This article was downloaded by: [Ams/Girona*barri Lib]On: 16 October 2014, At: 05:51Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

The Art BulletinPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcab20

Regionalist Radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Art for Your SakeLeo G. MazowPublished online: 03 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Leo G. Mazow (2008) Regionalist Radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Art for Your Sake, The Art Bulletin, 90:1, 101-122,DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2008.10786384

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2008.10786384

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in thepublications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations orwarranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsedby Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectlyin connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone isexpressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Regionalist Art for Your Leo G. Mazow

Radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Sake

A remarkably high percentage of work by the American artist Thomas Hart Benton depicts musical performance, instru- ments, singing, and clapping. An even larger group takes as its subject the production of sound in nonmusical contexts, by way of meteorological phenomena, sound-receiving and -transmitting technology, discharging guns, neighing wild horses and other animal cries, boisterously revivalist religious services, feats of manual and mechanized labor, chugging trains and steamboats, objects falling and bodies bumping, filibustering politicians, and miscellaneous historical inci- dents (Figs. 1, 8, 9). This sonic litany suggests that the artist considered sound itself meaningful and, one might say, meaning forming. In Benton’s pictorial universe, it is through sound that stories are told, opinions are voiced, experiences are preserved, and history is recorded. All that is consequential, or so the artist would have us believe, has both voiced and heard components.

If modernism, broadly conceived, can be defined as a quest to understand, via paint, prose, and other media, one’s ex- periences in an ever-modernizing world, then Benton’s sonic sensibilities help to locate his work within an American mod- ernist canon.’ More than simply depicting radios, phono- graphs, and other imagery, he consistently used formal tropes-overlapping passages, randomly cropped forms, fast- paced action, continuity amid fragmentation-that also char- acterize mass media and, in particular, the experience of listening to radio. In his 1930s murals, Benton further evoked the sonic dimensions of radio and phonographs by way of ray lines, exaggerated perspective, and echoing forms. He was hardly alone in bracketing narratives with the imagery and effects of mass media; several modernist authors developed a similar “radio style.” In the opening pages of The 42nd Paral- lel, the first book in his trilogy U.S.A. (1930-39), John Dos Passos asserts that the “U.S.A. is . . . a radio network.”* In the pages that follow, as in a serial radio broadcast, sketches and novellas produce recurring characters whose actions are both connected and interrupted by the disjointed headlines of “newsreels,” which in turn are punctuated by choruses from songs heard on the radio. The panels of Benton’s 1930s murals, as well as the several vignettes encapsulated within them, unfold in comparable stop-and-start fashion, cropping and abutting dramatic incidents with climactic moments from other stories.

Richard Wright’s early novel Lawd Today (1937) gives an idea of how this “radio style” could at once disrupt and unify plot.3 Documenting the trials and travails of a typical gloomy day in the life of an African American postal worker, Wright introduces each chapter with the disembodied sounds of a continuously playing radio program tracing the life of Abra- ham Lincoln and the Union victory in the Civil War. Insofar as the radio jolts Wright’s antihero Jake out of a halcyon sleep and presents an ironic contrast to his caged life, the broad-

cast splinters a plot that is already at once painfully drawn out and restlessly rapid. Yet the same program also fuses the day’s events, providing regularity by reminding the reader, at the beginning of each section, of the inescapable awfulness of Jake’s life. Sounding from shopwindows as Jake and his friends traverse the city, the Lincoln-Civil War broadcast is a metaphor of the way the narrative remains connected in spite of the many points and pauses that threaten to obliterate any such integration of parts.4

Benton understood sound in general and radio in partic- ular as effecting a similar interconnectedness. Where Wright foregrounded dissimilar parts of a single day, Benton aimed for a sense of national amalgamation. The radio style was particularly well suited to Benton’s Regionalist aesthetic, with its adjacent vignettes, often depicting radically divergent im- agery, connecting through the very partitions that also sepa- rate them. This style also matches aspects of his Regionalist agenda, which endeavored to reconcile the peoples and tech- nologies of outlying regions with a cultural mainstream, all the while keeping intact the sacrosanct folkways of the re- gion. For all that, Benton’s radio style is probably best exem- plified not in any one painting or mural but rather in a highly scripted radio program dramatizing his life and discussing his work.5 Beginning in the mid-l930s, Benton, in fact, was heard on several radio programs. The script from his appearance on the NBC program Art for Your Sake in early 1940, however, underscores with uncommon clarity the ideological founda- tions of the modernist radio style as he understood it in paint: national interconnectedness, easy movement from zone to zone, and an ever-expanding litany of subjects and address- ees. The story of Benton on the radio is thus worth recount- ing at some length because, as in the work of Dos Passos and Wright, it allies the artist’s modernism with the effects of contemporary mass media.

NBC, the NAS, and Art for Your Sake The American cultures of network radio and artistic Region- alism blossomed concurrently in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) emerged as the leader of the former, with Benton the key protagonist of the latter. The art movement and the radio network had similar goals of reaching as many people as possible in an attempt to create and market a culture of consensus and stability in the Depression years leading to World War 11. Through the efforts of a third party, the National Art Society (NAS), the artist and the broadcaster would be momentarily and uniquely allied in a crusade to impose a fixed American identity on a large radio public. With airtime provided gratis by NBC, the NAS presented in 1939 and 1940 the program Art fw Your Sake, a series of dramatizations of the lives of famous artists. Although the show’s organizers claimed to broadcast an international cast

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

102 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 0 8 V O L U S I E XC: N U h l I \ E K I

of artists through the ages, Art for Your Sake focused on contemporary, Renaissance, and Baroque art, with an empha- sis on American Scene painting.

At 7:30 p.m. on January 6, 1940, Art for Your Sake aired an elaborate dramatization of Benton’s art and life over stations on the NBC network. The broadcast consisted of twenty minutes of theatrical narration and dialogue regarding Ben- ton’s biography, stylistic evolution, and subject matter, fol- lowed by seven minutes of discussion by Bernard Myers, professor of art history at New York University. Quoting several passages verbatim from Benton’s 1937 autobiography, An Artist in Amm‘ca, the program stressed the importance of making art meaningful and accessible to audiences far re- moved from the refinements and dilettantism of Paris and New York. The script of the Benton program is one of the relatively few surviving primary documents from the many art-on-the-radio programs broadcast during the Depression and World War II.G

Art historians have charted Benton’s cultivation of an ever- expansive audience through his paintings, prints, publica- tions, and various corporate appropriations, but the use of broadcast technology in this endeavor has escaped scholarly discussion. Throughout his life, the artist appeared on nu- merous radio and television broadcasts and in a handful of documentaries. With Benton often trashing European mod- ernism, praising the United States, and espousing supposedly rural values, these broadcasts turned into opportunities to provide a running text-albeit a greatly simplified and often misleading one-to his art. Evidently Benton was a particu- larly popular radio subject from 1938 to 1940. In March 1938, fellow Regionalists John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood joined Benton in a radio program, broadcast from the library in Benton’s Kansas City, Missouri, home, “in which the artists discussed one another and their works.” In April 1939, Ben- ton was a guest on the WJZ program I f I Had the Chance, and in September 1940, he joined actresses Helen Morgan and Anna May Wong on WABC’s Fun in Print: Literary Quiz.’ Sound and script records of broadcasting’s early years are spotty at best; it is little wonder that radio and television have not been enlisted by art and cultural historians as primary sources in the study of Benton’s art.’

1 Thomas Hart Benton, Inslruinents of Power, from the mural America Today, 1930, distemper and egg tempera on gessoed linen with oil glaze, 92 X 160 in. (234 X 406 cm). AXA Financial, Inc., New York, through its subsidiary, The Equitable Life Assurance Company of the U.S. (artwork 0 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.; photograph 0 1988 Dorothy Zeidman and AXA Financial, Inc.)

Benton’s full participation in several now-famous art-appre- ciation programs broadcast on radio in the 1930s and 1940s is yet to be determined.“ It is known, though, that he enlisted radio to expand the audience for his art and, by intention or default, to articulate his distance from other styles and ide- ologies. Benton stated his grandiose claims for art and his larger-than-life persona in his autobiography, as well as in many essays, reviews, and interviews. A medium largely driven by “personalities,” radio presented Benton and his promoters with an ideal aural instrument with which to fashion and diffuse their own particular brands of artistic Regionalism and national identity. Radio was still relatively young when Benton appeared on Art for Your Sake-KDKA in Pittsburgh, the first fully licensed commercial radio station, began broad- casting in October 1920-and the artist could scarcely have chosen a medium better suited to his ongoing quest for publicity. Progressive historians Charles and Mary Beard re- ported that by August 1937, radios could be found in 26 million American homes, with an additional 5 million sets in automobiles.” Benton’s presence on this mass medium- and, later, on television-certainly enabled him to advance ideas about and effectively create a mass public, just as Pres- ident Franklin D. Roosevelt enlisted radio, in these same years, to unite vast audiences by means of his so-called fire- side chats.” The artist’s radio programs join a lengthy list of book forewords, published interviews, editorials, book re- views, and feature articles in the 1930s and 1940s through which Benton, who was known to contradict himself and generate perhaps more controversy than he desired, could edit, reedit, and clarify his stances.

Considered alongside NBC and NAS documents and se- lected paintings by the artist, the script for the January 1940 dramatization of Benton’s life on Art for Your Sake presents in a new, critical light questions posed by the artist’s Regionalist agenda, pointing as well to the movement’s often overlooked mission of the mass distribution of cultural products. As cultural historian A. Joan Saab has pointed out, “during the 1930s the communicative potential of art increased as defi- nitions of art became more expansive and its constituency became more inclusive.”” Comparison of Benton’s Region- alist philosophy with the NBC and NAS endeavors on Art for

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

THOMAS H A R T B E N T O N O N A R T F O R Y O U R SAKE 103

Your Sakewhich was initially called Art forEmyone”-reveals remarkable consonance in the realization of that potential. For radio and Regionalism alike, constructing a national identity was only one part of the agenda; reaching that nation was equally important. Much of the success of Roosevelt’s fireside chats has been attributed to the direct dialogue with the president that tens of millions of listeners, scattered across the nation, perceived in the act of listening to these live broadcast speeches.14 The example of Art for Your Sake demonstrates that the arbiters of contemporary Regionalist art would enlist similar populist criteria-the idea of reaching the polity-as a measure of achievement.

The organizational efforts of NBC and the NAS also afford a cultural backdrop against which we may gain insight into Benton’s recurring communication and transportation imag- ery, an interpretation that underscores the importance of national interconnectedness within the Regionalist project. That philosophy is emphasized in Benton’s four mural pro- grams from the 1930s: America Today (1930), commissioned for the New School for Social Research, NewYork (now in the collection of AXA Financial, Inc., New York); The Arts of Lije in America (1932), made for the Whitney Museum Library, NewYork (presently in the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut); A Social Histo? of the State of Indiana (1933, Indiana University Campus Art Collection, Bloomington) ; and A Social Histmy of Missouri (1937, House of Representa- tives’ Lounge, Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City). Antici- pating more than a decade of “connecting” iconography, Instruments of Power, a panel from Amerka Today, places air- planes, locomotives, dirigibles, electricity towers, and related emblems at the forefront of contemporary American history (Fig. 1). The activities of the NAS and the script for Art for Your Sake join Benton’s depictions of cars, trains, roads, tele- phones, telegraphs, typewriters, and radios in symbolically bringing together a diverse and divisive nation, recasting it as a mythic inclusive whole.

In fusing national sections and divergent voices by way of mechanical imagery, Benton’s murals parallel several tenets of a well-known and influential contemporary history text, The American Lcuiathan (1930), authored by Charles Beard, Benton’s friend at the New School for Social Research, and his brother, William Beard. The volume posits broadcast, transportation, and communication technology as a “web uniting disparate parts of nation and globe. “Railways, tele- graph lines, airplanes, and the radio,” wrote the Beards, “override historic political boundaries, weld [ing] this country into a single economic organi~ation.”’~ The vast literature on Benton suggests several parallels between artistic Regional- ism and the Beards’ historical progressivism. The artist’s engagements with broadcast technology and radio program- ming in early 1940 offer both a specific case study of the pictorial and literary forms that such “welding” could take as well as its fate on the heels of American involvement in World War 11. The Benton installment of Art for Your Sake does not subvert some master narrative of Regionalism so much as it dramatically enforces such histories through radio content and sonic symbolism. The Art for Your Sake script elucidates a broad, ongoing debate regarding the ability of the visual arts to mediate both local and global concerns. The program points to the perceived promise and peril of Regionalism,

2 “Three Middle West Artists in a Tri-State Meeting” (left to right, Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry), Kansas City Star, March 5, 1938, 3B (photograph 0 copyright 2007 The Kansas City Star)

and of any popular art form, an ambivalence inherent in the notion of the ever-expansive audience.

Dual Regionalism and the Expansive Audience Announcing the “triumvirate” of American Regionalist paint- ers, contemporary art historians, as if following some socially sanctioned alphabetic hierarchy, habitually list the names of Benton, Curry, and Wood, all three of whom, in one way or another, would be connected with Art for Your Sake (Fig. 2). Like other isms in the modern history of art, Regionalism has a somewhat exclusionary tendency, typically restricting its canon to artists favoring realistic and representational styles and identifiably American-often rural-subject matter.IG Along with critics such as Thomas Craven and Lewis Mum- ford, these painters conceived of their enterprise in opposi- tion to what they viewed as the delimiting aspects of a mod- ernist art world confining its exhibition spaces, studios, schools, and publications to a few square miles within Manhattan. The accessibility for which the triumvirate strove, then, was more than a matter of iconography or composi- tional principles; it was also to be achieved in a more literal sense, through the complex channels of communication that enabled their painted and otherwise limned messages to reach locations well beyond New York City limits and to go into the “regions.”

