The Arts of Life in America: Unemployment, Radical Protest, Speed

This painting, painted with tempera on board, underscores much of the political and social issues of the day. There are illustrations from the left to the right of a woman driving a car, a locomotive, industrialization, wage strikers and the gunmen firing at them dominate the scene. The bright red, green, and yellow colors, paired with the suggestion of movement, infuses the painting with energy.		Thomas Hart Benton
American (1889-1975)
The Arts of Life in America: Unemployment, Radical Protest, Speed, 1932
Tempera on board
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.
Modern Art
Location:  Exhibit, Gallery 168
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Dimensions:  H: 32 in, W: 176 1/2 in
Object ID: 71.2011

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Thomas Hart Benton
Neosho, Mo. 1889-1975 Kansas City, Mo.
The Arts of Life in America: Unemployment, Radical Protest, Speed, 1932
Tempera on board, 32 × 176 1/2 in. (81.3 × 448.3 cm)
Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.2011
Reproduction © T.H. Benton and R.P. Benton Testamentary Trusts/Licensed by VAGA, New York, N.Y.

References: Matthew Baigell, Thomas Hart Benton, New York, 1974, pp. 114-28; Zafran, 1978, no. 40; Henry Adams, T homas Hart Benton: An American Original, exhib. cat., Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City et al., 1989-90, pp. 184-91.

The life and art of Thomas Hart Benton were marked by numerous contradictions. Benton studied in 1908-09 at the Académie Julian in Paris and experimented in his early pictures with Impressionism and the color abstractions of Synchromism. Eventually, however, he denounced the "foreign tyranny" of European and expatriate American avant-garde painting and instead developed a conservative, figurative art that celebrated indigenous American themes.
Locale was a second point of contradiction. Much of Benton's mature work-from 1912 to 1935-was produced in New York City. Yet the Missouri-born artist railed against the aesthetes and leftist intellectuals of the New York art establishment and devoted much of his painting to a "regionalist" vision of the ordinary working poor in the rural South and Midwest. In fact, by the mid-1930s he had joined fellow regionalist painters John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood at the forefront of the nationalistic "American Scene" movement, emerging as a vociferous defender of purely American subjects and straightforward realist styles. All of this notwithstanding, Benton's compositions derived much from Michelangelo, Pieter Brueghel, and other European Old Masters, and his agitated, hard-edged figure style owed a good deal to El Greco and Tintoretto.
During the 1930s Benton was a key figure in the revival of public mural painting in the United States. He established his reputation in New York with a multi-panel mural cycle entitled The American Historical Epic(1919-26) and a 1930 mural series, America Today,for the New School of Social Research.
In 1932 Juliana Force, the director of the recently founded Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, commissioned Benton to do a set of murals for the reading room of the museum's library. The series, called The Arts of Life in America, included four large wall panels, a lunette, and three long ceiling panels, one of which is the Chrysler Museum of Art's Unemployment, Radical Protest, Speed. The series celebrated the popular arts of the city, of the American West and South, and of the American Indian. As the Chrysler picture shows, the suite also underscored the social and political issues of the day. The racing locomotive (signifying "Speed") was a recurring Benton image. Together with the airplane and roadster, it suggests the vitality and breakneck pace of industrialization in America leading up to the Great Depression. The confrontation of strikers and gunmen ("Unemployment, Radical Protest") alludes to the violence that surrounded the labor movement during this period. The image may refer specifically to the violent coal miner strikes of 1929 and 1931 in Harlan County, Kentucky, which resulted in several shooting deaths and received considerable national press.
Following the unveiling of the Whitney murals in December 1932, some critics offered positive assessments of the series and applauded its raucous energy. In his review of the work in the December 24 issue of Art News, Ralph Flint called the murals a "brilliant bit of Bedlam" and praised Benton's "fervor and conviction":
He has expounded his gospel of the 'art of life in America' . . . with all the conviction of a Billy Sunday or an Aimee Semple McPherson. . . . You may not like Mr. Benton's new murals but you can't get away from them any more than you can close your eyes to the headlines in the morning's papers. They have an inescapable ring to them, a terrible 'tabloid' insistence that keeps them strumming like a taut wire.
Yet other observers of the day found The Arts of Life in Americairreverent and distasteful. Indeed, the murals prompted the first genuinely hostile responses to Benton's art, which may have hastened his eventual break with the New York art scene. In any event, the Whitney series was Benton's last important project in the city. By 1935 he was back in Missouri, working on the mural cycle of the Social History of the State of Missouri for the State Capitol at Jefferson City.
The Arts of Life in Americaremained in place until 1954, when the Whitney Museum moved from Eighth Street to West 54th Street. Thereafter the murals were removed from the walls and sold. Today the four wall panels and lunette are in the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, Connecticut.
JCH
 

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