.
00:36:42guitar & harmonica play in bright rhythm
00:36:55guitar & harmonica play in bright rhythm
00:37:09All Missouri gets excited about the Statehouse murals.
00:37:13Already the paintings by Thomas Hart Benton
00:37:16have drawn 30,000 spectators.
00:37:18He planned his life,
00:37:20and as a politician he knew how to go about it.
00:37:24He told me the way he got his mural.
00:37:27He was with some of the politicians,
00:37:29and they were at a party, and they were drunk,
00:37:31and he just slipped it to them.
00:37:33What you need is a mural by Benton.
00:37:35So they said, yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:37:38The next day he showed up and said, where's the contract?
00:37:41And he said, what contract? They had forgotten.
00:37:44But he put it over, and he got the contract.
00:37:47He made the mural. He made the commission.
00:37:50They didn't come looking for him.
00:37:52And that's the way he's done his life.
00:37:54He has made the move.
00:38:01It was his masterpiece.
00:38:03He covered the Jefferson City walls
00:38:06with familiar scenes and people.
00:38:08His brother pleads a case before a jury.
00:38:11His father harangues a crowd
00:38:13that includes his old law partner.
00:38:16Everything in that mural relates to his boyhood.
00:38:21And he said, at the time he did it,
00:38:24it's like living my boyhood over again.
00:38:32The Jefferson City mural is an extremely personal statement
00:38:36because he's representing a social history of Missouri
00:38:40and, by implication, a social history of America.
00:38:43But he gives his own family a very central place in it.
00:38:47And, interestingly, not the most famous member of his family,
00:38:52not his namesake, Senator Thomas Hart Benton,
00:38:55but it's his father and his brother
00:38:58who dominate the central section of that mural,
00:39:01the huge 40-foot wall.
00:39:03Benton's version of Missouri's more distant past
00:39:06was filled with hard truths
00:39:09and the enduring myths of the state.
00:39:12Huck Finn.
00:39:14Jesse James.
00:39:16And the legend of Frankie and Johnny.
00:39:19And this picture became quite controversial,
00:39:23but it's generally credited
00:39:26that Frankie got her revenge on Johnny
00:39:30in some of the less respectable areas of the town of St. Louis.
00:39:34Benton put everything in,
00:39:36even the print of Custer's last stand,
00:39:39which inspired him as a boy,
00:39:41can be found on the wall in Frankie and Johnny.
00:39:52Politicians and clergymen objected to his portrayal of a lynching,
00:39:56the presence of lowlifes, a bare-bottomed baby,
00:40:00and the notorious boss of Kansas City, Tom Pendergast.
00:40:04He tells a truthful story there,
00:40:07and he's not afraid to tell the underside,
00:40:10the dark side of the history of the state.
00:40:13And when he does things to suggest
00:40:16that there was poverty during the Depression,
00:40:18that there was slavery, that the Mormons were persecuted,
00:40:21that the Indians were cheated,
00:40:23that there was hypocrisy going on
00:40:26in terms of politics and religion and law and all of these things,
00:40:30he's telling it like it is.
00:40:32And he does it beautifully.
00:40:41People say we're a bunch of little Bentons.
00:40:44Well, we were.
00:40:47Tom said to us,
00:40:50I'm going to teach you guys the tools of this trade,
00:40:55and then you go out and go your own way.
00:40:58But while you're here, I'm going to teach you what I know.
00:41:02Tom's phrase was, grand is grand.
00:41:06I'm going to teach you what I know.
00:41:08Tom's phrase was, grand design.
00:41:11You've got to get the grand design first.
00:41:14Don't get into detail and this, that, and the other
00:41:17until you've got a grand design.
00:41:19When you've got the grand design, now you can make a painting.
00:41:22Just as the students wanted to be associated with the great painter,
00:41:27Benton wanted to be one of the students, or one of the workmen.
00:41:31He wanted to be a man applying his trade.
00:41:37Students had always sought him out.
00:41:40One of the first was a young man named Jackson Pollock,
00:41:44who became almost a son to the Bentons.
00:41:47I made friends out of my students.
00:41:50In fact, they were my only associates I had.
00:41:53And Jack was one of them.
00:41:55And he'd come to Martha's Vineyard and help me with the chores there
00:41:58and we had a little house we used to put him in.
00:42:01He and other students, but we called it Jack's house.
00:42:05Pollock often posed for his teacher
00:42:08and for a time, emulated his style.
00:42:13There was a guy who came into the class one time
00:42:16in the beginning of a semester.
00:42:18And he sat down, and here's a model and the whole thing,
00:42:21and this guy gets some purple and he puts a big glob of yellow
00:42:25and Tom said, that's it.