Benton, Curry, and Wood placed art within popular reach through several strategies. Perhaps most notably, and in keep ing with the many Depression-era artists hired by the Trea- sury Department’s Section of Fine Arts to decorate court- houses and post offices, they produced murals for libraries, museums, state capitols, universities, and other high-traffic public venues across the country. Benton went one step further, endeavoring-sometimes successfully-to exhibit his

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

104 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2008 V O L U M E xc N U M B E R I

3

What.. . only $5 for this siened ORIGINAL by THOMAS BENTON? Why, he’s one of the countq’s finest zwtists!

Yes, $5. .. and not only Benton but Grant Wood, Curry, Lucioni and 63 other great Ameriean art- bb o&r their Signed Original ETCHINGS and LITHOGRAPHS for the same amazinglylow price!

FEU I I L ~ A ~ ~ I I CATALOGUE GIVES Conprmrr DETAIIS

His is the moment you hove

new Art Project you now can get museum-perfect Originals, personally signed by the artists, from the selfsame collection from which the Metropolitan hluscum of Art, Chicago Art In- stitute, United States Library of Congress, Yale University and 74 other famous museums and galleries have ncquired them.

And the price is incredibl low - only $5 each! (NormJ value $18 to R6.)

T waited/or! Through this vital

What makes this possible? Why do America’s leading

artists makc this socrifice when their works normally bring far higher prices? Because they re- alize that the artist ochicves his finest expression, attoins a wider market, only when every cul- tured person (not just wealthy collectors) can afford a genuine original.

Many prize-winning suhjecls You will find precisely the

subject you prefer - for home decoration, collector’s port folio or a gift - in our free. hand. somely illustrated 64-pogc Cotn- loguc, jnst published. Over 140

THESE NOTED ARTISTS.. .

. . . AND MANY OTHERS (Scr Frcc G t a b p c )

subjects, in styles from tradi- tional to modern, arc pictured. Many arc recent prize-winners; some already have soared to a value away beyond their orig- inal price.

Send for FREE catalogue To assure complete selection.

ninil the coupon at once. You ean order direct from the cata- logue, which shows all subjects. size of each, names and biog- raphies of artists, prizes they have won, etc.

Evrry original is guaranteed mnseuni-perfect. If you are not completely satisfied, your money will be refunded. Endose 1Oc in stamps with the coupon to cover postage and handling. Address:

Advertisement for Associated American Artists, 1940

art in saloons and train stations.” A collaboration with the pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories in the early 1940s to circulate nationally reproductions of works related to his Year of Peril series probably marks his most effective effort to reach large, widely dispersed audiences. Between pamphlets, newspapers, posters, postcards, and magazines, the Chicago- based firm arranged for the photoreproduction of paintings and sketches Benton had produced in response to the hor- rors of fascism and war, with the number of reproductions totaling an estimated 55 million (Fig. 13).”

Benton ultimately produced more murals than Curry and Wood combined, but each artist managed to reach popular constituencies throughout the nation via print and reproduc- tive media, particularly illustrated books.” Thanks in large part to corporate appropriations of their work, Benton, Curry, and Wood-like other artists in the period-also pro- cured enormous exposure through advertisements, illus- trated articles, and feature stories in popular magazines.” And, unlike Georgia O’Keeffe and Stuart Davis, two heavily marketed and widely appropriated artists of the era, the Regionalists figured prominently among the rosters of Asso- ciated American Artists (AAA), a company that, beginning in 1934, sold limited-edition lithographs by famous artists through mail order and department stores. Advertising and distributing their products nationally, and initially selling their prints for five dollars each, AAA made Benton, Curry, and Wood even more accessible; the firm, one might say, brought Regionalism to the regions (Fig. 3).”

Benton was AAA’s best-selling artist. The firm ultimately acted as his agent in a series of advertising commissions, and it comes as little surprise that he was a more or less willing accomplice in these activities for much of his career.** Ben- ton participated in the advertising work because AAA pro- moted “easily understandable . . . American art”; of equal significance was the fact that the group offered, as the artist put it, “not something for the few but for all.”23 AAA director Reeves Lewenthal commented in 1939 that the firm envi- sioned its mission as “national in scope,” that it sought to “reach prospective patrons in every section of the country.”24 As tempted as Benton may have been by the income, the ability to bring the visual arts to constituencies outside New York strongly complemented the Regionalist mission and surely also influenced his decision to circulate sixty-two prints with AAA from the 1930s through the 1970~.*~ As we will see, the National Art Society upheld a similar goal of mass circu- lation.

Around the time Benton appeared on Art far Your Sake, several of his AAA-distributed lithographs featured cloistered and confined spaces, often denoting an underlying private and occasionally macabre sensibility in his art. This was some- what at odds with the rough-and-ready reactionary persona he had taken great pains to craft in numerous public venues and with the overt nationalism and republicanism he had suggested in several murals over the preceding decade. The AAA print Shallow Creek (1939), for example, depicts trees, rocks, and water that set the (dark) mood in which the lone figure (Benton’s son, T. P.) , with head lowered, comes across as isolated in time and space-although we know he is ford- ing a stream, leading to the dam-controlled White River, in

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

T H O h l A S HAKT D E N T O N O N A R T F O R Y O U R SAKE 105

northern Arkansas (Fig. 4) .26 Yet even this psychologically expressive tableau addresses the dual nature of Regionalism. Anchoring the back of the composition is a bridge that would have facilitated the mass migration of so-called Back-to-the- Landers, as well as the visitation of other urban tourists who increasingly populated the Ozarks in the 1930s and 1 9 4 0 ~ . ‘ ~ When patrons bought work from AAA, they received not only a view of the regions but also a visual statement about intra- national connectedness.

Benton articulated the dual nature of Regionalism when he wrote that his-and Wood’s, and Curry’s-representa- tional style and homegrown themes were but “forms in which Americans would find an opportunity for genuine spectator participation.”“ Through his murals, publications, and mass- marketed prints, Benton achieved the dual goals of Region- alism: to make art intelligible by way of trademark American subject matter and objective realism, while simultaneously making it accessible, visible, and procurable, within reach intellectually, financially, and physically. Saab uses a similar vocabulary to describe steps taken by Depression-era educa- tional, commercial, and government institutions to cast the visual arts in terms of pedagogy, community building, and mass accessibility, dubbing their mission one of “participatory ~pectatorship.”~~

In the period between 1925 and 1945, department stores, music and book publishers, and an increasingly sophisticated postal system combined efforts in a large-scale delivery of cultural products to individuals far removed from New York and the eastern seaboard. Through such networks of com- mercial exchange, music and literature about the South and Midwest became available to individuals in those regions.30 Similarly, through AAA and allied efforts (such as community arts centers and traveling exhibitions), and in keeping with a broad program of cultural democracy advocated by John Dewey and others, art illustrating sectional folklore and ide- ology was now available in the very regions that were increas- ingly represented in the paintings and prints.31

The triumvirate subscribed to this dual agenda of art and outreach. The return of the three to their native states (Mis- souri, Kansas, and Iowa) in the 1930s certainly attests to their desire to be among the folk and landscape each depicted in his work. Inspired by the artistic productions and outreach efforts of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) , Wood went so far as to comment, “The Federal Government should establish regional schools for art instruction . . . in connection with universities or other centers of culture in various ~ e c t i o n s . ” ~ ~ Neither Wood nor other Regionalists, however, took the proactive role that Benton did in promot- ing the movement’s section-reaching mission. In the early 1940s, around the time he was fired from his teaching post for making homophobic remarks regarding the top brass at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City (and museum ad- ministrators in general), Benton advocated something simi- lar to Wood’s call. Benton envisioned a “People’s Museum” where administrators, when faced with a surplus of works demanding more space, would give “them to schools, centers or publicly useful In a similar vein, for much of his life the artist spoke and wrote on behalf of “the importance of art in smaller cities.”34

Of all the artist’s contemporaries, architecture and cultural

4 Benton, Shallow Creek, 1939, lithograph, 16 X 11% in. (40.6 X 30.3 cm). Palmer Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pa., 2005.32 (artwork 0 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.)

critic Lewis Mumford may have come closest to writing a manifesto on the dual nature of Regionalism. In his two-part essay “The Theory and Practice of Regionalism” (1928), Mumford predicted a modern “neotechnic” age in which industrial progress “makes . . . possible [the] growth of tech- nical knowledge and education . . . over wider areas,. . . making things available at central points,” in which category he included the Midwest, or “Mid-Ameri~a.”~~ The critic maintained that roads, telephones, radios, airplanes, and electric power plants would decentralize social processes and cultural forms previously limited to urban centers, and that this “regionalism must depend on the artist, the poet, the ph i l~sophe r . ”~~ The previous year Mumford had employed a transportation- and network-laden vocabulary in a discussion of Benton’s art, writing, “Movement and distance are always beckoning to Mr. Benton: a railroad train sweeping around a curve; a locomotive emerging from a tunnel. . . .”37 The mod- ernist sensibility of cultural connectedness shared by Mum- ford and Benton lay at the heart of American Regionalism. Art historian Erika Doss has put the matter succinctly, noting that artist and critic alike underscored “the importance of

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

106 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 0 8 V O L U M E X C N U M B E R I

linking localized contemporary social, geographic, and eco- nomic cultures.”38

Broadcasting Thomas Hart Benton Art for Your Sake aimed for a similar sensibility of cultural connectedness. Airing over the course of twenty-six consecu- tive Saturday evenings, Art for Your Sake was organized under the auspices of the NAS, which also published and made available via mail order color reproductions of the artworks under discussion, along with illustrated brochures, written by Myers, for each installment of the radio program. By April 1940, Art for Your Sake was carried on thirty-six NBC affiliates, and the NAS had sold 26,000 portfolios of sixteen prints each, for a total of 415,000 prints.3g Reaching large audiences from coast to coast, the program was well suited to Benton’s goal of far-reaching, regional appreciation of American art and culture.40

The NAS could number several well-known figures in art and education among its organizing trustees, including F. Trubee Davison, president of the American Museum of Nat- ural History, New York, and Herbert E. Winlock, director emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Leading the group’s administrative activities was Frederick T. Fisher, who came to be billed as the NAS “professional direc- tor.” Fisher, who personally owned the several thousand re- productions that would be distributed on the radio program, most likely established the NAS as a nonprofit means of channeling his personal property into educational Of all the trustees, James Rowland Angell, president emeritus of Yale University, appears to have been most directly responsi- ble for the content of Art for Your Sake and related public programming on NBC radio. At Yale, Angell had pushed for free tuition, curriculum reform, and wide opportunities for learning, maintaining a populist, pluralistic educational phi- losophy similar to that espoused by John Dewey, with whom he had studied as an undergraduate at the University of Mi~higan.~’ Angell left Yale in 1937 to assume the position of educational counselor at NBC radio, where he applied the same Dewey-inspired educational goals. Indeed, at NBC his job was to “devise and suggest methods by which we may more capably serve radio’s listening millions,” a topic on which he frequently wrote and lectured.43

In a message specially prepared for the first broadcast of Art for Your Sake, on October 7, 1939, Angell emphasized that the program promoted precisely this agenda. Much as Ben- ton’s dual Regionalism called for “genuine spectator partici- pation,” Angell, as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the NAS, insisted that Art for Your Sake “is the first practical method I have heard of for bringing widespread public par- ticipation in the arts.”44 It is probably not a stretch to imagine Angell as an educational or social reformer whose primary tool was radio. Not unlike popular radio writers of the day, such as Arch Oboler and Norman Convin, Benton and Angell envisioned art to be at its most meaningful when it reached large segments of the p ~ p u l a t i o n . ~ ~

The NAS enlisted several measures to achieve the sizable audiences and large-scale participation that Benton and An- gel1 envisioned. The group’s first annual report stated that the “organization [is] dedicated to public participation in the arts” and that it sought to “reach . . . more than a fraction of

the population.” Although the NAS had previously under- taken other activities-it published two contemporary art tomes for the 1939 World’s Fair and sponsored local art competitions-its efforts ultimately went toward “mass pro- duction plus mass distribution” of cultural products, a meth- odology for which radio and mail-order reproductions would “provide the necessary promotional medium.”4‘

Benton was one of many American painters whose lives were dramatized on Art for Your Sake. Wood, Emil Ganso, Rockwell Kent, Eugene Speicher, and Harry Watrous were also the subjects of broadcast^.^' But the show’s organizers took several measures to promote the Benton dramatiza- tion, intimating the artist’s uniqueness among his contem- poraries-steps not taken in the cases of other American artists featured on the program. An art appreciation work- book distributed to facilitate the use of the program and reproductions in public schools treated the Benton install- ment as something special, with the artist typifying the best in contemporary American art. Elizabeth Wells Robertson, superintendent of art in the Chicago Public Schools and author of the Art for Your Sake workbook, asserted, “I t is particularly fitting that the first artist to be considered in this second series should be one of the triumvirate: Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart B e n t ~ n . ” ~ ~ With the Benton episode launching the program’s second series, and the first to air in the new year, the program used the artist as a sort of introduction to art history, setting in place an organizational blueprint through which one could understand the contributions of other Region- alists and lesser-known artists.

