By HENRY ALLEN
On rainy days when I was a kid, I'd lie on the living-room floor and page very slowly through a book called "Modern American Painting."
To a 9-year-old mind uncluttered by art appreciation courses, the paintings weren't good or bad, this school or that; they were uncontrollably spooky, sexy, alluring, mysterious and beautiful.
Peter Anger/The State Historical Society of MissouriThomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry at Benton's home in 1938.
Some I couldn't bear to look at, they made me feel so creepy. (Paul Cadmus's "Coney Island," 1934, with its malignant vulgarity.) Some I could hardly stop looking at, they were so beautiful. (Thomas Eakins's "Max Schmitt in a Single Scull," 1871, with its early-autumn perfection.)
And then there were the five paintings by Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), who is the subject now of an intense biography by Justin Wolff, 72 years after my rainy-day book came out.
"Thomas Hart Benton: A Life" tells the story of the painter's rise and fall as a hero of American art. The fall had already started when I began my studies on the living-room floor, but I didn't know that. Benton had been overtaken by changing times, by the new Abstract Expressionism of his former pupil Jackson Pollock and by public distaste for his own loud rancor toward museums, Modernism, Europe, curators, capitalism, Marxism, homosexuals, on and on.
I knew none of this. All I saw were Benton's paintings, with their quality of being both sinister and beautiful—all those snaky curves and cartoony exaggerations, the locomotives leaning forward like the little engine that could, cruel and plaintive hillbillies, plants growing out of the chthonic earth around the tangible and endangered flesh of "Persephone" (1939). Benton's pictures hit me at a place that language could not explain.
Mr. Wolff, a professor at the University of Maine, doesn't try to explain. He chooses instead to deploy his clear and easy prose in recounting political and aesthetic history.
Along the way, he describes the struggles between those who looked to Europe for aesthetic guidance (Alfred Stieglitz, Stuart Davis, Stanton MacDonald-Wright) and those who looked for it in the American heart (Benton, George Bellows, John Steuart Curry); those who evoked reality (regionalists, American-scene painters, social realists) and those who questioned it (cubists, surrealists, expressionists).
Benton would lose this struggle to the younger artists and critics, but before then he was a national hero, the old master of the Big New Thing, which was the nationalist impulse that also inspired Carl Sandburg's big-shoulders poetry, Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" and Thornton Wilder's "Our Town."
It's hard to believe, but my old book from 1940 began: "America today is developing a School of Painting which promises to be the most important movement in the world of art since the days of the Italian Renaissance." Time magazine had put Benton's self-portrait on its cover in 1934. He'd published his autobiography in 1937. His work was both praised and reviled with passions that no art arouses now, except a Super Bowl halftime show.
Despite his vigorous reading and colorful writing, Benton was no finely sliced aesthete. Instead, he was an angry, hard-drinking, harmonica-playing, well-read little backwoods aristocrat from a small town in southwestern Missouri, a man given to the sad pugnaciousness called a little-man complex. He was called "virile" back when that was a compliment.
Benton was contradictory. He celebrated the American spirit while being a Marxist. He was an American nationalist accused of defaming America by showing its ugliness along with its beauty. He was a good enough politician to get hired to paint historical murals in public buildings. He was fired from his job at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1941 after saying that the typical museum was "run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait."
With the end of both the Depression and World War II, Benton's we-the-people factuality lost its eminence. Only a few practitioners would hold on to their prestige—Edward Hopper with his beautiful alienation, Grant Wood on the strength of one painting among many fine ones, "American Gothic." The paintings that stood for America in the Cold War world were Abstract Expressionist—Pollock's drips and de Kooning's slashes, the intellectualized art of Rothko and Kline. Benton should have been forgotten as a failed prophet, proof that there's nothing more old-fashioned than yesterday's tomorrow.
Yet he has kept his untidy niche in the rainy-day American mind.
Long after his death at 85 in 1975, critics still go after him, but they don't seem to attack him as much as they defend themselves against him: Robert Hughes once called Benton "flat-out, lapel-grabbing vulgar, incapable of touching a pictorial sensation without pumping and tarting it up to the point where the eye wants to cry uncle." But Mr. Wolff is part of a revisionist movement that concedes dignity to his work.
The biographer begins his book with a description of Benton and his Italian wife, Rita, on Martha's Vineyard in the early 1920s, living without plumbing or electricity amid farmers, fishermen and Indians, soaking up the authenticity that before Benton died had become a brand sold to rich summer people. It was here that he found his groove, after World War I service in the Navy, which, he said, "tore me away from . . . my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns."
What he meant by "drivelings" was years of failure with various isms and abstractions in Paris and New York. He now began painting the serpentine ecstasies of a real world writhing with the vigor of pagan animism, an animism that would also be employed in the winking trees and frowning skies of Walt Disney—another artist from the Show-Me state.
Born in Neosho, Mo., Benton was the son of a red-bearded, thick-necked egotist—a lawyer, Confederate veteran and Democratic congressman who made the mistake of marrying a resentful snob from Texas. Tom was named for his violent great-uncle, Sen. Thomas Hart Benton (he once shot Andrew Jackson and he killed a man in a duel). His mother hated his father, and his father hated Tom's incessant drawing. When he was 7, his father began serving four terms as a congressman in Washington, where his mother ascended the social ladder.
Tom was a bad student. He escaped to Joplin, Mo., at 16 to draw for a newspaper before his father sent him to military school, which he fled after football season. He studied art in Chicago, then went to Paris, "fantasizing about Whistler, about genius and about buying a black walking stick," according to Mr. Wolff. He had the air of a genius and the walking stick but not much work to show for them. He returned to New York. He taught, he worked as a longshoreman, painted ceramics and argued politics.
Mr. Wolff chooses to describe Benton's great years, the 1920s and 1930s, by summing up the aesthetic and political battles that surrounded him. There were many sides in these battles, but none of the participants questioned the idea that they were building the ultimate future, the teleological trope of thinkers from Marx to Mussolini to the postwar critic Clement Greenberg. They were all part of a land rush on the American psyche.
By the late 1940s, Benton had lost the claim he'd staked. The new media hero was Pollock, who had been Benton's student and sometime ward since 1930. Benton praised Pollock's abstractions, and the two often exchanged wisecracks. In 1949, 15 years after Benton was on the cover of Time, Pollock was on the cover of Life. Pollock, with his mental problems and alcoholism, would be telephoning Benton until he died at 44 in a car crash.
Benton would keep travelling the western United States, studying the common folk and the landscape. But even as a realist, he was overtaken by the morbid Andrew Wyeth. He kept on selling paintings, encouraged the musical career of his son, T.P., and raised his second child, a daughter named Jessie. He let shrewd Rita manage his career. He painted a mural for the Truman Library and a portrait of Truman, his match in Missouri testiness.
Mr. Wolff fills in the life of Thomas Hart Benton, but his insights don't quite explain the mysterious fascination Benton provoked. He concludes: "We want to pin him down precisely because we cannot."
If only Mr. Wolff could be 9, lying on the floor on a rainy day, looking at the beauty, vulgarity, dark passions and bright fields of "Persephone." Open your eyes, ignore cultivated tastes, and it explains itself.
Mr. Allen, a former writer and editor for the Washington Post, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000.
A version of this article appeared Mar. 10, 2012, on page C9 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: America in All Its Ugly Beauty.
