The Missouri Murals: Another Look at Benton

Abstract

In conversations held shortly before his death in 1975, Thomas Hart Benton asserted that the radicals of the 1930s misunderstood his ideological position and that their extraordinary animosity was based on spurious and, to him, mysterious assumptions.1 He did admit that in the heat of argument he might have said unkind things in those days, but he maintained that he was not the evil, anti-Semitic, nationalistic fascist they believed him to be. He pictured himself, with no self-pity, as the victim of a longstanding smear campaign. Without thinking, I automatically assumed his remarks to be those of an elderly person papering over earlier antagonisms and trying to persuade me — a potentially hostile New York-born Jew — that his work did not represent the artistic and social evils with which it was still so closely identified.