The brochure published for the Benton broadcast also distinguishes his place in the history of art from that of other living American artists highlighted on the program (Figs. 5, 6). Authored by Myers, these illustrated publications were part of the package that subscribers received along with their color reproductions of the works under discussion. Myers’s text made clear Benton’s singular position within contempo- rary art history: “Among the artists who have decorated the walls of libraries, post offices, schools, and other public build- ings, no name is so well-known as that of Thomas Benton.”4g Similarly, Myers wrote of Benton as a sort of compass through which one could orient oneself to the direction of contem- porary art: “No American painter of this generation has been as influential in molding the interests of the younger men who, with increasing frequency, are turning toward the Amer- ican scene as a source of inspiration.”5o The fact that the script survives points to the importance of that particular program. In the Depression, art education via radio was commonplace, and stations were likely to retain those scripts of most importance for their researchers and writers; several stations maintained libraries for professional and lay consul- tation of these texts. Eventually, institutions such as the Cleve- land Museum of Art maintained such libraries, especially for the brochures and workbooks published in conjunction with Art for Your Sake, which, according to the museum’s head educators, were “besieged” by the public.”

By launching the 1940 lineup of Art for Your Sakewith the Benton dramatization, Myers and Angell took a positive step in their objectives to reach sizable and vastly distrib- uted audiences and to stimulate “public response” to the

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

T H O M A S I I A R T R E N T O N O N A R T FOR Y O U R S A K E 107

THOMAS BENTON

5 Page 6 from Bernard Myers, Lessons in Art Appreciation, no. 1, New York: National Committee for Art Appre- ciation, 1937 (artwork 0 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts

VAGA, New York, N.Y.) / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by PAOX4 S P

visual arts in “homes . . . schools . . . [and] museums,” as the NAS 1940 report put the matter.52 In the previous decade, Benton had produced four widely publicized mu- rals. In late 1934 he appeared on the cover of Time maga- zine-the first artist to receive such an honor-and over the next two years wrote a best-selling autobiography, pub- lished in 1937.53 In January 1939 his painting Cradling Wieat graced the cover of the Bulletin of the City Art Museum of St. Louis, and in March 1940, Benton was featured on the cover of the magazine American Artist. By early 1940 his renown had already reached celebrity proportions, per- haps more on account of his character, anecdotes, and travels than for his artistic production. In February of that year, the Divorce Reform League named the artist, along with Lou Gehrig and President Roosevelt, as one of the nation’s “five best husbands.”54 If Art for Your Sake ad- vanced Benton’s dual Regionalist mission, the inverse is true as well: an artist of Benton’s escalating fame and name

recognition could only facilitate the NAS’s goal of a “uni- versity of the air” with immense public appeal. The pro- gram organizers, seeking to reach “the tens of thousands of communities where no museums exist,” surely saw a kin- dred spirit in Benton, who had similarly gone to great lengths to bring the visual arts to audiences far removed from museums, and through what might be called alterna- tive media.55

Unique to the Benton dramatization were several dis- tinct personal touches not found in the extant scripts for other artists on Art for Your Sake broadcasts. Benton was a self-taught harmonica player who performed frequently and a leading figure in the Greenwich Village music scene until he left New York in 1935. Music indeed figured prominently in the script of the Benton broadcast, with the popular group the Norsemen Quartette punctuating the narrative at key junctures with dramatic renditions of “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee,” “Over There,” and “River

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

108 A R T B U L L E T I N h l A R C H 2 0 0 8 V O L U h l E X C N U M B E R 1

Uon of the newer stylea fmm abmad Not Only were a great many other artlets Influenced by lmpresalonltt valntlng but the varlous Bubwuent Eumpedd d b TeloDmeuh have also been mlrrond In thl8 muittry‘s art.

Our natlve stmln. as revrereniedln the work Of WlMloW Homer and T h 0 m ~

Eaktm. fin6 Ib slightly later wunter WM In the pnIntlng of Robert Wenrt George Lulrr and George Bellow& all of whom have dled wlthln the past ten yearn or no. More rscenUy thlr form of

1 WlnUng h u penlsted, In the work of such m~~sts u sword W. Leon K ~ U and Eugene Bpelcher.

Thomas Bento?i (1889- ) -._ He bra onen bean accused of balng a

%‘red*. not only because.of hls outspoken wrsonallty. but also on aceount of hl# d b IlMrate choice of subject matter and In-

wndltlon of the Inrlt-Dlckers rlhou( WLInwone slde or another.

T h 6 W Benton WM born In N w b . . Mo., In 1889 of 6 hmlly long Dromtnent In pollua.. €Us m a t ude, Thomas H. Ben104 WM the flmt wnator Imm Yla~url and we are told that hil gredbgmndfather once shot Up Andrew Jacbon. Benton’s father had settled In Ylssourl to D ~ ~ c U U ) law and often In the wurse of ble handllng varlous land dls- putee In that eounm, t o o k young Thomrs rlth blm. Fmm the very be %%&22d :S%%%EW%: VelODed In hIm.

hls WM, Benton wanted to be an arttat. RIB father ob. An a young lad

Among the 6fib who have deoorated the d l s of I I b r 6 r I e 1. post OfftCe4 schools. and other DUbUC bildlom, M name law wall.known u that of ThomM

jecung, he mmpmmlsed on a artoonlst’s lob rlth the JoDlln American. When the family sent hlm to a mllll6ry acndemy to arold hlr bammlnc an ~ r t l s t ha 1 1 ~ 1 1 ~ - . - - . - __-_- __ I ___ -_ __

Bentod’ .. 1 No&erlOan palntsr of thls gsnemtlon

hm &em u InnnsntW In maldlni the In-

Dlcked hlrmelf np and went off to P6rls at the age of rlneteea Them he fell wmnletelY under the Iflnence of French __ - ___ - .- .- -. .-- -. .-

tarest8 of ibs younger men who, rlth In- ar t k d citure. bnl for a long Ume ha creaalng )repuency.’ora turnlng towvd W M unable to flnd h h e U a8 6 the Amertcpn a w e u 6 m r c B of Inapt- bcame of the wnnict behwn tE?E mVoa If some of thede young men set pllCW of hls w l y trplnlng and the new- on1 to dsl lb .n la l~ “oaInt Amerloan” that IT found Bob& ahnorvhore of th8 Is not Mr. Bentoi’r ipult for no one can accuse hlm of selfcomdousneds In thls regard.

What he h u tried to do la to study and rewrd the varlous rspecb of llfe In there Unlted Stated. to mt the u n d e r 1 Y i n g

French cnplM Aiter bla return. ha lived for 6 time

rlth the ncolptor Rex Ingram. who WM at that Ume an rssht.nt director for the old Fox Studtoe. Tbmwb hlm. Benton secured a job wthsrtns sonrce mateW

.rhythm that anko& the powerful an&, for neb and mInUng portrslb of Tbsd. In many redpects. iUll crud4.clvUlratlon Barn Clars KLmball Yrmn(l and others. In which-we live. Werythlng la srlat for We are told that be even acted a small bls mlll: “the Mluourl rtllage, the Ark. “drunk*‘ put In one of the old Wlld Weet a m blllbllly, the TeIM O l l well. the D h t U M . Tbb Deh’IOd Of hlr IU0 I# Tammany polltidnn. the New England bmwbt to a cloae by hlr enllrbnent In tbherman, the MIssI~sIppI nem, the the navy durlng t h e m andhls wmplete power plant, the etreet excavauon: the hlllng away from whatever bench man- robust the venerable. the seedy: anclenr netlams he may have h6d. urlde and egually ancisnt ouht=thbhed- neas”.

But what 1. mom Imaartnnt (han the

q r a short Ume after the war be was one of the m n v of %lfat~ced” a m b snomored bF A l f d SUedltr the fmom

mcm recordlogof thGi thtngaTs the h c t that Benton know bls way 6mund

tar rlth the backgmund of Amerlcan pol. ltlcs and ewnomlu M rlth the Utory

PhotomDh& but blr tiherent neiii for the EXDrssdon of acttullHss made blm

palntsn He be- to use a Italtsn kenalsunce m6br16f%rd%E

~a Ulnklng, IIler6te lndlrldnal M fmll. rether nnh6VW m n g thW 4 b e l n O t

form. .Dace and rhythm. In a perfectly lodcal development thls man who WM deeply Imbued W l t h the trpdlUoIu of Amerlcp of whlch he was such an InW ~ r a l narL deiermhed to adant hls srt ta

’ No one wia better fllted than he to-ex- Drws hls wnceptloa The Idea8 that he had abeorhed Irom Ilshnlng to hls older relaUvea and thelr f r lendbthe men who were actually maklw A m e r l m hhton -or the atodes they told of thelr own Immediate anceatom these were the h l s of the m6terU ’that Benton w u to D r n U c a In 1BP4 be flrst began to wllect the

nr loos forms and Incldenb from tlfe that m i d , f o n n nnlb or hlr htstorier tn mu ralnUw. Benton la Drlm6rlb known for

LIB In Amerld aad The Mlner (see Illm- tntlonl. Xe hu ah0 done 6 mnsldsr-

16 an th&s w o r k large or #ma& we nnd the a m e blgneds of d d m , the cams feeling of 6n overwheltnlng tom that time and wain smremsed the aarslntuan character of thls w u n t n In 6 masterN dlagonab In hla wmposlUona bellerlng that thla derlc4’dvw blr a&,! mat= fMhlOn. He &ken KIWlllfzIlt use Of aharP

upper r k h t foree held In ChnL M away Imm the ww-pnncher who ~ u U 8 bls hardest in the opmlte dlrecUo4 while the nnUed ponlss churn UD tho d m t at the bottom of the ulcture. Benton understsnda all tmw and 6u

wndltlonm of Ilfe. Everyone posss for him, elther rllllngly Or unknorlnglY, M that no- ~ ~ ( E L D M Us pencil and b m h . Other vtlab bare rewrded dlfferent M- pact# of the Amerlun scene. but none have shown us that thla country is still ~n a stste of ferment that It Is YOUW, that thwn am hapvenlng-mme sood. othen very b a d - m d that thls Is Just a

E0 h M d V @ l M 6 WM

- p h r . . . ~~

h Leason Number Two. we shall KO hack to the Oolden Age of PalnUns. the RenalsMnCe and analyze the mter1Y m r k a of da Vlncl. W c h a ~ U d o . Ra- phael and TIU~I.

. - .

PAOE 8- 6 Page 7 from Myers, Lessons in Art

_ _ _ _ _ Appreciation, no. 1

Chantey,” among other tunes5‘ An exceptionally enthusi- astic promoter of American folk music-he counted among his friends the composer Carl Ruggles and the musicologist Charles Seeger-Benton ultimately collected and transcribed the music of some 130 songs from his sojourns into Appala- chia, the South, the West, and the Midwest.”’ It thus seems appropriate that the author of the Benton dramatization, Albert N. Williams, titled his script The America of Mister Thomas Hart Benton, including the folk song^.^^ In his autobiog- raphy the artist commented, “The old music cannot last much longer. I consider a great privilege to have heard it in the sad twang of mountain voices before it died.”5’” The Art for Your Sake dramatization honored this aspect of Benton’s work, with the Norsemen Quartette also singing the ‘‘chorus of [a] mountain ballad,” a “mountain hymn with hand c lap ping and shouts,” and a “southern lament.”“

Also suggesting some sort of preexisting relationship between Benton and NAS trustees, about one-quarter of

the first episode of Art for Your Sake, on October 7 , 1939, dramatized a conversation between a character named “Dr. Benton” and (in order) the fictional Blake family, a group of teachers, and Frederick Fisher of the NAS. Dr. Benton had apparently given a talk one evening on Renaissance art, and his comments resemble closely those of the artist Benton. Like Benton the artist, Dr. Benton the lecturer championed Tintoretto as a foundation from which any mod- em artistic education must proceed. Mr. Blake and his son Jack and daughter Dorothy, in a postlecture reception in the family’s living room, questioned the relevance of art, in gen- eral, to them, especially since they knew only cheap mono- chromatic prints, quality color reproductions being prohibi- tively expensive:

Dorothy: It’s right, isn’t it Dr. Benton-when you get right down to it-art is for the collectors-people who can spend a million.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

T H O M A S H A R T B E N T O N O N A R T FOR Y O U R S A K E 109

Benton: No. . . it isn’t-not just for them- make clear that living artists did not supply their own voices-

Jack: Well, then at least you admit it’s for people who can travel and visit the galleries-

Mr. Blake: I’ll tell you what art is for, Doctor-you can talk all you please-you can even convince me that art can enrich my life-but when all is said and done-art is for the collector with a million dollars, as Dorothy says-or else it’s art for art’s sake.

Benton: No, it’s not-art is for your sake-1’11 confess I haven’t the answer now, but there is an answer-there’s some way in which everyone can participate-some way that everyone can share in the things that men have starved and died for through the ages . . . I know there must be some way. . .61

Such a living-room lecture parallels the NAS’s crusade to domesticate the fine arts, to promote work of “real artistic merit for the average American home.”62

Like Benton the artist, Dr. Benton considered mass partic- ipation and large-scale distribution high on his agenda. On the Benton dramatization a year later, the artist’s character stated several times the importance of painting “people . . . things, and ideas . . . rather than colored cubes.”G3 The latter, in Dr. Benton’s-and Thomas Hart Benton’s-opinion con- stituted art for art’s sake, the former “art for your sake.” Perhaps most apparently, the dual Benton persona contends that the more meaningful “art for your sake” is necessarily representational art. Dovetailing with the artist’s idiosyncrat- ically personal style, such an assumption undermines his grandiose claims to cultural democracy, pointing instead to Thomas Hart Benton himself and his growing distaste for abstract painting.