00:42:27He said, no bug house art, no bug house painting in my class.
00:42:31He says, you're out.
00:42:33The guy lasted about as long as it took him
00:42:35to put about four or five blobs of color.
00:42:39He just, he was real.
00:42:42Tom Benton was real.
00:42:44There wasn't anything phony about him.
00:42:47Then he came here to his home and he prospered
00:42:52and in my opinion, he decayed.
00:42:55But he became very popular.
00:42:57His work became slicker, smoother, more detailed,
00:43:02and he became more lonely.
00:43:05Of course, he felt a new life was going to be born in Kansas City.
00:43:10He thought this was going to be the Athens of the country.
00:43:13He was tired of the domination of the Paris school in New York.
00:43:19He felt that he would find an immediate home in Kansas City.
00:43:25He was trying to be, as it were, Tintoretto in Kansas.
00:43:30He was using 16th, 17th century strategies
00:43:35for a 20th century country
00:43:38and using, as it were, the dynamisms of high art
00:43:43in order to present a common message to common people.
00:43:46The distance was, I think, too great.
00:43:49I think somewhere early in his life he says I'm a Missourian
00:43:53and he went back and he went through the Ozark and he sketched.
00:43:57He wanted to get the feeling of this.
00:43:59He worked very hard at it
00:44:01and he came up with something that's as stimulating.
00:44:05If you look at the early work, it is stimulating in approach.
00:44:10He paints rapidly, he paints with a lot of decision.
00:44:15He then gets it, and the unfortunate thing, like it happens so often,
00:44:20maybe success is a deadly thing.
00:44:23Then what to do with the success?
00:44:25He didn't know what to paint after that.
00:44:27He painted success.
00:44:31Many of his trips through the southeast and southwest and through Appalachia
00:44:36took on the aura of a political tour, as he wrote about it,
00:44:41he saw his father visiting his constituents around America,
00:44:44stepping into their lives, talking to them,
00:44:46but Benton was not one of them.
00:44:48He was a very sophisticated guy.
00:44:50He spoke French, read widely,
00:44:53at the same time tried to be a hayseed,
00:44:55tried to be one of the people, but was really not one of the people.
00:45:01You see, Tom Benton, he liked to sort of be a hale fellow,
00:45:06well met and one of the gang, but he wasn't.
00:45:10Tom Benton was an aristocrat.
00:45:16There is about the Missouri landscape something intimate and known to me.
00:45:21While I drive around the curve of a country road,
00:45:24I seem to know what is going to be there,
00:45:27what the creek beds and the sycamores and walnuts lining them will look like,
00:45:32and what the color of the bluffs will be.
00:45:35Feeling so, I don't believe I shall ever eat the words
00:45:39of the essay I wrote when I left New York.
00:45:42It will take considerable pressure, anyhow,
00:45:45to make me eat them all and go back.
00:45:49In 1938, Benton published an autobiography.
00:45:52It spared neither enemies, nor friends, nor himself.
00:45:57A reviewer pronounced it, all Missouri, no compromise.
00:46:01Artists in America is one of the best books of its decade.
00:46:05It was appalling to me and made me rather angry at myself
00:46:10to see that this man, who was primarily a painter,
00:46:13could handle language that well.
00:46:15I think his autobiography is a really splendidly written memoir,
00:46:21and what I particularly admire about it are these very short, tough sentences.
00:46:28I mean, every sentence is really like a kind of bullseye.
00:46:32I think that Benton really, you know, missed his vocation.
00:46:36He really should have been a writer rather than a painter.
00:46:41Benton's frank autobiography outraged community leaders in Kansas City
00:46:46who demanded he be fired from the Art Institute.
00:46:49The controversy grew hotter after Benton painted two nudes.
00:46:53Both pictures were realistic, detailed,
00:46:55and developed in three-dimensional composition,
00:46:58which so projected the ladies, he said,
00:47:00that their nudity was in quite positive evidence.
00:47:04When Susanna and the Elders was first shown in St. Louis,
00:47:07clergymen were outraged that a nude with red fingernails
00:47:11should represent a figure from the Old Testament.
00:47:14Velvet ropes had to be put up to keep male visitors
00:47:18from getting too close.
00:47:21Persephone caused an even bigger stir.
00:47:25Well, that's pure kitsch. Persephone is pure kitsch.
00:47:29I mean, it's like girly pictures that used to appear in Esquire
00:47:34of an earlier period.
00:47:36That certainly has to be one of his very worst paintings.
00:47:40Persephone.
00:47:42Persephone certainly was a womanizer.
