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Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Benton (1889-1975) is a painter shrouded in paradox and misapprehension. Though pigeonholed as a regionalist chronicler of the Midwest, many of his finest on-site pictures are of Southern blacks and poor whites. Remembered best are his folksy rural scenes and aggressively three-dimensional murals, but the public tends to forget that he ran through the gamut of modernist styles (he was Jackson Pollock's teacher) and that his brilliant abstract color experiments ally him with the modernist movement. Some of Benton's crowded murals of the 1930s reflect his leftist sympathies, yet critics reviled him as politically conservative. These contradictions are illuminated in this catalogue of a touring exhibition curated by Adams. The text stands on its own as a wholly engaging biography, offering an unbuttoned look at a pugnacious, often reckless, artist who valiantly sought to preserve a rural America that was vanishing before his eyes. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A mostly successful revisionist view of the midwestern ""regionalist"" whom Harry S. Truman called ""the best damn painter in America."" Even as the ex-President spoke, however, Benton's reputation was sliding toward near-oblivion. Now, with the 100th anniversary of Benton's birth being celebrated with a massive retrospective exhibition and a PBS documentary, Adams--a curator at Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum--attempts a reevaluation of the painter/muralist's place in American art. Adams is laudably straightforward in depicting his subject, who--arrogant, misogynous, and often opportunistic--was not only controversial but downright contentious. Benton insulted Stuart Davis, for example, the first time they met; Davis never forgave him. In treating several areas of Benton's life, Adams displays particular perception. Regarding Benton's lifelong homophobia, for example, the author points out that this trait was largely responsible for some of the artist's most disastrous career decisions: Benton claimed to detect ""pansies"" in just about every museum, gallery, and editorial office he encountered. It was a cabal of these homosexuals, he said, who controlled the art scene in New York; Benton fled that city for the simpler, more ""hetero"" world of Kansas City Predictably, he was soon sniping at midwestern ""pretty boys"" and was fired from his position as instructor at the Art Institute there. Too, in tracing Benton's influence on his most famous student, Jackson Pollock, Adams establishes quite convincingly that Pollock's ""drip"" technique and swooping lines of energy found their source in Benton's The Mechanics of Form Organization, published in 1926-27. An engrossing portrait, refreshingly free of aesthetic jargon. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Noted muralist, regionalist painter, art theorist, instructor of Jackson Pollock, and controversial figure in the world of art and politics, Benton (1889-1975) has received relatively little attention from art historians. In overall format and tone, this chatty, gossipy biography is aimed at a popular audience. Yet it also contains academic discussions of both abstract and realist art, and nearly half the 340 illustrations are handsome color plates. The catalog for a traveling retrospective exhibition and a PBS documentary, this book is oddly satisfying; for public, and some art, libraries.-- Kathleen Eagen Johnson, Historic Hudson Valley, Tarrytown, N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