The Dr. Benton-Blake family script and the musical em- phasis of the Benton dramatization-as well as the fact that the script quoted liberally from Benton’s autobiography- compel us to considerjust how closely Benton may have been involved with the broadcast. The term “art for art’s sake,” of course, has a well-known history in scholarly and popular literature, but here it parallels Benton’s usage of the term in his 1937 autobiography. In describing his departure from the “aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns” of modern- ism, Benton wrote that he then “left for good the art-for-art’s- sake world in which I had hitherto l i~ed.”‘~ The Dr. Benton- Blake family script also raises the question of whether the artist supplied his own voice. The script for the Benton installment implies as much, differentiating in its cast listing between actual and nonspecific characters:

CAST Benton 3 Men (Dialecticians) 2 Women (Dialecticians) Norsemen Quartette”

The cast lineup for the Benton broadcast indicates that he may have been present for the program broadcast, along with the Norsemen Quartette and the “dialecticians.” Although the cast listings for some surviving Art for Your Sake scripts

the parts sometimes consisting of invented characters and generic types-others suggested that they did.66 In late Oc- tober 1939, Angel1 sent letters to several dozen schools, cor- porations, and government offices announcing, “In the case of contemporary artists, we shall attempt, when possible, to have them join in the broadcast dealing with their own works,” adding, “Mr. Rockwell Kent appeared thus on the initial p r~gram.”~’

Scholars have commented on the notorious unavailability of archived recordings of this and similar radio programs; indeed, old-time radio guides make clear the improbability of extant recordings of the Benton dramatization on Art for Your Sake.‘* It seems unlikely that we will ever have a recording of the Benton broadcast and thus know for certain if he pro- vided his voice on the program. At the very least, however, with these many personal touches on the broadcast, we may assume the possibility that Benton was closely involved. It is also tempting to speculate on just what about Art for Your Sake Benton might have found considerably appealing; many of these features parallel those that compelled Roosevelt to initiate his fireside chats in 1933. The president envisioned radio as a way to surpass opposing parties and interfering bureaucracy, to speak clearly and correctly about things that the press m~dd led .~ ’ Similarly, with interruption, protest, and second-guessing by outside voices a virtual impossibility, a program like Art for Your Sake enabled Benton to sidestep critics and modernists- his usual antagonists.

Radio, Regionalism, Nativism Benton’s section-specific subject matter and the nationwide distribution of his art announced his dual goals of Regional- ism, and that philosophy was proclaimed in the very structure of An Artist in America, which, in turn, was quoted throughout the dramatization on Art for Your Sake. The book is divided into chapters covering the regions through which the author traveled: “the south,” “the west,” “Missouri,” “the mountains,” “the cities,” and “the rivers.” The Thomas Hart Benton Trusts in Kansas City alone possess approximately 1,300 drawings by the artist depicting these various sections of the United States. Williams, as the writer of the dramatization, went to some lengths to match the artist’s sectional emphases in his oeuvre and geographic vocabulary in his autobiography. Oc- cupying a large and particularly theatrical portion of Wil- liams’s script on Artfor Your Sake, the recounting of Benton’s tenure in the United States Navy as an architectural drafts- man in Norfolk, Virginia, during World War I evokes strongly Regionalism’s transnational agenda. As if thinking of the regions to which NBC broadcast the program, Williams has Benton physically-and aurally-encounter representatives from several states. Playing the part of muses of their respec- tive regions, several of the characters invite Benton to visit and sketch their native territories, a dialogue culminating in a multistate, conjoining crescendo in celebration of the United States:

Voice: ( ~ E R SOUNDS FADE TO BC-SOUTHERN DIALECT) So you come from Missouri, do yo’, Tom Benton? Well I come from Georgia, which (FADE) is a long way from Missouri, but I’m glad to see you.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

110 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2008 V O L U M E X C N U h l B E K I

Voice: (FADE ON-TEXAS DRAMT) Yo’ hail from Missouri? Tom Benton from up Kansas City way, huh? Well, I’m from Texas, and I’m (FADE) glad to know you.

Voice: (FADE ON-SWEDE DIALECT-RESTRAINED) I never been to Missouri, Tom Benton. I’m from Minnesota myself. I think you’d find that a handsome state to make pictures in. (FADE) I’m sure glad to see you.

Voice: (FADE ON-TWANG) Try apainting up in my country sometime, Benton, you might like our scenery . . . I’m from Wyoming!

Voices: (BUILD I N KHYTHM AND INTENSITY) Georgia! Florida! Texas! Minnesota! Dakota! Utah! New Hampshire! Ken- tucky! Indiana!70

Although it appears most famously in his autobiography, Benton’s litany of place-names also found its way into his many lectures and published essays. Williams and the NAS trustees thus chose a trope specifically tailored to the artist’s emphasis on a national whole composed of equally worthy geographic entities. For his part, Benton may have been somewhat influenced by several friends of his, including the poet Carl Sandburg and musicians Pete Seeger and Burl Ives, who similarly employed lengthy enumerations of American place-names in their celebrations and critiques of a burgeon- ing nationalism.

The radio program’s logic and vocabulary of national in- terconnectedness match even more closely-and perhaps take cues from-the American Guidebook Series, the pri- mary effort of the Federal Writers Project (FWP), a New Deal agency. From 1935 through 1943, more than six thousand writers produced guides covering the geography, history, and lore of each state, with guided automobile tours constituting about one-third of each volume. Recalling the radio pro- gram’s transsectional litany of places, one guide manual ad- vised that the only way to understand the abstract whole of the United States was to become “familiar with the nation’s great resources of scenery, recreation, its history, its industry, its cities, and . . . even . . . [its] infinite variety. . . of language and dialect.”71 The guides encouraged reader-tourists to re- discover the myriad parts of the United States as a seamless, conjoined whole. As FWP historian Jerrold Hirsch observes, “The guides further asked travelers to link the place to the larger tour, the tour to the state, and ultimately the state to the nation.” As we will see, in his form and subject matter, Benton subscribed to a comparable program of amalgam- ation and unification.’*

Where the FWP relied on highways and guidebooks to forge a mythic national identity-a whole, linked by way of its parts-the NAS used art reproductions, the postal service, and the airwaves. As with most of the other twenty-five epi- sodes of Art for Your Sake, the Benton dramatization began with an announcer proclaiming that the program “makes it possible for every listener to own splendid reproductions of the world’s great art treasures and then-through these weekly programs-to hear the story behind the story behind the paintings in his own c~ l l ec t ion . ”~~ On the introductory episode of Art for Your Sake in October 1939, NAS trustees apparently felt that they could not overstress their program’s

mission of spawning a nationwide and interfiised audience of art appreciators:

Announcer 2: The first portfolio will be mailed to any point in the United States, postpaid and where practicable will amve in time for the opening program of the series over this same network next Saturday evening, Repeating-the first portfolio of sixteen prints and brochure will be mailed post- paid to any point in the United States upon receipt of one dollar, addressed to Art for Your Sake, care of the National Broadcasting Company, Radio City, New Y ~ r k . ~ “

The very usage of-and emphasis on-postal processes served to underscore Benton’s and the NAS’s goal of na- tional unity through geographic interconnectedness, through reaching what the announcer above calls “any point” in the nation, and in a manner that, to some extent, evokes what Mumford had called the many “central points.”

Angel1 and his fellow trustees ambitiously undertook many strategies for reaching the “points.” An NAS membership application brochure lured prospective members with the promise that the highquality photographic reproductions of works of art would be exhibited nationally, like any other museum-worthy item.75 Armed with testimonials from such institutions as the Worcester Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art, the NAS could report in March 1940 that “museums in Cleveland, Toledo, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Denver, and Utah . . . inaugurated exhibitions or study groups tied in with our radio program.”7G Evidence for how such an arrangement might work is provided by the Milwau- kee Art Institute (now the Milwaukee Art Museum), which announced that “a framed reproduction of the picture under discussion will be on exhibition at the Art Institute for the week preceding [each] broadcast” on that city’s NBC affiliate, WTMJ.77 Beginning in December 1939, immediately follow- ing each program, NBC’s New York affiliate, WAF, re- minded listeners that the images discussed that week were on display-with no admission fee-at the International Build- ing at Rockefeller Center, at the Permanent Exhibition of Decoration, Architecture and Crafts, part of the 1939 World’s Fair.78 The NAS sought to establish widely dispersed clubs, in the form of local advisory groups in Minneapolis, Cleveland, Chicago, Toledo, and other cities across the nation.79 Art for Your Sake reached yet more audiences when, in 1940, with Myers as its emcee, it aired over RCA’s television station W2XBS in New York.”

The measures taken by the NAS producers parallel Ben- ton’s own publicity and outreach efforts. Adopting as their mission the distribution of the program and supplementary materials to “any point in the United States,” NBC and the NAS found a spokesman in Benton; the dramatization cer- tainly implied as much. The narrator states that Benton’s revelation at the Norfolk Navy Yard-that people are wor- thier subject matter than “cubes”-compelled the artist to go to the American people himself, to drive in “an old car through the muddy roads” of a vast nation. Again quoting lengthy passages of the artist’s biography for its geographic litany, the narrator summarized (and again, surely taking a cue from the American Guidebook Series): “Tom Benton was finding an America for himself. And America is a large coun-

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

THOMAS H A R T B E N T O N O N A R T FOR Y O U R S A K E 111

try. It is three thousand miles across, and hvo thousand miles from North to South. It is much bigger than New York City, and so Tom Benton began to travel.”” By car and foot, Benton was doing what the radio and television programs sought to do, with artist and broadcaster sharing in a broad, transnational mandate. The writers and producers of Art for Your Sake went to some lengths to match the outreach efforts and geographic vocabulary of dual Regionalism.

“Something Like That Horse Picture” Wyoming was one of those places Benton explored by car and foot. It seems somewhat coincidental that Williams’s script for the radio program has a Wyoming native inviting Benton to his birthplace, insisting that the artist will find much to paint there. Art for Your Sake subscribers received a color reproduction of Benton’s watercolor LassoingHorses (1931)- depicting a rodeo scene in Wyoming-to consult during the January 1940 dramatization and Myers’s scholarly comments afterward (Fig. 7). After Benton drove several thousand miles with his student Glen Rounds in the summer of 1930, the two men managed to obtain special access to the grounds of an elaborate Wyoming rodeo by telling the organizers that they were “official artists” on assignment for the Denver Post. The serpentine lines, zigzagging forms, and rich washes in the picture probably illustrate the climactic moment when, as Benton would later reminisce, “the whole herd in a close, turbulent knot came pounding toward me in a cloud of dust.” Having lied their way to their perch on the fence, the men were at first admonished to leave, but, thanks to their claim to be newspaper illustrators, they were allowed to stay.82

The resulting watercolor is the basis for the upper right- hand corner of Arts of the West, which is part of the mural The Arts of Life in America (1932), commissioned for the Whitney Museum Library, and the subject of enormous publicity (and

controversy) on its completion (Fig. 8). The large reproduc- tion of Arts of lhe West in Myers’s illustrated brochure for the Benton dramatization would surely have encouraged Art for Your Sake subscribers to make the comparison between the mural section and the watercolor sketch (Fig. 5). For his part, Myers made clear in his comments following the dramatiza- tion that he understood Lassoing Horses as a “mural sketch” for Arts ofthe West.83

Throughout the 1930s, Benton envisioned murals as the ideal medium for “reaching more people.”84 The mural pro- gram of which Lassoing Horses is part, in turn, casts the radio itself as an agent of outreach. Just right of center in Arts of the City, another panel in The Arts of Life in America, he depicted a “plump diva singing on the radio” (Fig. 9). The woman, with the mien of someone belting out tunes, forms part of the “jazz orchestra” whose pianist and conductor Benton de- picted further to the right, intersecting with the woman’s stylized and enlarged b~ttocks.’~ Benton indicates blaring volume by way of the lines emanating from her gaping mouth; these rays, however, point less to the microphone before her than to a white, winged figure. With the mega- phone positioned at his wide-open mouth and his caricatured rear end repeating the diva’s bulbous curves, the Pegasus-like creature joins the woman in a suggestion of enhanced am- plitude, as if further discharging and promulgating her loud voice. The exaggerated scale of the behemoth radio at center and the elongated antenna tower-so tall it must be anchored with cables (the figure is suspended from one of these wires)- connotes the transmission of an extraordinarily powerful wavelength, a signal capable of reaching remote sites, even, perhaps, Wyoming and other points across the continent.

Art for Your Sake was not broadcast directly to Wyoming but it was aired by stations throughout the Rocky Mountains, including KOB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, KGIR in Butte,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

112 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 0 8 V O L U M E X C N U M B E R I

8 Benton, Arts of the West, from the mural The Arts of Lqe in America, 1932, egg tempera and oil glaze on linen, 93% X 159% in. (238 X 405 cm). New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Conn.. Harriet Russell Stanlev Fund. 1953.21 (artwork 0 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentaly Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed

Montana, and KDYL in Salt Lake City, Utah. Perhaps most significantly, the show was carried by KOA in Denver, Colo- rado which, at 50,000 watts, is an extremely powerful signal even by today’s standards, so that it could be picked up in most of Wyoming.8G Stations like KOA boasted soaring an- tenna towers to ensure such a wide transmission, and Ben- ton’s vertically elongated edifice in Arts of the City bears re- markable fidelity to such masts, on which high-wattage radio stations continue to rely (Fig. 10). In keeping with Regional- ism’s dual mission, images and commentary about Wyoming life and culture reached that state. Lassoing Horses, Arts of the City, and Arts of the West support radio’s role in bringing “the City” to “the West” and “the West” to “the City.”

