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Regionalist radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Art for Your Sake
Art Bulletin, The, March, 2008 by Leo G. Mazow
The organizational efforts of NBC and the NAS also afford a cultural backdrop against which we may gain insight into Benton's recurring communication and transportation imagery, an interpretation that underscores the importance of national interconnectedness within the Regionalist project. That philosophy is emphasized in Benton's four mural programs from the 1930s: America Today (1930), commissioned for the New School for Social Research, New York (now in the collection of AXA Financial, Inc., New York); The Arts of Life in America (1932), made for the Whitney Museum Library, New York (presently in the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut); A Social History of the State of Indiana (1933, Indiana University Campus Art Collection, Bloomington); and A Social History of Missouri (1937, House of Representatives' Lounge, Missouri State Capitol, Jefferson City). Anticipating more than a decade of "connecting" iconography, Instruments of Power, a panel from America Today, places airplanes, locomotives, dirigibles, electricity towers, and related emblems at the forefront of contemporary American history (Fig. 1). The activities of the NAS and the script for Art for Your Sake join Benton's depictions of cars, trains, roads, telephones, telegraphs, typewriters, and radios in symbolically bringing together a diverse and divisive nation, recasting it as a mythic inclusive whole.
In fusing national sections and divergent voices by way of mechanical imagery, Benton's murals parallel several tenets of a well-known and influential contemporary history text, The American Leviathan (1930), authored by Charles Beard, Benton's friend at the New School for Social Research, and his brother, William Beard. The volume posits broadcast, transportation, and communication technology as a "web" uniting disparate parts of nation and globe. "Railways, telegraph lines, airplanes, and the radio," wrote the Beards, "override historic political boundaries, weld[ing] this country into a single economic organization." (15) The vast literature on Benton suggests several parallels between artistic Regionalism and the Beards' historical progressivism. The artist's engagements with broadcast technology and radio programming in early 1940 offer both a specific case study of the pictorial and literary forms that such "welding" could take as well as its fate on the heels of American involvement in World War II. The Benton installment of Art for Your Sake does not subvert some master narrative of Regionalism so much as it dramatically enforces such histories through radio content and sonic symbolism. The Art for Your Sake script elucidates a broad, ongoing debate regarding the ability of the visual arts to mediate both local and global concerns. The program points to the perceived promise and peril of Regionalism, and of any popular art form, an ambivalence inherent in the notion of the ever-expansive audience.
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