00:47:46Persephone.
00:47:48Persephone's just a glorious and wonderful painting.
00:47:52She's one of the great works of American pornography.
00:47:56She invites you to have all sorts of emotions in front of her
00:48:00that you're not supposed to have in front of works of art
00:48:03and then denies you the ability to fulfill them.
00:48:06It's just a kind of great experience
00:48:09to walk into some stuffy old art gallery
00:48:12and all of a sudden come into contact with that lady.
00:48:15Besides which, there's this wonderful old wench
00:48:18peering around the corner at her.
00:48:21Persephone's a pretty luscious painting.
00:48:25And also I think it's an emotionally complicated painting
00:48:29in a way that's quite fascinating
00:48:32because it's really about all those complexities
00:48:35of a man lusting after a woman
00:48:38and both the way that that's a way of conquering women
00:48:43but also it suggests some of the ways in which men feel very vulnerable.
00:48:52His favourite painting was Persephone because he got so much mileage
00:48:56out of wanting it hung in a saloon or a brothel
00:48:59rather than a museum.
00:49:02The showman Billy Rose made it possible
00:49:05and Persephone hung for a time in his Manhattan nightclub,
00:49:09the Diamond Horseshoe.
00:49:16Benton told reporters that the average museum is a graveyard
00:49:20run by a pretty boy with a curving wrist.
00:49:26That did it.
00:49:28The Kansas City Art Institute fired him.
00:49:31Why did Tom Benton get fired?
00:49:34Rita said that you give Tom Benton a couple of highballs
00:49:38and a couple of reporters and he would take off.
00:49:42He felt that they had a bunch of fakes there.
00:49:45He was very harsh on what he called the limp wrist crowd
00:49:50and actually made it rather tough for them.
00:49:54Now some of them were a bit lacking in talent
00:49:58but others were very important and excellent curators it turned out.
00:50:04It wasn't the best aspect of Tom that he would take out after that.
00:50:25December 7th, 1941.
00:50:30A date which will live in infamy.
00:50:36America, Tom Benton's America, was under attack.
00:50:40Art is unimportant alongside life, he told a reporter.
00:50:45Even the Statue of Liberty should be melted down to make bullets.
00:50:51Within weeks he had painted The Year of Peril,
00:50:54a series of ten huge war paintings.
00:50:57They were intended, he said, to awaken Americans to the danger they faced,
00:51:01to pull them out of their shells of pretense and make-believe.
00:51:10A great American artist, Thomas Hart Benton, portrays World War II.
00:51:15He explains his war paintings with...
00:51:17I made these paintings because of a conviction
00:51:19obtained by traveling around the country to lecture
00:51:22during the weeks following Pearl Harbor.
00:51:24I saw that too many people were over-confident, over-optimistic
00:51:27and under the impression that their lives could go on much as usual
00:51:31while George won the war.
00:51:33New York Gallery's bursty Benton series called The Year of Peril.
00:51:37This is exterminated, a plea that America outmatched
00:51:40the destructive will of the Axis.
00:51:44This is called again.
00:51:46Benton says it portrays the recurrence of evil peoples mad with power.
00:51:55The sewers, and Benton asks, are we to stand by and let them reap?
00:52:02The Year of Peril is a kind of almost psychotic outburst in Benton's work.
00:52:09He somehow just totally went off the deep end in those paintings.
00:52:14He clearly was upset about Pearl Harbor
00:52:18and that just sort of unloosed all kinds of garbage that was inside his mind
00:52:22that just came out all over the canvas.
00:52:26Critics called the war series cartoons,
00:52:29but 75,000 people came out to see them when they were exhibited in New York
00:52:33and 26 million copies were printed up as posters.
00:52:38But of course there's no shortage of people
00:52:42who are capable of being moved by bad art.
00:52:46I mean, the world is full of bad art and people love it.
00:52:52I don't think popularity can be cited as a standard of achievement in art.
00:53:03The reason why his work declined, which he admitted,
00:53:06was that World War II knocked the bottom out of anybody
00:53:11who was concerned just with American art.
00:53:14The 1940s was a period of global warfare
00:53:17and to be concerned with how one felt in a certain city
00:53:21or place in America, he thought was irrelevant and he knew this.
00:53:29A new, distinctively American kind of painting came out of the war.
00:53:35The New York School of Abstract Expressionism.
00:53:41It represented everything Benton despised.
00:53:46Who are the ones who patronize and support modern art?
00:53:50It is supported by the sons and the daughters,
00:53:54mostly the daughters of 19th century millionaires
00:53:57who have a lot of surplus capital
00:53:59and who can't afford to put it out amusing themselves with obscure issues.