Beyond integrating his impressions of the western United States into vignettes in The Arts of Life in Amerka, Benton had also rehashed his Wyoming escapades in his recently pub- lished and widely read autobiography An Artist in America. Underscoring their Dewey-inspired educational populism, the organizers of Art for Your Sake, intent on delivering their program and supportive publications to “schools in the most remote parts of the country,” surely took pride in bringing art education to Wyoming and other sites across the trans- Mississippi West. Comparing their broadcast to NBC’s enor- mously popular weekly music education hour featuring symphony conductor Walter Damrosch, the organizers com- mented further, “Through the radio program and ultimately by recordings even the remotest schools would have in the arts aids to teaching which are now thought essential to music

by VAGA, New York, N:Y.; photograph by Arthur G. Evans)

appreciation cour~es.”~’ And Wyoming citizens apparently were receptive to Benton’s art, its message of mass accessibil- ity being among its attractions. Recalling the Dr. Benton conversation, several prominent residents of Casper, Wyo- ming, met in early November 1940 for an evening to discuss Benton’s art, followed by a one-day exhibition of materials on loan from Associated American Artists.”

Taking credit for bridging the gap between cutting-edge pedagogy and the “remotest” audiences, the program direc- tors could scarcely have circulated more appropriate subject matter than Benton’s Wyoming. The last state in the nation to develop an AM radio station (1922), Wyoming did not have standard electricity lines until 1940, at which time its roughly 271,000 inhabitants made up less than 2 percent of the nation’s p~pulation.~’ Further implying the state’s rela- tive isolation in space and time, modern conveniences long enjoyed in other locales were dubbed only “recent” advances in the 1941 American Guidebook for Wyoming: “The recent de- velopment of rural electrification sent the smelly kerosene lamps into the dump heap, and has replaced the washboard and the talking machine with the electric washer and the Seemingly outpaced by modern life, the state was ideal subject matter for the lofty outreach aims of Benton and the NAS.

Wyoming stood, then, for isolation, “un-tucked shirts,” and a time-honored folklore of rugged, macho individualism. “Wyoming was, and continues to be, the land of the cowboy,” states the 1941 American Guidebook for Wyoming?’ Similar descriptions might apply to Benton as well in this period.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

THOhlAS IIAKT RENTON O N A R T FOR Y O U R S A K E 113

9 Benton, Arts of the City, from The Arts ofLiJe in Ama‘ca, detail, 1932, egg tempera and oil on linen mounted on panel, 93% X 264 in. (238 X 670 cm). New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Conn., Harriet Russell Stanley Fund, 1953.19 (artwork 0 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.; photograph by Arthur G. Evans)

Benton projected these traits not only on the iconography of his artwork but also in books, articles, and other public constructions of his persona. In his 1937 autobiography, for example, even when he was not describing his Wyoming rodeo experience, he devoted much of the text to fashioning himself as a tobaccochewing, rough-and-ready type who had no use for modern convenience. Associated American Artists promoted him as “a tough hombre from Missouri.”gz Recog- nizing the self-consciously performative nature of Benton’s unrefined, maverick persona, art historian Henry Adams has commented on the artist’s “carefully cultivated frontier man- ner-his rough clothes, crude language, and hard drink- ing. . . . The broadcasting of Thomas Hart Benton, coming on the heels of Arts of the West and the publication of An Artist in America would have been tantamount to broadcasting a mythology of the West. The former, in turn, was well suited to the NAS’s claim that it brought culture to the outermost and otherwise inaccessible regions.

Yet, in Benton’s estimation, the Wyoming rodeo scene in the watercolor and mural could have represented any horse in any radio in any state. He claimed that “the real subject of” The Arts of LiJe in America is a generic one, “in the end,” merely “a conglomerate of things experienced in Ameri~a.”“~ Asked about Lussoing Horses in a later interview, he commented that “this rodeo thing can be seen any day.” The picture’s “tech- nical processes” may someday be “outmoded,” Benton granted, but “as long as you’ll have a rodeo, you’ll see some- thing like that horse picture.”95 Like the radio program for

,993

which the reproduction was circulated, the stock subject matter and representational forms in Lassoing Horses figured in a simultaneous decentralization and homogenization of American culture. The ubiquity of American experience for which cowboys and radios stood has a long pedigree; it was enlisted by Depression-era cultural commentators as a vexed legacy, connoting equal parts hope and hazard.

For some observers in the 1930s, radio facilitated a sense of shared social goals and national unity. In The Ama’can Levi- athan, Charles and William Beard imagined technology as a nation-conjoining web. The Beards wrote that radio, telegra- phy, and other marvels of the present “technological revolu- tion” helped “emphasize . . . as never before the role of government as a stabilizer of civilization.”96 Benton suggested something similar in his mural A Social History of the State of Indiana (1933), which consists of several dozen panels. In the background of the panel Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press, the artist depicts the racist horror of the Ku Klux Klan (Fig. 11) . The Klan’s stronghold on Indiana was broken by the Indianapolis Times, which received a Pulitzer Prize for expos- ing the group’s large-scale criminal organization (the case implicated and ruined the political careers of both the mayor and governor).” In this context, we may interpret the news- paper reporter at his typewriter and his telephone, cropped to the edge of the picture plane at center, as contributing to the expos6 of the Klan’s cross-burning barbarism. With the telephone and typewriter as vehicles for enlightenment and

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

114 A R T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2 0 0 8 V O L U M E XC N U M B E R I

10 Harry Mellon Rhoads, KOA radio transmitter on East 14th Avenue, Denver, ca. 1934-40, photographic print, 7 X 5 in. (17.8 X 12.7 cm). Denver Public Library, Western History Collection (photograph 0 2007 Denver Public Library)

the articulation of social conscience, Benton effectively painted the “stabilizer” called for by the Beards.

From Folk to Volk In analogous fashion, Art for Your Sake also claimed to be a national “stabilizer.” In the NAS’s 1940 Report of the President, Fisher quoted a letter from a listener in Connecticut who wrote that the program “is the one hour in the week when our family is united in a common interest.” Fisher reported that space constraints would not permit quotation from a truly representative sampling of all the fan mail, but he claimed that this letter typified 99 percent of the correspon- dence.98 Addressing throughout its promotional materials a perceived common need for uplift and unity by means of radio art education, the NAS purported to facilitate its much- desired goal of “public participation in the arts.” An assump- tion of cultural consensus-a mandate to give the people the art they want, as if that is one determinate thing-punctuates much of the NAS’s programming and virtually the entire script of the Benton dramatization and Myers’s commentary.

With their formula for mass circulation, officials at NBC and the NAS could be confident that they at least partially achieved such a consensus. Specifically, they could be sure that at 7:OO p.m. on Saturday, January 7, 1940, and on se- lected rebroadcasts later in the week, a large and geograph- ically heterogeneous portion of the population was looking at the reproduction of Benton’s Lassoing Horses as they listened to the dramatization of his life and to Myers’s official com-

mentary on his art. Even more individuals wodd have had access to the thirty-six stations airing Art for Your Sake even if they did not subscribe to the corresponding print and bro- chure service. By the Art for Your Sake broadcast in January 1940,45,300,000 radios had a place in more than 80 percent of American h~useholds .”~ In the weeks following the Benton dramatization, as “master recordings” of the program were made available at a nominal price to schools across the nation, yet more audiences, more or less simultaneously, heard Ber- nard Myers proclaim Thomas Hart Benton’s America as “the” America.”’

The delivery of a product agreed on as “culture”-in the forms of radio and Regionalism-to large cross sections of the population approaches a condition that the cultural his- torian and literary critic Philip Fisher has dubbed a “trans- parent” and “democratic social space.” This space is charac- terized by a sense of “cultural sameness,” a state of being for which Fisher finds precedents in Reconstruction-era and Gilded Age American literature. At the same time, the ho- mogenized set of social practices he describes also comprises many contemporary phenomena. The mass uniformity of modern American experience is characterized not so much, Fisher observes, “by ideology, religion, language, or culture but by the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes on the kitchen table, Sesame Street on the television screen at 4:30, the package of Marlboro cigarettes in the shirt pocket, and the same ten songs on every car radio on a certain summer day everywhere in America.””’ From his Abbott Laboratories project to his work for Associated American Artists, Benton benefited pro- fessionally and personally from the technologies Fisher de- scribes. The NAS’s mass dispersal of Lassoing Horses and the group’s fashioning of Benton as the worthiest of contempo- rary American artists helped to produce such homogeneity. NBC, the NAS, and others appropriated the artist and his work in their quest to decree a shared American identity and to enforce that nationalism as cultural hegemony.

Myers’s accolades on Art for Your Sake and numerous glow- ing reviews of An Artist in Amm‘ca notwithstanding, some observers recoiled from the mass mailing, mass publishing, and mass broadcasting of Benton’s monolithic American vi- sion. For an observer like art historian Meyer Schapiro, the artist contributed to a class- and distinction-leveling Ameri- can “sameness,” an American “web” of culture. Its “American- ness,” Schapiro argued in his 1938 review of Benton’s auto- biography, was shortsighted at best. On Art for Your Sake, Myers had announced that, with works like Lassoing Horses, Benton’s art constituted “one of the first attempts in our own generation to sing a song of America, of its largeness, strength, crudeness and power. . . those things that spring from the background of this country.”102 Myers, that is, joined Ben- ton in an evocation of consensus, in a monolithic version of national identity. Schapiro pointed out that the mere appear- ance of stock emblems such as “railroad trains and farmers” did not somehow make Benton’s art any more American, any more in touch with the folk, than had his earlier depictions of

The Art for Your Sake dramatization did not mark the first time a radio program hailed Benton’s Regionalism as na- tional in scope. On the afternoon of February 4,1936, WABC aired a program on the artist. Making clear Benton’s pre-

n 109

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

T H O M A S FIAKT BENTON O N ART FOR Y O U R S A K E 115

11 Benton, Parks, the Circus, &he Klan, the Press, cultural panel 10 from the mural A Social His&o?y of the Slate of Indiana, 1933, egg tempera and oil on canvas, complete mural 12 X 200 ft. (3.7 X 61 m). Indiana University Campus Art Collection, Bloomington (artwork 0 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.; photograph provided by the Indiana University Archives)

sumed representation of a larger polity, and demonstrating the slippery connection between section and nation, the show was entitled “Middle West Art, True American Art- Thomas Hart Benton, Artist.”’04 Schapiro’s comments thus bore relevance not only to An Artist in America but also to a mythology of the local-yet-national artist apparently fueled by radio as well as art and Iiterature.lo5

For all his caustic criticism of Benton’s autobiography and the homogenizing massculture sensibility it advocated, Scha- piro displayed an uncommonly keen understanding of the formal and narrative properties of Regionalism. The art his- torian called attention to Benton’s wavering support of racial equality and his stance on other injustices in his murals and in An Artist in Amm’ca. Moreover, Schapiro discerned in the artist’s handling of form and compositional techniques a pretense of cultural freedom, a buoyancy and boundlessness that existed in the artworks but not outside them. Recalling Benton’s earlier comments on “representational inclusive- ness” in The Arts of Life in America, Myers wrote approvingly in the NAS materials that Lassoing Horses “is a typical example of the way Benton arranges his compositions from one corner to the other” (Fig. 7) . I o G Yet it was precisely this technique that bothered Schapiro, who commented, “The common energy of his figures, each moving in its own way, a vast perspective field, resembles the optimistic idea of an expanding Ameri- can world in which everyone is active and free to follow his

ends in a limitless pace.''^^' Schapiro was suggesting some- thing more than Benton simply being out of step with the contemporary American life he claimed to know so well. He was proposing, rather, that Benton’s art form itself-includ- ing the vast, interconnected swirls in Lassoing Horses and Arts of lhe West-perpetuates a false mythology of a congealed, like-minded, and ever-expansive audience. The consensus, Schapiro declared, was a fiction.

Elsewhere in his review Schapiro referred to Benton’s semiutopian social vision as a “unity without classes,” chal- lenging what he saw as the artist’s naively limited definition of the American polity.’o8 Schapiro obviously did not share the confidence expressed by Benton, the Beards, and the NAS that a monolithic artistic message broadcast to the masses would somehow have constructive, nation-benefiting results. As Philip Fisher and others have long observed, the fact that the United States is not some unified organism whose parts link through a common culture or shared identity has long been recognized- by politicians and pundits especially-as chief among the characteristics distinguishing this nation from oppressive and totalitarian regimes.Io9 Whatever the intellectual worth and educational potential of Art for Your Sake, in hindsight it is difficult not to interpret such a large- scale program of cultural dissemination as an assumption and perpetuation of a Zeitgeist. The same Regionalism that de- mocratized culture also homogenized it; the same radio that

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

116 ART U U L L E T I N LIAKCII 9 0 0 8 V O L U M E X C N U h l B E K I

annihilated physical distance also proposed an all-unifying culture in its place.

