Regionalist radio: Thomas Hart Benton on Art for Your Sake

Dual Regionalism and the Expansive Audience

Announcing the "triumvirate" of American Regionalist painters, contemporary art historians, as if following some socially sanctioned alphabetic hierarchy, habitually list the names of Benton, Curry, and Wood, all three of whom, in one way or another, would be connected with Art for Your Sake (Fig. 2). Like other isms in the modern history of art, Regionalism has a somewhat exclusionary tendency, typically restricting its canon to artists favoring realistic and representational styles and identifiably American--often rural--subject matter. (16) Along with critics such as Thomas Craven and Lewis Mum-ford, these painters conceived of their enterprise in opposition to what they viewed as the delimiting aspects of a modernist art world confining its exhibition spaces, studios, schools, and publications to a few square miles within Manhattan. The accessibility for which the triumvirate strove, then, was more than a matter of iconography or compositional principles; it was also to be achieved in a more literal sense, through the complex channels of communication that enabled their painted and otherwise limned messages to reach locations well beyond New York City limits and to go into the "regions."

Benton, Curry, and Wood placed art within popular reach through several strategies. Perhaps most notably, and in keeping with the many Depression-era artists hired by the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts to decorate courthouses and post offices, they produced murals for libraries, museums, state capitols, universities, and other high-traffic public venues across the country. Benton went one step further, endeavoring--sometimes successfully--to exhibit his art in saloons and train stations. (17) A collaboration with the pharmaceutical giant Abbott Laboratories in the early 1940s to circulate nationally reproductions of works related to his Year of Peril series probably marks his most effective effort to reach large, widely dispersed audiences. Between pamphlets, newspapers, posters, postcards, and magazines, the Chicago-based firm arranged for the photoreproduction of paintings and sketches Benton had produced in response to the horrors of fascism and war, with the number of reproductions totaling an estimated 55 million (Fig. 13). (18)

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Benton ultimately produced more murals than Curry and Wood combined, but each artist managed to reach popular constituencies throughout the nation via print and reproductive media, particularly illustrated books. (19) Thanks in large part to corporate appropriations of their work, Benton, Curry, and Wood--like other artists in the period--also procured enormous exposure through advertisements, illustrated articles, and feature stories in popular magazines. (20) And, unlike Georgia O'Keeffe and Stuart Davis, two heavily marketed and widely appropriated artists of the era, the Regionalists figured prominently among the rosters of Associated American Artists (AAA), a company that, beginning in 1934, sold limited-edition lithographs by famous artists through mail order and department stores. Advertising and distributing their products nationally, and initially selling their prints for five dollars each, AAA made Benton, Curry, and Wood even more accessible; the firm, one might say, brought Regionalism to the regions (Fig. 3). (21)