00:54:04Why do they support it?
00:54:06For the simple reason they can afford to hide their absolutely conservative opinions
00:54:11by being very radical about something that don't count.
00:54:15I think Benton had a lot of quarrels with modern art,
00:54:19but I suppose the basic one was that he thought it appealed to a privileged elite
00:54:25and he wanted to make art that had a larger and more universal statement to it
00:54:31and that dealt with more powerful realities of daily life
00:54:36that wasn't quite so precious and esoteric.
00:54:39I'm sure that the movement had passed him by.
00:54:42Certainly the regional painters, the Midwestern school, had vanished by then.
00:54:50And, you know, the New York school was suddenly doing what Tom Benton wanted to do himself.
00:54:56They were chasing Paris out of this country, you know, becoming the world center.
00:55:02Benton was 56 at the war's end and increasingly isolated.
00:55:06Grant Wood had died in 1942.
00:55:09John Stuart Curry followed in 1946.
00:55:13Regionalism was dead, too, and realism out of fashion.
00:55:19The so-called European abstractionists took over and he was lost.
00:55:24He had nobody to fight with.
00:55:26The U.S. art market no longer was interested in the American scene.
00:55:31They were interested in the Chicago scene.
00:55:35They were interested in this new thing which they called abstract expressionism,
00:55:39minimalism, action painting.
00:55:44Critics now dismissed Benton's painting as sentimental, old-fashioned, oaky, baroque.
00:55:50He no longer had a gallery.
00:55:52The Whitney Museum asked him to find a new home for the murals he had painted for them in the 30s.
00:55:57They didn't have room for his work.
00:56:04¶¶ ¶¶
00:56:21There is a colossal irony in the fact that Benton's most famous student, Jackson Pollock,
00:56:28went on to produce the kind of avant-garde abstract art
00:56:33that Benton himself most articulately abominated.
00:56:38One could almost believe that there was a kind of poetic justice there,
00:56:43that everything Benton rejected, Pollock exalted.
00:56:48The most publicized abstract expressionist was Benton's old student, Jackson Pollock,
00:56:54who claimed he learned nothing from his old teacher.
00:56:57Benton, he said, had come face to face with Michelangelo and lost.
00:57:03Jack never did anything that was ugly, Benton loyally told visitors,
00:57:08but he was privately hurt by his student's great success.
00:57:13He once said that the only thing he taught Jackson Pollock was how to drink a fifth a day.
00:57:22But in my opinion, there wouldn't have been a Jackson Pollock if there hadn't been a Tom Benton.
00:57:30There wouldn't have been a painting like Autumn Rhythm, I believe is the title,
00:57:35if there hadn't been Tom Benton and through him Michelangelo and Rubens and others.
00:57:43Pollock rebelled against all the discipline of representation,
00:57:50but he never forgot the melody.
00:57:54He used to call Tom in the middle of the night, always was, asking,
00:57:59well, really begging for Tom's approval.
00:58:03He felt attached to him always, I think.
00:58:08And Tom never gave it.
00:58:10He said, Jack, it's all right, whatever you want to do,
00:58:14successful, you're successful, don't bother yourself about it, it's all right.
00:58:21One evening, long after business hours,
00:58:24two men alone on the main floor of a great Midwestern store
00:58:28discussed the making of a mural to adorn the space above the elevator entrances.
00:58:35These men are the president of the store and Thomas Hart Benton,
00:58:39one of America's leading painters.
00:58:41Having decided on a subject, they agree on an immediate start of the work.
00:58:46Benton took work wherever he could find it.
00:58:49He illustrated books by Mark Twain and John Steinbeck,
00:58:52tried advertising art, worked with Walt Disney
00:58:55on the sets for an operetta about Davy Crockett
00:58:58and quit when Disney insisted on a happy ending.
00:59:01He painted small murals for a Kansas City department store
00:59:05and the fashionable and exclusive Kansas City River Club.
00:59:10Each mural, he assured friends, would be his last.
00:59:16And now framed and mounted on the store's wall,
00:59:19the mural fulfills its function.
00:59:25A lasting contribution to the art of America and of the world.
00:59:31He somehow lost touch with the changes that America had gone through.
00:59:39It was a different kind of society,
00:59:42and I think that Benton went on painting some wonderful paintings
00:59:46throughout his career, but there isn't quite that same magical connection
00:59:50with his own concerns and with the identity of America.
00:59:55When he moved to the left, apparently in the 20s,
00:59:59it was as against the bourgeoisie.
01:00:03Then in the left, he found it stifling and inhospitable,
01:00:08so he fights them, too, and he is fighting constant battles
01:00:12between right and left, finding, charting his own path.