That is to say, Benton and the NAS had a propensity to reduce American cultural identity to a single category or shibboleth, and radio played a special role in advancing the popular and idiosyncratically nationalist ideals to which Ben- ton’s art aspired. The NAS’s working definition of the United States and Benton’s understanding of artistic Regionalism were somewhat restrictive, often favoring truths and symbols that had been ratified by previous generations. In the context of the dramatization on Art for Your Sake, the use of broadcast technology in the diffusion of Benton’s art, I am arguing, could carry a taint of enforced hegemony. Shortly before NBC aired the art education program in 1940, when the network played live and recorded broadcasts of Adolf Hitler’s speeches barely rising above deafening cheers, audiences experienced firsthand the propaganda potential of radio. In these same years, American radio personalities like Father Coughlin and Huey Long exploited the medium to advance anti-Semitism, racism, and nativism.”’ Not unlike the ever- popular “assimilationist” family dramas-playing up the elim- ination of ethnic difference among largely Eastern European kmigrks-on radio in the 1930s and 1940s, Art for Your Sake sought to naturalize and normalize.’ ’’ When the program’s producers claimed that Benton’s travels through “Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Arkansas” made him uniquely qualified to paint “the world of America,” they were, intentionally or unwittingly, sub scribing to a volk principle seeking to unite culture through allegiance to its perceived greatest commonalities.’ l 2

In this context, the choice of Benton’s Lassoing Horses for the program seems to have been very deliberate on the part of Myers and the show’s producers. “The distinguished art critic” used the discussion of the watercolor as an opportunity to praise the surging interest in American “wall paintings,” stopping only one step short of crediting Benton-and the sort of Regionalism typified in Lassoing Horses-for a dramatic increase of public interest and participation in the visual arts:

It is one of the wonderful coincidences that shortly after Benton had begun to paint his astonishing murals, the Federal Government became interested in art. . . . That it was not a flash in the pan is attested by the fact that many art centers have sprung up in various parts of the country, and that many more people than ever before are inter- ested in art. Although I am not trying to hold Benton responsible for this entire movement, it is probably true that his inspiring and exciting example had something to do with turning artists’ minds to the song of America.’I3

Through Art for Your Sake, increasingly more Americans were-literally- hearing that song, joining in a chorus hail- ing “America” as one unified organism. Myers’s comments would certainly have seemed appropriate in 1931, when Ben- ton painted Lassoing Horses. As the evolution and eventual cancellation of the program demonstrated all too clearly, however, such a message of domestic oneness and welfare was, by the Benton dramatization in early 1940, awkward and anachronistic at best.

From Drama to Pageant In March 1940, the National Art Society’s Report of tliePresident asserted that Art for Your Sake was “so successful that a second series” would be broadcast to Chicago public schools in the fall of that year, with additional sets of portfolios of seventeen prints each to be mailed to the teachers. But the Report also noted that after “test[ing] the soundness of our approach” during the 1939-40 season, the NAS would be free to sever ties with NBC and thus “discontinue the experiment” in broadcasting if so desired.Il4 There is no record of additional broadcasts of Art for Your Sake, and it appears that its first season was its last. In hindsight, one wonders if the assump- tion of cultural consensus ultimately helped or hindered the NAS. Circulating comments and artistic imagery more fitting to a 1931, prewar milieu than a 1940 setting may have reeked of misplaced nationalism. Given the high hopes pinned on the affiliation with Benton-the superlative nature of the January 6, 1940, script, the fashioning of the Dr. Benton character in the first episode of Art for Your Sake the em- brace of Regionalism could have sent mixed messages on the heels of American involvement in World War 11. The discon- tinuation of the program and the subsequent reconfiguration of NBC’s collaboration with Bernard Myers illuminate the critical fortunes of Benton’s transnational mandate and, in a broader sense, some of the problems inherent in the cultural nationalism of about 1940.

By mid-April 1940, officials at both the NAS and NBC were concerned for the fate of Art for Your Sake and proposed several avenues through which the program, or a variant on it, could continue through the summer of that year and into the following broadcast season. A common complaint con- cerned the financial management and development efforts of the NAS and its ability to obtain reproductions for subscrib- ers. One option-the one ultimately taken, and which effec- tively terminated the NAS-featured a collaboration between NBC and the American Association of Museums (AAM), whose chairman of education, Francis Henry Taylor, was also director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the time and had long expressed interest in Arl for Your Sake. This plan would feature reproductions of paintings from various col- lections in those regions to which the new program would be broadcast. NAS trustee James Rowland Angell favored this option, which resulted in a radio program called The Pageant of Arl, because it promised to be more intellectual, with period music, literary allusions, and historical references grounding the works of art in a cultural ~0n tex t . I ’~

Throughout 1939 and 1940, NAS “professional director” Frederick T. Fisher expressed yet more exuberance for mass distributing cultural products. Recalling Benton’s and Wood’s calls for regional art clubs and mass-audience partic- ipation, Fisher envisioned the NAS sponsoring an “Art Infor- mation Service, a Photograph Index of Contemporary Amer- ican Art, a Lecture Bureau for art organizations and a series of travelling exhibitions.”Il6 Lacking concrete details, this enthusiasm rubbed Angell the wrong way. With the proceeds from what would become Art fw Your Sake, Fisher originally hoped to buy paintings by American artists at the 1939 World’s Fair (for example, those works depicted in the NAS volume Amm’can Art Today) and distribute them through a series of NASorganized traveling loan exhibitions.”’ As early

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

THOMAS H A R T B E N T O N O N A R 7 FOR Y O U R S A K E 117

as October 1939-the date of the first Art for Your Sake broadcast-Fisher was busy lobbying government officials on behalf of the NAS, attempting to have the radio program broadcast to South America.”’ The former Yale president knew, however, that Fisher’s schemes, which depended on expensive highquality colorplates, entailed aggressive solici- tation of sponsors and a commercialization that threatened to transform Art for Your Sake. Angell’s correspondence from this period reveals his disapproval that Fisher acted without consulting the NAS board and indicates that Fisher sought personal gain from what was supposedly conceived as a self- less art-reform crusade.Il9

The replacement of Art for Your Sake with The Pageant of Art parallels some of the larger political and cultural shifts from isolationism to internationalism that ultimately saw the United States enter World War 11. Myers, who served on the AAM Committee of Education, emceed the new program and also organized a similar, fifteen-minute weekly broadcast for NBC radio called Art in the N ~ s . ’ ~ ’ Surveying materials from “The Dawn of Art” through “The Period following the Industrial Revolution,” The Pageant of Art made no mention of contem- porary American art. In a reversal of NAS policy, The Pageanl made no claims for American exceptionalism, or for Region- alism as the inheritor of some noble tradition.

Much more than the fare offered on Art for Your Sake, the subject and approach of The Pageant of Art matched the content of current radio programming, particularly news broadcasts-a sobering shift dramatized by the subjects of Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Throughout the 1930s, the chats focused primarily on the economy and, occasionally, on other domestic issues, such as “midterm elections.” Roose- velt’s topic on September 3, 1939, though, was “the Euro- pean war”; the next broadcast, on May 26, 1940, addressed “national defense.”’21 By the time Art for Your Sake high- lighted Benton in early January 1940, the critical fortunes of Regionalism, with its perceived insular aesthetic, had been ebbing since at least the middle of the previous decade. Benton and company were increasingly overshad- owed by Surrealists and practitioners of other abstract (and often European) styles with more universal, subjec- tive sensibilities. The cultural and political message of a program targeted as “art for your sake,” that is, was quickly waning in favor of a more international “art for art’s sake.” Still, it is not so surprising that a relatively isolationist program like Art for Your Sake (which even Americanized European styles) should be launched and find temporary success in the 1939-40 season. Polls showed that most Americans resolutely opposed intervention, yet at the same time overwhelmingly recognized the impending reality of American involvement in the war.’22

Art for Your Sake had frequently valorized Regionalism through art historical comparisons to old masters treated on the program. Following the Benton broadcast in 1940, Myers announced, “The fact that a modern painter like Benton has reverted to the painting of the Italian Renais- sance for his technical inspiration seems to show that the art of modern America is, in many ways, the result of a long tradition of painting that has been developing over the past five hundred years.” In his next sentence Myers made yet clearer the heroic lineage from one mural painter to

FOX A N D WOLF HVNT by Peter Pard Rrtbenr (1577-1640) An imprts\i\i. i\.iiiipIc ut Rulwnr’ iurhulent pniniings of thc Flciiikh cnun in the wtwtcentli wiiturr

FLOOD SCENE by Ion Corbino (1go5-) A work b y ii young Aincricaii whca h;fi txcn influrncrcl by the powerful nnil colorful trdiiion of such ninstcrs ;is Rulxns

12 Reproductions of Peter Paul Rubens, Fox and WolfHunt, and Jon Corbino, Flood Scene, from Art Jbr Your Sake, National Art Society membership brochure, New York: National Art Society, 1939 (Rubens artwork in the public domain; Corbino reproduced by permission of Marcia Corbino)

another, saying, “Next week we are going to examine one of the beginnings of that tradition of one of the greatest mural painters of all time, Mi~helangelo .” ’~~ The program reinforced an equation made in NAS’s promotional mate- rials, which frequently sought out uncanny juxtapositions between Regionalist and old master paintings. A member- ship brochure, for example, claimed a direct lineage from Peter Paul Rubens to the American Scene sensibility and representational aesthetic of contemporary painter Jon Corbino (Fig. 12).

As if thinking of the historical reenactments on NBC’s Art for Your Sake from the previous year, Myers reported that the new radio program The Pageant of Art would present “not merely a dramatization of the physical contents of the 1,700 museums of art, science and history in the United States, but a vivid picture of the historical and philosophical truths to which these buildings and their contents are dedicated.” In his preface to the booklet accompanying The Pageant of Art,

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

118 A R T BULLETIN M A R C I I z n n x V O I . U M E xc N U M B E R I

Taylor asserted that the United States needed a “mobilization of the human mind” to match the nation’s outlay of “billions of armament.” For Taylor, the latter meant nothing without the former. He aligned the goals of The Pageant of Art with a contemporary search for “Truth” and enlightenment that, once achieved, could defeat the forces of evil. Quoting Isaac Newton and Edmund Burke in his preface, Taylor under- scored the international sources and timelessness of such truths.Iz4 The Pageanl ofArt was subtitled A Guide to Art and the Histoly of Culture, and readers and listeners could have little doubt that more was at stake than giving American art and culture their proper due.

At least momentarily, Benton espoused a similarly solemn internationalism. He engaged global politics as well as a budding Surrealist aesthetic in several monumental, self-con- sciously horrific paintings in his Year of Pm’l series of 1941-42 (Fig. 13). However, as we have seen, any over-the-top, anti-

13 Benton, Exterminate! from The Year of Peril, 1942, oil on canvas, 97% X 72 in. (247.7 X 182.9 cm). The State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia (artwork 0 T. H. Benton and R. P. Benton Testamentary Trusts / UMB Bank Trustee / Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.)

Axis frenzy we may detect in these works can be weighed against the fact that this Abbott Laboratories-funded project also promoted the Benton-AAA publicity machine. Erika Doss has made a persuasive case that with The Year of Pen‘l, the artist was effectively riding the Surrealism-Magic Realism bandwagon.Iz5 Art historian Amy Lyford has observed further that the very title of the series “seems designed to resonate with the anti-Japanese hysteria in which claims of an en- croaching ‘Yellow Peril’ permeated the West Coast.”126 The lines separating Benton-as-interventionist, Benton-as-home- grown-isolationist, and Benton-as-publicist are indeed slip- pery ones.

With their horror vacui clutter and severe antifascist im- agery, the Year of Peril paintings were profoundly unpopu- lar. The Office of War Information (whose predecessor, the Office of Facts and Figures, had distributed The Year of Peril posters) would ultimately abandon the project in

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

T H O M A S HART B E N T O N O N A R T F O R Y O U R S A K E 119

favor of a more user-friendly, corporate flavor that Doss has dubbed a “strategy of optimistic hype.”lZ7 The experi- ences with Abbott and the Office of War Information both illuminate and complicate our understanding of the trans- formation of Art for Your Sake to The Pageant to Art. Given the context of “optimistic hype,” one wonders about the extent to which contemporary observers would have balked at the disjunction between the early 1930s Region- alist ideals espoused in the Benton dramatization and the interventionist positions increasingly taken by American politicians, journalists, and cultural critics. Considering Benton’s artistic production in the 1940s and 1950s and well into the Cold War, however, the artist himself hardly seemed troubled by any such perceived anachronism.

In his writing Benton took a less ambiguous stance, his comments marked by a global concern for human rights, paralleling the official, government-allied stance of The Pageanl of Art. Not long before the Benton dramatization on Art for Your Sake, he adopted a clear and measured tone against totalitarianism. “I’m anti-Fascist,” he told a re- porter from the New York Posl in April 1939, “because I like to keep my tag wagging. I want to be able to sound off when I want to.”’28 In 1940 he announced to the Kansas City Star, ‘We in this country put no stock in racial genius. We do not believe that, because a man comes from one racial strain rather than another, he starts with superior equipment. We do not believe this is true in any field, but particularly in the field of creative endeavor do we repu- diate it.” Yet his comments appeared in an article called “American Artists Have Won Fight for Realism, Asserts Thomas Hart Benton.’’1z9 These statements demonstrate that if Benton was not an isolationist, he nonetheless used his democratic pluralism to champion American Scene painting, to defend his particular variety of cultural nation- alism, and to increase public participation in his art. They also confirm the artist’s attempts to expand his audience in a manner consistent with radio publicity, in a way that caters to a public in supposed need of a shared identity. It is precisely this agenda to which Art for Your Sake sub- scribed, and for which The Pageant of Art sounded a death knell.

Leo G. Mazow is curator of American art at the Palmer Museum of Art at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is also afJiliate associate professor of art histoly. Tile author of essays on George Inness and John Covert, he is the contributing editor of Picturing the Banjo (2005) [Palmer Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, university Park, Pa., 16802, LGMI I @psu.edu].

Notes I wish to thank Anthony Cutler, Rachael DeLue. Lory Frankel, Barbara Kutis, Marc Gotlieb, Alissa Walls Mazow, Jan Keene Muhlert, Richard Powell, Sarah Rich, Clarence Sheffield Jr., Katherine Staab, Justin Wolff, and the anony- mous readers for The Art Bullefin for their insights and assistance in the preparation of this article. This essay is particularly indebted to Erika Doss, whose teaching, scholarship, and ongoing critical support have in no small way benefited my work.

