Thomas Hart Benton by Justin Wolff

Author:Justin Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PART THREE

AFTER NEW YORK

9

AT WORK

When Benton was invited, in the winter of 1935, to join the faculty of the Kansas City Art Institute and to paint a mural in the Missouri State Capitol, he saw an opportunity to make some money and drive home a point or two. The offers allowed him to leave New York on his own terms and were attractive enough to persuade him that he was leaving for bigger and better things; a triumphant return to his native Missouri, he felt, would demonstrate his conviction that the nation’s cultural vitality was centered on its middle states and that New York had become unhinged. Naturally, his public and distressing feuds with Stuart Davis and the John Reed Club made the decision easier, but, in addition, during the months prior to his departure Benton had finally sought his revenge against Alfred Stieglitz in a now infamous critique of the older man’s legacy, which prompted an exchange of juvenile letters. Even before the dust had settled on these disputes, Benton understood that his life in New York was coming to an end.

On New Year’s Day 1934, Stieglitz turned seventy. For three decades he had run galleries, mentored fellow artists, and served as vicar of “Spiritual America”—an America revitalized by a modern cultural idealism. In a portrait from that year by the photographer Imogen Cunningham, Stieglitz stands in front of Black Iris (1926), a painting by his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe, that’s representative of much that he believed in: its expressiveness, formal elegance, and supposed objectification of feminine identity make it an icon of American modernism. Posing in front of the painting, Stieglitz is cerebral but regal: sharply dressed in a crisp white shirt, gray suit, and dark overcoat, he peers through a pair of delicate spectacles, the perfect complement to his wispy white hair. Stieglitz is the master of his universe: a patriarch, a seer, and, in a time of economic depression, a giver—of money and motivation. And so to celebrate his birthday and triumphs, and the ascendancy of modernism more generally, Stieglitz’s friends and admirers apotheosized him in a lavish tribute, a Festschrift titled America and Alfred Stieglitz.

The book, published in late 1934, is an example of the occasionally absurd idolatries upon which some modern art depended. Biblical epigraphs (“And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land”) are followed by accolades from Lewis Mumford, John Marin, and Charles Demuth. William Carlos Williams sets the tone in an introductory essay that places Stieglitz in a Manichaean relation between Old World culture and American pragmatism. But, Williams concludes, he “carried the fullest load forward.” Gertrude Stein contributed a poem titled “Stieglitz”: “If anything is done and something is done then somebody has / to do it.” A meditation by Sherwood Anderson, “City Plowman,” closes the book. Anderson compares Stieglitz to the imaginary “Uncle Jim,” a nurturing Ohio farmer.

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