01:00:16He's a man of his word.
01:00:19He is fighting constant battles between right and left,
01:00:23finding, charting his own course for this middle American Athens
01:00:28that he dreamed of.
01:00:30It must have been damn disappointing not to have had that happen.
01:00:36I think what hurt my father the most,
01:00:40and he used to talk to me about it, was loneliness.
01:00:46He said it was his great motivator.
01:00:50The sands have been washed from the footprints
01:00:55Of the stranger on Galilee's shore
01:01:01And the voice that subdued the rough billows
01:01:07Will be heard in Judea no more
01:01:12But the path of that lone Galilean
01:01:18With joy I will follow today
01:01:23The toils of the road will seem nothing
01:01:28When I get to the end of the way
01:01:33The toils of the road will seem nothing
01:01:38When I get to the end of the way
01:01:48Benton spent nearly every summer for half a century
01:01:51in the town of Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard.
01:01:54His family had grown to include a daughter, Jessie.
01:01:58He had a wonderful kind of gruffly voice.
01:02:02He was very handsome.
01:02:07He had a very rich face and wonderful hair, black as could be.
01:02:13He was 50 years old when I was born,
01:02:15and I always thought he was in his 20s.
01:02:18Other people's fathers were always so old
01:02:21and kind of dried up,
01:02:24and he was so young and vibrant.
01:02:32He liked to talk big, and he had millions of friends,
01:02:38but every day at home it was like silence.
01:02:44We had to be quiet.
01:02:46My brother and I, most of the time the house was very still
01:02:49because he was very intense,
01:02:51and he thought about things and thought about his paintings.
01:02:57I used to love to go in that studio because of the smells of the paint,
01:03:01and my father used to always whistle when he painted.
01:03:04He'd go...
01:03:07always, constantly.
01:03:09It was rich being in there,
01:03:11and I used to sit on the floor and paint my pictures,
01:03:15which he would put up on the walls if they were good.
01:03:21When he was not painting,
01:03:23he made music with his family, friends, and students.
01:03:32You see, the Benton that he became here was a routine.
01:03:37He got up in the morning early, went to his studio.
01:03:40Nobody's to come into his studio by 5 o'clock.
01:03:44He then comes out, he meets his friends, he has his drinks,
01:03:47he eats and goes to bed, and he has this time and time again.
01:03:51Those hours in his studio, he is all alone.
01:04:01The subject matter that formed the content of most of my pictures
01:04:06just died out after the Second World War.
01:04:10Small towns everywhere are getting to be practically the same.
01:04:14This is what sent me chasing here, beginning in the 50s,
01:04:18out into the landscape of the United States,
01:04:21to see if I could find anything in the country,
01:04:24not the towns or the life, but in the country,
01:04:26something I could identify myself with.
01:04:28I found enough.
01:04:30He told Rexine one time, he said, that's my wife,
01:04:33he said, do you know what I like to do?
01:04:36I like to float the buffalo
01:04:38and camp on a sandbar and get drunk.
01:04:44He began traveling again,
01:04:46sketching the Great Plains and the Rockies,
01:04:49floating down the Buffalo River,
01:04:51turning more and more into landscape.
01:04:54In nature, he found new challenges and a new serenity.
01:05:03I love his mountain pictures.
01:05:05He took aside many, many years to paint the mountains.
01:05:08He said it was the damnedest, hardest thing he ever did,
01:05:12that mountains are impossible to paint.
01:05:14And it took him years to finally paint a picture
01:05:17that he was satisfied with.
01:05:19You know, that's why I think he paid no attention
01:05:21to all these critics and stuff,
01:05:23because he would get these things that he had to do,
01:05:26and while they were still quibbling over Persephone,
01:05:29he was off in Wyoming trying to paint the Tetons
01:05:32for 3, 4, 5 years.
01:05:34As he goes older and he gets into detail,
01:05:38he's projecting himself into the canvas.
01:05:41He's not projecting himself into life.
01:05:43He gets life, and he puts it down in his early years.
01:05:46In his late years, he's painting into his picture.
01:05:49He's losing himself in his painting.
01:05:51You know why? He's a lonely man.
01:05:53The only friend he's got is his painting,
01:05:56and he puts a lot of his stuff into it.
01:05:59No one else is allowed in his painting, in a sense.
01:06:03The modern world wants to look into the painting
01:06:06and see what they want.
01:06:07You look into a Benning painting,
01:06:09in the end you see a very quiet, poetic man.
01:06:13You're either with him or you're not with him.
01:06:22But the dedication to his craft is something honorable.
01:06:26To me, it's inspiring.
01:06:28He worked at his business.
01:06:30He worked at his craft.
01:06:31By craft, I mean the business of putting down paint,
01:06:34designing the picture, completing the picture.
01:06:37It was a day-to-day job, which people don't understand.
01:06:40I think it's some emotional thing that comes out of the sky.
01:06:44To his wife, he's making pictures to sell.
01:06:47To him, he's making another painting
01:06:49which he feels is more perfect than the one before it.
01:06:56The only way an artist can personally fail, Benton said,
01:07:00is to quit work.
01:07:02Thomas Hart Benton never quit.
01:07:05Neither did Rita.
01:07:06They fed each other.
01:07:08She kept him going and he kept her going.
01:07:11Tom, straighten up your shoulders, you know.
01:07:13You look like an old man.
01:07:15He'd straighten up.
01:07:16But she was the one, you know, she'd go out to the studio,
01:07:19we'd go out there on a Sunday
01:07:21to see what his latest project or painting,
01:07:24and she would just look at,
01:07:26Tom, you're magnificent.
01:07:29She'd just keep pushing and pushing him, you know,
01:07:32and feeding his ego.
01:07:34But she would also say, if you want him to do something,
01:07:38don't tell him you want him to do it.
01:07:41Because she said, he's stubborn just like a bull
01:07:43and if he thinks you want him to do it, he won't do it.
01:07:46He wants to get the idea to do it.
01:07:48So she would manipulate around and...
01:07:51I'm going to introduce you to...
01:07:55Mrs. Benton, Rita, and Jessie, our daughter.
01:07:59Good evening, Mrs. Benton.
01:08:01Good evening, Mr. Meyer.
01:08:02Good evening, Jessie.
01:08:03Good evening.
01:08:04Mrs. Benton, are you often called on to assist Tom in his work?
01:08:08No, I never assist him in his work.
01:08:12You just handle the business end of affairs, is that right?
01:08:15Right.
01:08:16Occasionally I make frames.
01:08:18She never faltered from her one purpose,
01:08:22which was he was a great artist, no matter what,
01:08:25and she saved all the money and saved all the paintings.
01:08:30Sometimes, you know, my father would paint a painting
01:08:32and then he wouldn't like it, so he'd paint another painting over it.
01:08:35But she'd run out there in the studio and steal them
01:08:38before he could do that so that she could have them to sell them.
01:08:41I don't think he would have lived without her.
01:08:43The incomes, of course, would vary, you know, year to year.
01:08:47Sometimes we were very poor.
01:08:50Sometimes we had lots of money if we sold a painting.
01:08:53But the life in the house never changed, and that was my mother's genius.
01:08:58She kept it all smooth.
01:09:01He didn't like to do the business part of things.
01:09:04He had Rita take care of that.
01:09:06If you came to his house and you wanted to buy a painting,
01:09:08he'd say, I don't do that.
01:09:10You want a painting, you talk to Rita.
01:09:12She might sell you one.
01:09:14She always watched over Tom and took care of him
01:09:18and protected him.
01:09:20On this particular occasion, a man came to the island
01:09:23and came to their house and said,
01:09:26Oh, Mrs. Benton, I want so much to become a part of the art colony
01:09:33on Martha's Vineyard.
01:09:35Could you tell me about it?
01:09:37Rita looked at him rather coldly and said,
01:09:42There is no artist on this island but Thomas Hart Benton,
01:09:49which took care of that very completely.
01:09:53Tell me, what Thomas Hart Benton creation is in the works now?
01:09:58Well, there's plenty in the works.
01:10:01If you want to see it, you'll follow me.
01:10:03Good.
01:10:05Jesse and Rita will see you later.
01:10:07Okay.
01:10:08We're out to the studio.
01:10:10How much time do you spend in your studio?
01:10:12Well, I spend all the daylight hours there, Ed.
01:10:17Every day, seven days a week.
01:10:20I have to to get the stuff done.
01:10:22Do you ever have any young apprentice artists
01:10:24to help you out these days?
01:10:26I have no young apprentice artists.
01:10:28The young artists these days have been taught in the schools
01:10:30that their own individual souls are so important
01:10:33that they might damage them if they come and help
01:10:35an old fellow like me.
01:10:37Old-fashioned painter.
01:10:40That's the great trouble with modern teaching.
01:10:42Everybody has too much of a soul.
01:10:45Well, this studio really looks worked in.
01:10:48It is worked in.
01:10:50There are two projects, big projects,
01:10:53going on here at once.
01:10:55Here is one, the cartoon, rather,
01:10:58for the New York State Power Authority.