The George Dewey and Mary K. Krumrine Endowment at Penn State Univer- sity has generously supported rights and reproduction costs for this essay.

1. On modernism as experience, see Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a

Definition of American Modernism,” Anrm‘can Quarterly 39 (Spring

2. John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (1930), in U.S.A. (New York: Li- 1987): 7-26.

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

brary of America, 1996). 2. Richard Wright, Lawd Today (1937; New York Walker, 1963). As in Benton’s painting, Wright did not need to have a radio or its sounds present in order to approximate the radio style. Lawd Today approaches the radio style as Jake’s stasis and entrapment evoke phonic static, and as the abrupt scraping of divergent dialogues simu- lates the dizzying sensation of searching for a program up and down the radio dial. Wright’s recurring clatter and disparate utterances have the radiolike effect of gradually cohering into a continuous flow. This sensation is particularly apparent in Wright’s recounting of Jake’s experiences working in the post office (114): “As time passed all the noises gradually fused into one general din and imperceptibly dulled the senses.” The narrative-colliding, scraping of passages, and simultaneous inter- ruption and continuity that I am calling “radio style” obviously has debts to other media. Benton attributed this aesthetic in part to the pictorial overlays found in rotogravure inserts in period newspapers. Modern scholarship, focusing on select commissions of the 1930s and 1940s, has demonstrated that Benton was deeply invested in the themes and styles of Depressionera popular film. Like other artists of his generation, he painted several works recalling the production MI- ues, compositional techniques, narratives, scale, and tempo of con- temporary cinema. Yet any such “cinematic style” is in many ways grounded in a sonically enhanced “radio style.” See Erika Doss, “Re- gionalists in Hollywood: Painting, Film, and Patronage, 1925-1945” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1983); and idem, Benton, Pollock, and fhe Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism lo Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 129. Albert N. Williams, The Ammka of Mister Thomas Hart Benton, including the Fohongs, episode 14 of Art fur Your Sake (New York National Broadcasting Company, 1940). A copy of this typescript is in Miller Nichols Library, University of Missouri-Kansas City (hereafter MNL). Bernard Myers is probably best known as an editor of the seventeen- volume Encyclopedia of World Art (New York McGraw-Hill, 1959-87). On Myers, see Who’s Who in America, 39th ed., 1976-1977 (Chicago: Marquis Who’s Who, 1977), 2284; and Craig Hugh Smyth, “The De- partment of Fine Arts for Graduate Students at New York University,” in The Early Years ofArt Histo9 in fhe United States: Notes and Essays on Departments, Teaching, and Scholars, ed. Smyth and Peter M. Lukehart (Princeton: Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology, 1993), 75. On Williams, see Sheldon B. Hickox, Station Relations memo sent to NBC radio affiliates, October 3, 1939, National Broad- casting Company Records, Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin-Madison (hereafter NBCW), box 66, folder 22; and Milton Allen Kaplan, Radio and Poet9 (New York Columbia University Press,

“Radio Programs Scheduled for Broadcast This Week,” New York Times, April 16, 1939, x l l ; April 18, 1939, 26; “Radio Programs This Week,” New York Times, September 15, 1940, 141; and “At the Benton Home When Famous Guests Are Entertained,” Kamas Cify Star, March 13, 1938, 2, between secs. C and D. Paul Bolin, e-mail correspondence with the author, August 30, 2005; Clayton Funk, e-mail correspondence with the author, August 30, 2005; Jon D. Swartz and Robert C. Reiner, Handbook of Old-Time Radio: A Comprehasive Gui& lo Golden Age Radio Listening and Collecting (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993). On the radio programs and “schools of the air,” see Paul E. Bolin, “Art over the Airwaves: A Brief Examination of Radio Art Education in the United States, 1929-1951,” in The Histoly of Art Education: Prp medings from the Second Penn State Conference, 1989, ed. Patricia M. Am- b u r g et al. (Reston, Va.: National Art Education Association, 1992). 274-78; and Clayton Funk, “The Art in Amm’ca Radio Programs, 1934-1935,” Studies in Art Education 40 (Autumn 1998): 31-45. Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, Ainerica in Midpassage, drawings by Wilfred Jones (New York Macmillan, 1939), vol. 2, 645. On the origins of radio in the United States, see Erik Barnouw, A Histmy of Broadcasting in the United States, vol. 1 (New York Oxford University Press, 1966). See David Michael Ryfe, “Franklin and the Fireside Chats,” Journal of Comnzunication 49 (August 1999): 80-103. Alice Joan Saab, “Painting the Town Red (and White and Blue): Art and Politics in 1930s New York City” (PhD diss., New York University, 1999), 2. Blevins Davis to Rockwell Kent, September 15, 1939, NBCW, box 66, folder 22.

1949), 294-95.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

120 A K T B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2008 V O L U M E X C N U M B E K 1

14. Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine, The Profile and the Prrsi- dent: Am’ca’s Conversalion ruifh IDR (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

15. Charles A. Beard and William Beard, The Aim’can 1-euiafhan: Tlie Re- public in the Machine Age (New York Macmillan, 1930), 5.

16. See Thomas Hart Benton, “American Regionalism: A Personal History of the Movement,” in An Anm’can in Art: A Professional and Technical Aufobiography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1969), 147-92. As a selfconscious creation and promotion of a “Midwestern school” formed of the three artists, American “Regionalism” in the visual arts originated as a 1933 sales ploy by art dealer Maynard Walker. See Heniy Adams, Thornas Hart Benton: A n A i m k m Original (New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 216-20.

17. Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in Amen’ca (1937), 3rd ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968). 281-82, 298; “Benton Rejoices as Art Hung in ‘Saloon’; ‘Persephone’ Adorns the Diamond Horseshoe,” New York Times, April 9, 1941, 27; and Doss, Benton, Pollock, and f l i p

Pulifirs of Modernism, 282. 18. Benton, An Artisf in Amen‘ca, 318-19; Sidney Larson to Diana C. Gas-

ton, July 23, 1986, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Thomas Hart Ben- ton files (hereafter N-AM), cabinet 2, drawer 1; and Doss, Benton, Pollurk, and the Politics of Modeniirm, 282-99.

19. Vincent A. Keesee, “Regionalism: The Book Illustrations of Benton, Curry, and Wood” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 1972).

20. Doss, Benfon, Pollock, and the Politics of Modeniism, 229-41. 21. Doss, “Catering to Consumerism: Associated American Artists and the

Marketing of Modern Art,” Winferlliur Porffolio 26, nos. 2-3 (1991): 143-67. For analogous book-selling crusades in the 1930s, see Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making ofMiddle6roru Culture (Chapel Hill: Univer- sity of North Carolina Press, 1992).

Pollurk, and the I’olifirs ofModmzism, 161-66. See also Benton, An Arti.sl in Amm’ra, 279-80, 311, 313.

23. Benton, An Artisf in Amprica, 280. 24. Reeves Lewenthal, “A Word about the Associated American Artists,” in

22. Doss, “Catering to Consumerism,” 152, 156, 158; and Doss, Benfon,

Thornas Hart Benfon: A Descri$five Cafalogue, by Thomas Craven (New York Associated American Artists, 1939), 62.

25. Creekmore Fath, Tlic Lifliographs of Thomas Hart Baton, new ed. (Aus- tin: University of Texas Press, 1979).

26. Ibid., 84, 86. On the lithograph, see Leo G. Mazow, “Shallow Creek”: Tliomas Hart Brnlon and Armkan Watenuays (University Park Palmer Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, 2007).

Anierica Discovers the Arkansas Ozarks,” Arkansas Historical Quarferly 61, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1-35.

27. Brooks Blevins, “‘In the Land of a Million Smiles’: Twentieth-Century

28. Benton, An Artist in Ama’ra, 318-19. 29. Saab, “Painting the Town Red,” 259. See also idem, Fur the Millions:

Amm‘ran A Y ~ and Culfure between fke Wars (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 132.

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); and J. M. Mancini, “‘Mes- sin’ with the Furniture Man’: Early Country Music, Regional Culture, and the Search for an Anthological Modernism,” A m ’ c a n Lifermy His- tmy 16 (Summer 2004): 208-37.

30. See Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradilion in the Southeasf

31. See Saab, “Painting the Town Red,” 2-3, 9. 32. Grant Wood, “Revolt against the City” (1935), in James M. Dennis,

33. “Benton Visualizes People’s Museum,” Neru York Times, May 3, 1941. Granf Wood (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 234.

Adding to already existing tensions between Benton and the adminis- tration and trustees of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, in April 1941 Ben- ton held a sort of press conference in which he told reporters that the museum as we know it is “a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait,” advocating that museums be sold off and replaced by art-hanging saloons, Rotary Clubs, and the like. With notso-veiled reference to his superiors, Benton claimed that gay administrators (whom h e referred to as “the third sex”) had infiltrated the art world and loathed his art. The story was carried in newspapers nationwide, drawing severe rebukes of the artist. The trustees fired Benton in May 1941. For a survey of this drawn-out scandal and the press it generated, see Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: A n Aim’can Original, 303-13.

34. “Ledger Announces Exhibits at Library-Picture of Week Begins Mon- day-with Benton as First World Famous Artist,” Mexiru (Mu. j Evening Ledger, January 18, 1951, 1.

and 2, Soriological Review 20, no. 1 (1928): 23, 32; no. 2 (1928): 138. 35. Lewis Mumford, “The Theory and Practice of Regionalism,” pts. 1

36. Ibid., pt. 2, 137.

37. Lewis Mumford, “An American Epic in Paint,” Nmu Rqbublic 50 (April 6, 1927): 197.

38. Doss, Benfon, Pollock, and the Polifics of Modernism, 94. 39. Rqbort ofthe Prr?idenf: National Art Sociefy (New York National Art Soci-

ety, 1940), 15. See also “April Makes Some Plans for May,” New YurA Times, April 21, 1940, 130. A1.l for Your Sake broadcasts originated from WEAF in New York and were carried over the NBCRed Network.

of fhe Presidenf, 25-26. Art for Your Sake was also broadcast throughout New England on stations on the Yankee Network; James Rowland Angell to R. L. Harlow, October 17, 1939, NBCW, box 66. folder 22.

1606; “Art Group Formed to Educate Public,” Nerv Yurh Times, October 7, 1939, 22; and Frederick T. Fisher to James Rowland Angell, June 28, 1939, 9, NBCW, box 66, folder 22.

Press, 1974), 370-71, 384; and George Wilson Pierson, Yak: Tlir h i - vmity Colkge, 1921-1937 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955),

43. “Dr. Angell as Educational Counselor of the National Broadcasting

40. See

41. “New Art Society Formed,” Publisher2 Werkly 135 (October 21, 1939):

42. Brooks Mather Kelley, Yale: A Hktoty (New Haven: Yale University

22-29, 508-10, 518-19, 529-30.

Company,” School and Society 46 (July 3, 1937): 13; James Rowland An- gell, “Radio and National Morale,” Atnoican Journal of Sociology 47 (No- vember 1941): 352-59; and Orrin E. Dunlap Jr.. “From Yale to Ra- dio,” Nnu Yurk Times, December 3, 1939, 168.

44. James Rowland Angell, quoted in Gerald Holland, Art for Your Sakr: Draniafization of Lives and Works o f the Wurld’s Grrafesf Artists in 20 I$i- sodes, episode 1, October 7, 1939 (New York National Broadcasting Company, 1939), 2, copy of typescript in MNL.

45. See Bruce Lenthall, “Tuning into a Changing American Culture in the Great Depression” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1999), 195, 198.

46. Report oJfhe President, 1-3, 7, 21; Aim’can Art Today: Gallery of Amm’ran Art, New Yurh Wurld’s Fair (New York: National Art Society, 1939); and Airmican Art Today: Sixteen Re(/roductions in Full Color; Neru York World’s Fair (New York: National Art Society, 1939).

47. Rq+iort of the President, 24. 48. Elizabeth Wells Robertson, Arf fur Your Sake: An A1.l Ap/mciufion Work-

book (New York National Art Society, 1939), 30. 49. Bernard Myers, Lessons in Art Appreciation, no. 1 (New York National

Committee for Art Appreciation, 1937). 7. The forerunner of the NAS, the National Committee for Art Appreciation was formed in 1937 to mass-produce and distribute to museums and schools portfo- lios containing reproductions of forty-eight paintings by American, Renaissance, and Baroque artists. The committee produced the prints for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and their surplus formed the Arf for Your Sake portfolios. See nplort of the Presihif , 8; and Amm’can Art Today: Sixteen Rqbroducfiom.

50. Myers, Lessons in Art Apjntciation, 7. 51. Frank Ernest Hill, Listen and Learn: Fifteen Years of Adult Educafion on

fhe Air (New York American Association for Adult Education, 19377, 175-76; and Report of the President, 14.

52. Report of the President, 12-13. 53. See Doss, Benfon, Pollock, and fhe Polilics ofMociPmism, 98. On the auto-

biography, see Elizabeth Schultz, “An Artist in A m k c Thomas Hart Benton’s ‘Song of Himself,’” in Tliomas Hart Benfon: Artist, Writm, and Intellecfual, by R. Douglas Hurt and Mary K. Dains (Jefferson City: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1989), 165-89.

54. “New Laurel to Benton: Artist One of Nation’s ‘Five Best Husbands,”’ Kansas City Star, February 16, 1940, 3; and “Model Hubbies Listed: Gehrig, Roosevelt Listed, Also How to Be One,” New York Herald Tri- bune, February 16, 1940, newspaper clipping, in N-AMA.

