What Types of People Were Depicted in the Art Work of Thomas Hart Bentpon
Never Heard Of 'Hero Of American Fine art' Thomas Hart Benton? Yous're Non Lone 07:41 Copy the code below to embed the WBUR sound actor on your site
Copy the code below to embed the WBUR sound actor on your site
Play
Perhaps you've never never heard of 20th century artist Thomas Hart Benton, merely there was a time when the Missouri-built-in muralist was something of a rock star.
"Thomas Hart Benton has been described equally America's best-known contemporary painter," broadcast journalist Edward. R. Murrow said dorsum in 1959, as he interviewed Benton to mark the artist's 70th birthday.
Benton's cocky-imposed mission was to pigment "American histories," as he called them. He did that from the early 1900s until he died in 1975, always pioneering to make ordinary characters and stories into epic, colorful, ofttimes controversial works.
A new exhibition at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), titled "American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood," shines a spotlight on the influential painter and his longtime, footling-known relationship to Hollywood.
Benton Influenced By The 'Most Modern Grade Of Storytelling'
In the 1930s, Benton won commissions to paint murals for places like the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Missouri'due south State House. His face graced the cover of Time Magazine, which deemed him a "hero of American art." But flash forward to at present and Peabody curator Austen Barron Bailly says in that location hasn't been a major exhibition virtually Benton in more than 25 years.
"His claims to fame these days, if people even know nigh him, is every bit a muralist and as a public artist," she said.
Some know Benton was likewise a mentor to abstruse expressionist Jackson Pollock. Just even with that cred, Barron Bailly says curators from the four museums collaborating on this new exhibition fabricated a pretty depressing discovery.
"When we were putting together the testify nosotros did an breezy survey of museum-goers at all the participating institutions," she recalled, "and we learned that only about one in four people coming through the door had e'er heard of Benton."
That's a loss, Barron Bailey says, because Benton had a major influence non merely in the fine art earth, but ultimately on Hollywood and popular culture.
Early in his career — when move pictures were new — he became obsessed with the narrative, emotional ability he constitute in the movie theatre. Somewhen Hollywood vicious for Benton's fashion too. His on-going symbiotic relationship to the film industry is the focus of the new exhibition.
"Benton didn't actually piece of work on movies," Barron Bailly explains, "with the exception of when he worked in the silent film industry — where he was painting backdrops and sets, and doing research for the scenery, playing a few flake parts, assisting directors."
Benton's engagement with Hollywood, she continues, was much more conceptual.
"He's always enlightened of the authorization of Hollywood in American culture as the principal, well-nigh modernistic form of storytelling," she said, "and so he does become the commissions to promote the movies. So those are some of the central connections."
The curator says Benton's Hollywood connections are often overlooked — or forgotten — even in art history classes. But his fascination with the drama and power in motion pictures played a major role in shaping his visual vocalism.
To make that point, in this exhibition the curators pair Benton's paintings with film clips. His earliest mural series, titled "American Historical Epic," is compared and assorted to silent movies, including "The Last of the Mohicans." The artist's 14 big canvases hang in a row, similar cells in a film reel. They draw fierce scenes of Native Americans battling white settlers, puritans preparing to execute a witch, a slave being whipped.
"The year he conceives this [1919] is known as The Red Summer," Barron Bailly explained. "There are race riots all over America, it'due south the starting time of the Great Migration. And then Benton is very tapped into the very urgent problems of his 24-hour interval, and in thinking well-nigh, how can we think about the past in relation to the nowadays?"
'I Feel My Paintings In My Easily'
Benton constantly traveled. He roved the country searching for authentic stories, scenes and characters to populate his works. He plant them in factories, rail yards and cotton fields.
In 1937 the artist got a life-irresolute assignment from Life Magazine. The editors sent him to Hollywood to create images of the film industry for publication. Merely existence Benton, he was more attracted to Tinseltown'due south underbelly, its behind-the-scenes work and backstage dramas.
