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Regionalist radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Art for Your Sake
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2008 by Leo G. Mazow
A remarkably high percentage of work by the American artist Thomas Hart Benton depicts musical performance, instruments, 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 incidents (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.
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If modernism, broadly conceived, can be defined as a quest to understand, via paint, prose, and other media, one's experiences in an ever-modernizing world, then Benton's sonic sensibilities help to locate his work within an American modernist canon. (1) More than simply depicting radios, phonographs, and other imagery, he consistently used formal tropes--overlapping passages, randomly cropped forms, fast-paced action, continuity amid fragmentation--that also characterize 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 Parallel, the first book in his trilogy U.S.A. (1930-39), John Dos Passos asserts that the "U.S.A. is ... a radio network." (2) 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 Abraham 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 particular 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 imagery, connecting through the very partitions that also separate them. This style also matches aspects of his Regionalist agenda, which endeavored to reconcile the peoples and technologies of outlying regions with a cultural mainstream, all the while keeping intact the sacrosanct folkways of the region. For all that, Benton's radio style is probably best exemplified 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-1930s, 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 foundations 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 addressees. The story of Benton on the radio is thus worth recounting 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.
