Books in Brief: Thomas Hart Benton: A Portrait

Thomas Hart Benton: A Portrait, by Polly Burroughs (Doubleday, 202 pp., $29.95). During the Thirties and early Forties, when Tom Benton was a contributor to the magazine I then edited and I spent many weeks visiting him and his family on Martha’s Vineyard, I recall occasions during superheated bouts on art and politics when Rita Benton’s lusty voice would rise above all others with: “Tom, don’t be vulgar!” It didn’t occur to me that this warning could have applied to what was happening to Tom’s art -and, of course, it wasn’t intended to—but the reproductions of his paintings in Polly Burroughs’s book, which focuses on the fifty years the Bentons spent in Chilmark, make the point without stating it. Sometime in the early Twenties—the dating of the paintings and drawings from that period is vague-Benton abandoned the painterly lyricism of “Moonlight over South Beach” (cover) and of the Cezanne-inspired pictures in the Barnes Foundation and Hirshhorn Collections for over-muscled caricatures and the jingoistic regionalism that brought him instant fame and sales when such vulgarity was in vogue. Jackson Pollock, who sometimes shared a shack with me at the Bentons’ in those days and who shared my affection for Rita Benton, put it this way: “He came face to face with Michelangelo—and he lost. Art is coming face to face with yourself.” Later on Jack admitted that Tom had done a great deal for him both as friend and as artist, but he added: “He drove his kind of realism at me so hard 1 bounced into non-objective painting.” Great art is never made by bouncing. American painting had lost at its two extremes. Both men had abandoned what Pasternak calls “the eternal continuity of the happiness which is called art.”