Barron Bailly says Benton also learned more about moving-picture show-making techniques and co-opted them. For case, the creative person fashioned clay models of characters and scenery that he would lite up like tiny Hollywood motion picture sets, then painting them.
"Through those methods he'due south able to get a very luminous glow to his canvases," Barron Bailly said. "There'south a feel of projected light, there'south a experience of three-dimensionality, there's a experience of motion, of drama, and all of those things we associate with watching movies."
In that location's a replica of a surviving Benton clay model (or maquettes) in the PEM show. The original was also delicate and valuable to transport, so in a first for the museum, curators actually created a 3-D print.
"Visitors volition exist able to touch on information technology and appreciate the fact that Benton one time said, 'I feel my paintings in my hands,'" Barron Bailly said, smiling.
For Wall Street Journal art reviewer Lance Esplund, the 3-D print of Benton's model is a very constructive tool for conveying the artist's process. His personality comes through in the curation too.
"He's crazy," Esplund said, laughing. "He'due south got a lot of stuff going on — I mean, he's an interesting guy, certainly."
Esplund says highlighting the artist's links to Hollywood is helping him understand how Benton attained his signature effects in the paintings and murals.
"The drama, the theater lighting has always been axiomatic in his work, but this really drives those points home," Esplund said afterward seeing the new exhibition. "And he's certainly not the first artist, nor will he be the terminal to be influenced past the camera. But this does put a new lens on him certainly."
PEM'southward Barron Bailly says the artist's relationship with the "dream mill" approached a climax in 1940 when 20th Century Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck hired him to create art to promote manager John Ford'southward accommodation of "The Grapes of Wrath."
"There's a real recognition that his ability to go to the kind of quintessence of a character or a scene," she said.
Benton made black and white lithograph portraits of each character from the moving-picture show, along with imagery of the Job family's iconic departure from their farm. The movie studio blew them up for posters to celebrate the controversial movie'southward New York premiere. Barron Bailly says Benton's mode also inspired the artful John Ford and his team created in the final motion picture.
Also in 1940, Benton and about a half dozen other peak artists were invited to the set of "The Long Voyage Home," too directed past Ford and starring John Wayne. The producers deputed them to paint images for a marketing campaign — or publicity stunt, depending on who you ask.
Benton's terminal Hollywood committee was for the 1955 Technicolor film "The Kentuckian." It was a passion project for Burt Lancaster, who directed and played the chief graphic symbol.
"It was fun as a child to see people like Marlon Brando and Burt Lancaster, and Jimmy Cagney was a great friend," Benton'southward daughter Jessie told me on the phone from Kansas. The 76-twelvemonth-one-time says her begetter would appreciate the new exhibition.
"It'south like a thumb in the nose to his critics of his own fourth dimension," she said.
And Benton has had plenty. He'south been called everything from a cartoonist — not a painter — to a drunk to a racist for depicting white actors in black face up and the Ku Klux Klan.
"I think it'south fantastic to bring daddy dorsum — but daddy is non only murals and Hollywood," Jessie Benton added. "He's also intimate portraits, and people he knew, and interests he had, which were and then incredibly varied and enormous. He never stopped working, e'er."
Except, perchance, when his family unit vacationed on Martha'southward Vineyard every year. In fact, Benton actually worked until the twenty-four hour period he died in 1975 — paintbrush in hand.
And the 20th century creative person still has fans in Hollywood today. Rob LaZebnik, writer and producer for "The Simpsons," is lending a Thomas Hart Benton drawing he plant at an fine art fair in 50.A. to the new exhibition.
"American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood" is at the Peabody Essex Museum through September seven.
Source: https://www.wbur.org/news/2015/06/10/thomas-hart-benton-peabody-essex
Belum ada Komentar untuk "What Types of People Were Depicted in the Art Work of Thomas Hart Bentpon"
Posting Komentar