55. Report of the Presidenf, 7. 56. Williams, The America of Misfer Thomas Hurl Benfon, 2, 7, 14, 15. 57. Alan C. Buechner, “Thomas Hart Benton and American Folk Music,”

in Thomas Hart Benfon: Clironicler oJAmerirn’s Folk Hen’fage (Annandale- on-Hudson, N.Y.: Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Milton and Sally Avery Art Center, Bard College Center, 1984), 71, 73.

58. Williams, The A m a i m oJMister Tliomas Hart Benton, title page. 59. Benton, An Artisf in Amm’ca, 114, quoted and discussed in Vivien

Green Fryd, “‘The Sad Twang of Mountain Voices’: Thomas Hart Benton’s Sources of Countty Music,“ South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (Winter 1995): 327.

60. Williams, The A m ’ c a of Mister Thomas Hart Benton, 11 , 13. 61. Holland, Art fur Your Sake, 6 . 62. Fisher to Angell, June 28, 1939.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

T H O h l A S H A R T B E N T O N O N A R T FOR Y O U R S A K E 121

63. Williams, The A m e r i c a ofMister Thomas Hart Benfon, 9, 10. 64. Benton, A n Arfist in Amm’ca, 44. For historical understandings of

“art for art’s sake,” see Robin Spencer, “Whistler, Swinburne and Art for Art’s Sake,” in Affer fhe Pre-Raphaelifes: Arf and Aesfheficism in Victorian England, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Manchester: Manches- ter University Press, 1999), 59-89; and Martha Johnson Harris, “Clive Bell’s Formalism in Historical Perspective” (PhD diss., Uni- versity of Georgia, 1985).

65. Williams, The Aitrm’ca of Mister Thomas Harf Benfon, title page. Presum- ably an a cappella group, the Norsemen Quartette performed throughout the 1930s and early 1940s on the New York radio stations WAF, WJZ (both of which were NBC affiliates), and WABC.

66. See Albert N. Williams, Eugene Speicher, episode 28 of Arf for Your Sake (New York National Broadcasting Company, 1940), title page, 5, 8, 12-13, 15-16, 18-19, 22, typescript copy in MNL.

67. James Rowland Angell to Arthur E. Braun, October 30, 1939, NBCW, box 66, folder 22. Copies of two photographs on file at the Nelson- Atkins Museum of Art depict Benton reading a script as he speaks into a microphone bearing the initials KMBC and CBS, and one with KHB (N-AMA, cabinet 2, drawer 1).

68. Bolin correspondence, 2005; and Funk correspondence, 2005. On the paucity of surviving Arf for Your Salte and similar recordings, see Swartz and Reiner, Handbook of Old-Time Radio, ix-xv, 108. Wvartz and Rei- ner’s comments are seconded by old-time radio enthusiast and collec- tor Danny Goodwin (correspondence with the author, September 29, 2005). Michele Hilmes writes of the “unique challenge” posed by re- search in the history of radio in Radio Voices: Amerirun Broadrasfing, 1922-1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). xvi.

69. Levine and Levine, The Pea@ and fhe Presidenf, 14-15. 70. Williams, The A m ’ c n of Mister Thomas Harf Benfon, 9-10. 71. “Supplementary Instructions No. 11E to the American Guide Man-

ual,” October 1938, quoted in Jerrold Hirsch, Pwfraif ofAmm’ca: A Culfural H i s f q a/ fhe Federal Wrifers’ Projecf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 86, 87.

72. Hirsch, Pmlraif ofAmm’ca, 95. 73. Williams, The Ama‘ca of Mister Thomm Harf Benton, 1. 74. Holland, Arf for Your Sake, 3. 75. Arf for Your Sake, NAS membership brochure (New York National Art

76. Reporf of the Presidaf, 13, 14. 77. “‘Art for Your Sake,”’ Bullelin o f f h e Milwaukee Arf Insfifufe 14 (Novem-

Society, 1939), n.p.

ber 1939): 3; and Fisher to Angell, December 11, 1939, NBCW, box 66, folder 22.

New York, December 8, 1939, NBCW, box 66, folder 22. 78. L. H. Titterton to Pat Kelly, interdepartmental correspondence, NBC,

79. Fisher to Angell, December 11, 1939. 80. “Notes on Television,” New York Times, January 28, 1940, 10; “Telecasts

This Week,” New York Times, March 10, 1940, 161, and March 24, 1940, 118. The television version met considerable enthusiasm from top executives at NBC; Thomas H. Hutchinson to A. H. Morton, De- cember 5, 1939, NBC interdepartmental correspondence, NBCW, box 66, folder 22. No film or audio recording of the telecasts is known to survive.

81. Williams, The A m ’ c a ofMister Thomas Harf Betifon, 10. 82. Benton, A n Arfisf in Amrn’ca, 217. 83. Bernard Myers, in Williams, The Arnrn.cn of Mister Thomas Had Benlon,

21, 22. Benton repeatedly attempted to get increased monies-signifi- cantly more than was initially agreed on-from Juliana Force, secre- tary to Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney, for his work on the Whitney mu- rals, a scandal that was reported in the press; see Anita Brenner, “Art and American Life,” Nafion 136 (January 18, 1933): 72-73. Henry Ad- ams, Thomas Hart Benfon: A n Aim’cnii Orip‘nal, 184, points out that four years later, in his autobiography, Benton gave an “audaciously misleading account” of this course of events.

His Way Back to Missouri,” A d s and Decorafion 42 (February 1935): 20, reprinted in Matthew Baigell, ed., A Thomas Harf Benfon Miscellany: Selecfions from His Published Opinions, 1916-1 960 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1971), 76.

84. See Benton’s comments in Ruth Pickering, “Thomas Hart Benton on

85. Adams, Thomas Hart Benfon: An Amm’can Original, 186. 86. @urf of fhe Presidenf, 25-26. As of 1941, the largest radio station in

Wyoming carried only 500 watts; Wyoming: A Guide fo Ifs Hisfory, High- ways, and People, American Guidebook Series (New York Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1941), xxii-xxiii.

87. Rel,orf o f f h e President, 11, 16. See also Blevins Davis to Mrs. Harry Payne (Gertrude Vanderbilt) Whitney, September 22, 1939, NBCM’, box 66, folder 22.

88. “Program Features Benton: Foremost Artist’s Life and Work Is Subject of Study,” Casper Tribune Herald, November 6, 1940; clipping in Associ- ated American Artists papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter M A papers), reel D255, frame 795.

89. As late as 1947, Wyoming could boast only one broadcast station, KFBU, in Cheyenne. See earlyradiohistory.com.us/1922incr.htm; ~wv.highwestenergy.com/About%2OUs/history.htn1; and \vIvw.census. gov/population/cencounts/wyl90090.txt (accessed summer 2006). Charles Beard and Mary Beard observed in 1939 (Amrn.cn in Midpns- sage, vol. 2, 644) that “special devices furnishing ‘free-wind’ power en- abled rural homes in regions not yet electrified to have the radio.”

90. Wyoming: A Guide, 4. 91. Ibid., 3. 92. Sidney J. Harris, “Art for All of Us,” Associated American Artists Bullefin

93. Henry Adams, Thomas Harf Benfon: A n Infimafe View, exh. cat., Federal

94. Thomas Hart Benton, in Tlie Arfs of Lye in America: A Seties of Murals

35 (1946): n.p., AAA papers, reel D255, frame 78.

Reserve Branch of Kansas City, Kansas City, Mo., 1985, 5.

b~ Thomas Hurl Benfon (New York Whitney Museum of American Art, 1932), 5.

95. Thomas Hart Benton, interview by Arlene Jacobowitz, Lisfening lo Pic- lures, Brooklyn Museum, July 7, 1966, Brooklyn Museum, typescript, 11.

96. C. Beard and W. Beard, The American Ltviafhan, 5. 97. Kathleen A. Foster et al., Thomas Harf Benfon and fhe Indiana Murals

(Bloomington: Indiana University Art Museum, in association with Indiana University Press, 2000), 72; and Erika Doss, “New Deal Poli- tics and Regionalist Art: Thomas Hart Benton’s A Social History offhe Sfafe of Indiana,” Prospecfs 17 (1992): 372-73. This section of the mural continues to elicit controversy and criticism on account of its odious and incendiary subject matter; see Nick Riddle, “Black Students Pro- test Benton Mural,” Art News 101 (May 2002): 56.

98. Report of fhe Presidenf, 14, 15. 99. Orrin E. Dunlap, Dunlap’s Radio & Television Almanac (New York

Harper and Brothers, 1951). 126; and Robert L. Hilliard, The Broad- casf Cenfury: A Biography of A m ’ c a n Broadcasfing (Boston: Focal Press, 1997), 91. See also Christopher H. Sterling and John M. Kittross, Slay Tuned: A Concise Hisfory ofAmm’can Broadcasfing, 2nd ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1990), 656. As ofJanuary 1940, 743 radio stations operated in the United States; Dunlap, 126.

100. See Reporf of fhe President, 16. 101. Philip Fisher, “Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the

Promise of American Transparency,” Xejrresenfafions, no. 24 (Autumn 1988): 66-67.

102. Myers, in Williams, The Amm’ca of Misfer Tliomas Harf Benfon, 19.

103. Meyer Schapiro, “Populist Realism,” Parfisan Review 4, no. 2 (1938): 53-57.

104. “Radio Programs Scheduled for Broadcast This Week,” Nau York Times, February 2, 1936, x15.

105. O n the fluidity and instability of the regional and transnational in modern literature and culture, see Hsan Hsu, “Literature and Re- gional Production,” American Liferary Hisfory 17, no. 1 (2005): 36- 69.

106. Benton, in The A* of Lye in Amm‘ca, 9-10; and Myers, Lessons in Arf A,bpeciafion, 7. On Benton’s formal program of connectedness, see Emily Braun and Thomas Branchick, Tliomas Had Benfon: The America Today Murals (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1985).

107. Schapiro, “Populist Realism,” 55. 108. Ibid. 109. See Fisher, “Democratic Social Space,” 60-61. 110. On the role of radio in Hitler’s and Coughlin’s programs, see Doug-

las B. Craig, Fireside Polifics: Radio and Political Culfure in fhe Unifed Sfafes, 1920-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 160-68, 231. On Hitler’s strong and frequent use of radio, see the time lines provided in Dunlap, Dunlap’s Radio & Television Almanac, esp. 119-20, 124. Contemporary popular novels also emphasized (and perhaps warned against) the role of radio in building a fascist state; see John Dos Passos, Number Onp: A Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943); and Sinclair Lewis, If Can’f H a j ~ j ~ r n Here (New York Sundial Press, 1935).

111. See Hilmes, Radio Voices, chap. 1.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4

122 ART B U L L E T I N M A R C H 2008 VOI.UME X C N U M B E R 1

112. See M7illianis, Tlir Amrnrn ofizlister Thornas Hart Benton, 9, 11 113. Myers, in Williams, Tlir Ammirn uf Alislrr Timornas Hart Benlon, 20. 114. Q>ort ofthr Prrsidenl, 9, 12. 115. Wilfred S. Roberts to William G. Preston, NBC memo, April 16, 1940,

NBCW, box 35, folder 74. See algo Fisher to Angell, December 12, 1939, NBCW, box 66. folder 22.

1939-40, NBCM’, box 66, folder 22. 116. Frederick T. Fisher, “M’hat Is the National Art Society?” typescript, ca.

117. Fisher to Angell, June 28, 1939. 118. Angell to Fisher, October 26, 1939, NBCW, box G6, folder 22. 119. Ibid. Whatever his personal feelings may have been, Angell nonethe-

less personally lobbied several large American corporations on Fish- er’s behalf, including the New York Times, Reader’s Digest, the Met- ropolitan Life Insurance Company, and the New York Life Insurance Company; Angell to Fisher, June 11, 1940; Fisher to Angell, July 2, 1940; and Angell to Griffin M. Lovelace, October 11, 1940; all NBCM’, box 35, folder 74.

120. Bernard Myers, The Pngennl ofArt: A GnidP to Art and fhe Hislmy oJCuI- turr (New York: Columbia University Press for the National Broadcast-

ing Company, in cooperation with the American Association of Muse- ums, 1941); and Walter G. Preston to L. H. Titterton, NBC interdepartmental correspondence, April 17, 1940, NBCW, box 35, folder 74.

of Illinois Press, 1999), 119-20n. 121. Betty Houchin Winfield, IDR and fhe Nerus Mrdirr (Urbana: University

122. Levine and Levine, The People and fhe President, 286-89. 123. Myers, in Williams, The America oJMi.rler Thornas Hart Benton, 23-24. 124. Francis Henry Taylor, “Preface,” to Myers, The Pageanf ofArt, n.p. 125. Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Polifics of Modernism, 289. 126. Amy Lyford, “Noguchi, Sculptural Abstraction, and the Politics of J a p

anese American Internment,” Art Bulkfin 85 (March 2003): 151 n. 42. 127. Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics uf Alodernism, 289. See also Adanis,

Tiionmas Hart Benton: An Amm’crin Or igh l , 316. 128. “Artist Benton Ends Exile-Finds City Still Boring,” NPII York Post,

April 17, 1939, newspaper clipping, in N-AMA. 129. “American Artists Have Won Fight for Realism, Asserts Thomas Hart

Benton,” Knnsns City Star, 1940 (page and date unconfirmed), newspa- per clipping, in N-AMA, cabinet 2, drawer I.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Am

s/G

iron

a*ba

rri L

ib]

at 0

5:51

16

Oct

ober

201

4