Thomas Hare Benton
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Thomas Hare Benton Details
From Publishers Weekly Benton (1889-1975) is a painter shrouded in paradox and misapprehension. Though pigeonholed as a regionalist chronicler of the Midwest, many of his finest on-site pictures are of Southern blacks and poor whites. Remembered best are his folksy rural scenes and aggressively three-dimensional murals, but the public tends to forget that he ran through the gamut of modernist styles (he was Jackson Pollock's teacher) and that his brilliant abstract color experiments ally him with the modernist movement. Some of Benton's crowded murals of the 1930s reflect his leftist sympathies, yet critics reviled him as politically conservative. These contradictions are illuminated in this catalogue of a touring exhibition curated by Adams. The text stands on its own as a wholly engaging biography, offering an unbuttoned look at a pugnacious, often reckless, artist who valiantly sought to preserve a rural America that was vanishing before his eyes. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition. Read more From Library Journal Noted muralist, regionalist painter, art theorist, instructor of Jackson Pollock, and controversial figure in the world of art and politics, Benton (1889-1975) has received relatively little attention from art historians. In overall format and tone, this chatty, gossipy biography is aimed at a popular audience. Yet it also contains academic discussions of both abstract and realist art, and nearly half the 340 illustrations are handsome color plates. The catalog for a traveling retrospective exhibition and a PBS documentary, this book is oddly satisfying; for public, and some art, libraries.- Kathleen Eagen Johnson, Historic Hudson Valley, Tarrytown, N.Y.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition. Read more
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