01:11:01This picture finished will be seven feet high
01:11:04and 20 feet long.
01:11:06Over here you see one also in process
01:11:09for the Truman Memorial Library.
01:11:11This is 20 feet high and 32 feet long when it's finished.
01:11:15So these are things that cost you a little work.
01:11:18In 1959, Harry S. Truman asked Benton to paint a mural
01:11:22for his presidential library at Independence, Missouri.
01:11:26Truman called Benton the best damn painter in America.
01:11:32I never knew him, but he was like an old-time
01:11:34Missouri politician.
01:11:36And my father was an old-time Missouri politician too.
01:11:41You know, he was so interested in politics
01:11:44that I think I knew more about politics
01:11:48by the time I was a teenager than I knew about art.
01:11:52Truman thought highly of Benton, very highly.
01:11:56He also described abstract painting as scrambled eggs.
01:12:00I admired Harry Truman very much as president,
01:12:04but he would be one of the last people in the world
01:12:07whose aesthetic judgments I'd take seriously.
01:12:12He interested Tom tremendously
01:12:15because he was a great reader of history
01:12:18and he knew his United States history
01:12:20backwards and forwards and sideways,
01:12:23and they both liked the same kind of whiskey
01:12:26and they liked each other very much.
01:12:29You don't generally see a mural all at once,
01:12:32or you may see it all at once,
01:12:34but you're likely to exploit it
01:12:36by looking at one part and following it along.
01:12:39So you have to design a mural knowing that the eye
01:12:42is going to be moving all the time over these spaces
01:12:45and you have to arrange it so that the eye
01:12:48will follow certain lines and so that you will have
01:12:51a sense of unity when you get through with it.
01:12:54The Truman mural made Benton big news again
01:12:58and he loved it.
01:13:00He toured Europe, attended new shows of his old work,
01:13:03won election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters,
01:13:06and walked out of the banquet
01:13:08because its president made a speech he didn't like.
01:13:11Asked to lecture on the American artist,
01:13:14he strode on stage,
01:13:16announced that the only American artist that interests me
01:13:19is Thomas Hart Benton, and sat down.
01:13:23But he did make his peace with the museum which had fired him.
01:13:27And I said, Tom, in any divorce, you know they're two-sided.
01:13:30Well, he said, I buy that.
01:13:32And I said, they'd like to make up, and maybe you would too,
01:13:36and I'd like to get you together.
01:13:38He turned to me and he said,
01:13:40well, OK, just bring the sons of bitches over.
01:13:43He could now even afford qualified sympathy
01:13:46for the abstractionists who had so recently eclipsed him.
01:13:50The human figure is coming back into fashion, he told a reporter.
01:13:54And what are all those sons of bitches going to do now?
01:13:57They never learned how to draw.
01:14:00Particularly during the years of Pollock's great triumphs,
01:14:04Benton was very much on the ash heap.
01:14:08But I think he's been coming up, coming up since.
01:14:12I think he's an interesting painting.
01:14:14Representation is becoming respectable again.
01:14:17At age 82, he painted Turn of the Century Joplin
01:14:20and was honored by a Tom Benton Day
01:14:23in the town where he had earned his first money as an artist.
01:14:28Old age is a wonderful thing, he told the crowd.
01:14:31You outlive your enemies.
01:14:48In 1974, Benton undertook one more mural
01:14:52for the Country Music Foundation of America.
01:15:00Well, I don't think the artist can at any time help
01:15:04but expressing his own inner self.
01:15:07I think the less attention he pays to that, the better off he is,
01:15:11because he can't help that anyhow.
01:15:13It would be my feeling about things
01:15:16that if he can get out of this retirement
01:15:19and out into the actual world of men, that he's better off.
01:15:43piano plays softly
01:16:02He always went to the studio after dinner in the evening.
01:16:07And on this particular evening,
01:16:11his wife thought that he had stayed an awfully long time.
01:16:15She went out, and he had said before he left the house,
01:16:19he said, I think it's finished, I'm going to sign it tonight.
01:16:23Well, when she went out, he was lying beside
01:16:26the right-hand lower corner with his spectacles on,
01:16:31but he had not signed it.
01:16:33He apparently died just as he was preparing to sign it.
01:16:41He died so beautifully, you know.
01:16:46He went out to see his mural, and he had just finished it that day.
01:16:52And he was going out to sign it.
01:16:55And he decided not to sign it,
01:16:59or he didn't get to sign it because,
01:17:03as the doctor said, he was struck by lightning.
01:17:08I was really upset.
01:17:10In fact, when they interrupted the thing and they said,
01:17:13We're sorry to announce, I said to my wife, Tom died.
