Regionalist radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Art for Your Sake

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

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 modern 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 general, to them, especially since they knew only cheap monochromatic prints, quality color reproductions being prohibitively 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.

Benton: No ... it isn't--not just for them--

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--I'll 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 participation 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." (63) The latter, in Dr. Benton's--and Thomas Hart Benton's--opinion constituted 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 idiosyncratically 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 emphasis of the Benton dramatization--as well as the fact that the script quoted liberally from Benton's autobiography--compel us to consider just 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 modernism, Benton wrote that he then "left for good the art-for-art's-sake world in which I had hitherto lived." (64) 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: