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Regionalist radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Art for Your Sake
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2008 by Leo G. Mazow
Throughout 1939 and 1940, NAS "professional director" Frederick T. Fisher expressed yet more exuberance for mass distributing cultural products. Recalling Benton's and Wood's calls for regional art clubs and mass-audience participation, Fisher envisioned the NAS sponsoring an "Art Information Service, a Photograph Index of Contemporary American Art, a Lecture Bureau for art organizations and a series of travelling exhibitions." (116) Lacking concrete details, this enthusiasm rubbed Angell the wrong way. With the proceeds from what would become Art for Your Sake, Fisher originally hoped to buy paintings by American artists at the 1939 World's Fair (for example, those works depicted in the NAS volume American Art Today) and distribute them through a series of NAS-organized traveling loan exhibitions. (117) As early as October 1939--the date of the first Art for Your Sake broadcast--Fisher was busy lobbying government officials on behalf of the NAS, attempting to have the radio program broadcast to South America. (118) The former Yale president knew, however, that Fisher's schemes, which depended on expensive high-quality colorplates, entailed aggressive solicitation of sponsors and a commercialization that threatened to transform Art for Your Sake. Angell's correspondence from this period reveals his disapproval that Fisher acted without consulting the NAS board and indicates that Fisher sought personal gain from what was supposedly conceived as a selfless art-reform crusade. (119)
The replacement of Art for Your Sake with The Pageant of Art parallels some of the larger political and cultural shifts from isolationism to internationalism that ultimately saw the United States enter World War II. Myers, who served on the AAM Committee of Education, emceed the new program and also organized a similar, fifteen-minute weekly broadcast for NBC radio called Art in the News. (120) Surveying materials from "The Dawn of Art" through "The Period following the Industrial Revolution," The Pageant of Art made no mention of contemporary American art. In a reversal of NAS policy, The Pageant made no claims for American exceptionalism, or for Regionalism as the inheritor of some noble tradition.
Much more than the fare offered on Art for Your Sake, the subject and approach of The Pageant of Art matched the content of current radio programming, particularly news broadcasts--a sobering shift dramatized by the subjects of Roosevelt's fireside chats. Throughout the 1930s, the chats focused primarily on the economy and, occasionally, on other domestic issues, such as "midterm elections." Roosevelt's topic on September 3, 1939, though, was "the European war"; the next broadcast, on May 26, 1940, addressed "national defense." (121) By the time Art for Your Sake highlighted Benton in early January 1940, the critical fortunes of Regionalism, with its perceived insular aesthetic, had been ebbing since at least the middle of the previous decade. Benton and company were increasingly overshadowed by Surrealists and practitioners of other abstract (and often European) styles with more universal, subjective sensibilities. The cultural and political message of a program targeted as "art for your sake," that is, was quickly waning in favor of a more international "art for art's sake." Still, it is not so surprising that a relatively isolationist program like Art for Your Sake (which even Americanized European styles) should be launched and find temporary success in the 1939-40 season. Polls showed that most Americans resolutely opposed intervention, yet at the same time overwhelmingly recognized the impending reality of American involvement in the war. (122)
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