Arrested by Art
[5/11/2015] Arrested by art. That’s what happened as I entered a room filled with images created over 80 years ago by muralist and painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975).
Thomas Art Benton Exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Best known for his evocative scenes of the Midwest, Benton spent time in New York City from 1912-1935. While he was there he created a masterwork, “America Today” —a mural cycle painted to fill a room at The New School for Social Research. These murals were recently rediscovered and the room recreated for an exhibition that recently concluded at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Benton’s room provides the viewer with art as an immersive experience. In every direction you look, the murals draw you in. Through a rich array of images you are summoned to explore and engage the art. In it’s original setting at the New School the mural cycle covered the walls of the boardroom, the center of governance for this progressive and reform-minded institution
Benton's powerful cycle of murals provides an astonishing and provocative engagement with American life and culture in the late 1920s. At the same time the cycle left me with a lingering question: How might a gifted muralist portray the America we experience now, located as we are midway through the second decade of the 21st century?
Annotations
[Readers note: For these annotations I have drawn extensively upon the analysis of the exhibition contained in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (MMA Bulletin) for Winter 2015, reprinted as Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today.]
1. Entering the room, you see directly in front of you a mural called Instruments of Power, a visual display of the vital energies that drove the times: the surging bursts of steam from the engine of a train, a monoplane with propeller spinning, hydroelectric power generated by a dam, and the cutaway of a combustion engine.
Viewing Instruments of Power
We live today with a different configuration of vital energies. The mural invites the 21st century viewer to ponder what might be the driving energies of our “digital age.” How might we name these generative forces? What hold do they have upon us? How have they influenced our language, awakened our desires and shaped our behaviors?
2. After seeing Instruments of Power a viewer is drawn to the two sidewalls, each of which have a series of three panels. If you look first to your right, the panels successively portray the Changing West, the Midwest and the Deep South.
This first trio is a reminder that the America of the 1920s was a nation of regions.
The West that we see is being transformed by the powers of the machine age as suggested by images of a land surveyor, airplanes flying overhead, oil derricks and work on the construction of a pipeline. Billowing clouds of carbon are an ominous sign of the cost of progress. Cowboys situated in the distance are present as a symbolic reminder that the old west is rapidly fading away and that a new west is coming into being.
The Midwest, which was home territory for Benton, is portrayed by both farming and logging, each activity caught in the midst of the transition from individual labor to mechanized harvesting and distribution.
Of the three regions, the South is shown to be largely locked into the past. At the front of the panel we see workers engaged in the hard manual labor of disc plowing and cotton-picking.
Our nation of regions has been dramatically altered with the passage of time. The movement from farm to city, changing patterns of immigration, urban growth and economic dislocation have led to the loss of some of the distinctive elements in our regional cultures. What challenges do the traditional regions pose for our national life today? How have other geographic patterns such as the division into "red” and “blue” states reconfigured the way we think about “regions”?
3. Turning to the left from Instruments of Power, there are three more panels which take us from Coal extraction, to Steel manufacturing and finally to City Building.
The mural featuring Coal includes the image of bent-over miners, demonstrating the steep human price of “progress.”
Steel is central to Benton’s mural project. As Stephanie L. Herdrich writes about this panel in the MMA Bulletin:
“Essential to modern progress—especially the construction of cities, transportation infrastructure, and consumer goods such as automobiles—steel was, in Benton’s words, ‘the very focus of my picture.’ Filled with contrasts of light and dark, this panel captures the awesome alchemy of steel production in which solids are turned into liquids before being returned to solid form.”
The panel on City Building shows a further process of transformation where workers dockside are fashioning the raw materials of industry into the skyscrapers that form the skyline of the City of New York which is shown in the background.
Each of these three panels surges with a very human--a very visible--energy, seen in the bulging muscles of the male workers engaged in challenging physical tasks.
Who are the iconic workers who symbolize our digital age? How might we image the cerebral tasks of these knowledge workers who so dominate our post-industrial economy?
4. At last we arrive at the city itself. City life is captured by two panels located on either side of the door through which we entered the room. Each panel is a tapestry of images.
One of these panels is entitled City Activities with Subway. Among the host of images in this panel there is a lone woman straphanger and a boxing match, then a popular male pastime .
Portion of City Activities with Subway panel
Religion in Thomas Benton’s city is clearly a marginal and ineffectual activity. In a part of this panel shimmy shake dancers are back to back with a street preacher holding an open Bible, looking to the heavens and imploring God in the face of the surrounding debauchery. His one visible follower is a woman in white on her knees, arms uplifted. She in turn is juxtaposed to a parading Salvation Army band.
The other panel, again composed of vivid images, is City Activities with Dance Hall. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser writes in the MMA Bulletin about one portion of the mural:
“The women, so-called taxi-dancers, perform the popular fox-trot with men who have purchased tickets for ‘ten cents a whirl.’”
Portion of City Activities with Dance Hall panel
Benton places himself in City Activities with Dance Hall, along with his wife and son. Benton can be seen with a paintbrush in hand. And his wife and son are near the center of the scene below. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser offers an interesting observation in the MMA Bulletin:
“The figural group, especially the boy’s upraised arm, evokes images of the Virgin and Child in Christian art.”
Portion of City Activities with Dance Hall panel
These two city panels left this viewer with an overall sense of the hollowness of city life as portrayed by Benton.
Is this all there is to the city life made possible by the high promise of those Instruments of Power we witnessed as we first entered the room? Shouldn’t there be more to living than the largely frivolous pursuits portrayed in these two murals Perhaps these questions were part of a challenge that Benton intended to offer to those progressive civic leaders of the New School who would meet in this boardroom.
5. Finally, just as you are ready to leave the exhibition, your eyes are drawn to a narrow panel just above the door through which you first entered the room. Outreaching Hands. Here we see the hands of capitalist greed uplifted alongside hands grasping for bread and sustenance. As Benton was finishing up his murals, America was changing and the nation was entering the depression.
Outreaching Hands panel
This final mural above the door can give a certain focus to the spiritual legacy of Benton’s masterwork. It can perhaps be seen as the equivalent of the scene of the last judgment often found at the entrance to the medieval cathedrals of Europe.
Concluding thoughts
In this digital age our "instruments of power" have immense potential. They can provide us with instant access on computer screens and smart phones to a vast universe of knowledge. We have been given powerful tools to serve the common good. But how will we use these tools?
Will they open our lives to a greater appreciation for the wonder and beauty of creation?
Will they help us to better serve the common good?
Will these newer instruments of power be used to empower those who struggle at the margins of our world?
Will we be worthy of the potential that these technologies place at our disposal?
There is much more that could be said about each of the murals and the mural cycle as a whole. Benton's panels are filled with an abundance of highly evocative images inviting deep reflection on American life and culture, both past and present. To mention but one theme of particular interest to this viewer was the portrayal of women and African Americans in the murals. [To pursue more of the riches of this exhibition you will want to consult the The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin for Winter 2015. It provides extensive background and detailed commentary to the mural cycle, along with vibrant reproductions of the murals themselves.]
I would contend that the spirituality of art often resides not in the specific content of the artwork itself, but in the ability of the artist to engage the human spirit. In my two visits to Benton's room, I found myself not only arrested by the art but my experience of these murals increasingly became an act of meditation. This meditation centered on the meaning of America in Benton’s day--a time when my father was a young boy--and my own experience of America now. I found that as I wrestled with the spiritual energies of a past time I was compelled to address the spiritual forces that drive and dominate our own. Viewing a work of art such as “America Today” can thus become a profound experience of spiritual illumination.
Thomas Hart Benton has given us narrative art of the highest order.