01:17:17And he did.
01:17:21Nothing lost, nothing lost.
01:17:24Tom Benton finished a painting,
01:17:28came in the house, had his dinner,
01:17:31and went out, sat in his little chair,
01:17:34checked his painting, and fell over dead.
01:17:37It's as complete a life as you can have.
01:17:41Thomas Hart Benton died on January 19, 1975.
01:17:46He was 85 years old.
01:17:49I called Rita.
01:17:51I said, I thought that Tom was going to live forever,
01:17:58or he'd outlive us all.
01:18:01And I hear her come back with this furious line,
01:18:06He wasn't supposed to have died.
01:18:09He wasn't supposed to have died.
01:18:13Oh, my mother.
01:18:16It was terrible.
01:18:18She died three months later.
01:18:23She couldn't, she couldn't live without him.
01:18:30She couldn't live without him.
01:19:00We're here to celebrate the 98th birthday
01:19:03of the late Thomas Hart Benton,
01:19:06which we have done every year since his death.
01:19:12I'm so happy.
01:19:14I'm so happy.
01:19:16I'm so happy.
01:19:18I'm so happy.
01:19:20I'm so happy.
01:19:22I'm so happy.
01:19:24I'm so happy.
01:19:26I'm so happy.
01:19:28I'm so happy.
01:19:31The Benton bourbon birthday bash.
01:19:35It embarrasses me a little bit.
01:19:41All his friends and, I guess, admirers
01:19:44get together and have a party.
01:19:47And they all go to Kelly's bar,
01:19:50which I don't think my father ever went to.
01:19:53My father hated bars.
01:19:55He liked his paintings in bars.
01:20:25Hi, Hilton.
01:20:26Hello.
01:20:27What are you doing here?
01:20:29Well, we're here for the Benton bash.
01:20:56It's always difficult to sum up
01:21:00the work of any artist who has different faces.
01:21:05That he was a remarkable designer,
01:21:09a composer in form,
01:21:12that there was an element of reality in his work,
01:21:17of substance, of weight,
01:21:20a feeling that his art existed physically.
01:21:23And that, to me, is one of the greatest
01:21:27attributes that a painting can have.
01:21:30Well, of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder,
01:21:34but he painted beauty.
01:21:36Now, it could be an old farmer.
01:21:39It could be hogs.
01:21:41It could be an old beat-up steamboat.
01:21:44But he saw the beauty of it.
01:21:47Oh, the need of these things.
01:21:50There isn't any beauty unless there are fulfilled needs.
01:21:54And there was a need for people that picked cotton.
01:21:58There was a need for people
01:22:01that went around doing minstrel shows.
01:22:04People needed that, and he was there,
01:22:07and he saw the beauty of it.
01:22:10And he painted it.
01:22:13I think that people had great respect for Tom.
01:22:17Maybe they didn't always like what he did,
01:22:21but somehow there was a feeling of respect
01:22:25for what he represented in painting.
01:22:29And that was lasting.
01:22:32That was good.
01:22:34A painter doesn't make up stories.
01:22:37We're the real people.
01:22:39A painter doesn't make up stories.
01:22:42He's a real painter.
01:22:44He goes out, he sees America.
01:22:46He doesn't talk America.
01:22:48He sees America.
01:22:50The critics talk America.
01:22:52The critics talk all the art since World War II.
01:22:55He sees it.
01:22:57Number one, to understand Benton,
01:22:59you have to see America too.
01:23:01Now, shortly after we came here,
01:23:03we went down to Arkansas,
01:23:05and by Jesus, I looked around,
01:23:07and there was Benton.
01:23:09He didn't do a damn thing.
01:23:11He painted what he saw.
01:23:37¦
01:23:47¦
01:23:57¦
01:24:07¦
01:24:17¦
01:24:27¦
01:24:37¦
01:24:47¦
01:24:54How should we remember Benton?
01:24:57I think we should remember Tom Benton
01:25:01as an artist who got away with murder.
01:25:06I like Tom Benton's feistiness.
01:25:08I like Tom Benton's engagement with life.
01:25:11I like Tom Benton's lust for living.
01:25:14I like his carrying on.
01:25:16I like his excesses.
01:25:18That's tremendously American.
01:25:20¦
01:25:30¦
01:25:40¦
01:25:50¦
01:26:00¦
01:26:10¦
01:26:20¦
01:26:30¦
01:26:34If you could live, inhabit one Benton painting,
01:26:39which painting would you, Lloyd Goodrich, inhabit?
01:26:43Persephone.
01:26:45After all, who could resist that girl?