54
PARTISAN REVIEW
conceived the historical murals for which he is famous. Through this
conversion he regained a sense of solidarity with the world about him
which he painfully lacked when he was struggling as an abstract artist.
But New York in the '30s, with its radical intellectuals and sectarian
criticism was too much for him; he felt isolated in the big un-American
city. Knowing America as he did, the communist theories seemed inef-
fectual and foreign and threatened his liberty as an artist. In the last
chapter he packs up and returns to the Middle West where he hopes to
be free of such pressure. He had travelled in the South during the years
after the War and come to like the plain people, the farmers, boatmen,
Negroes and cowboys; he found in them the subjects for his new realistic
art. The greater part of the book consists of anecdotes of these travels,
stories of odd encounters and conversations, and some general reflections
on the people and the country.
Others have written of the South with more pungency and insight
and with less self-consciousness. But the book has a sp,ecial interest as the
experience of a painter converted from a formalizing to a realistic art
and as an account of the impact of the economic crisis on an artist with a
stabilized manner. But of his own experience as a painter, Benton says
very little; and despite his frankness and his admission of doubts, the
story of his pivotal decisions and their effects is too much on the surface,
too rationalized, to be altogether convincing. The reader is disposed to
penetrate it with his own suspicions. Benton brusquely disavows his ab-
stractionist past and presents his later experience in facile antitheses to
illustrate his theoretical oppositions of the country to the city, the native
to the foreign and realism to abstraction. Towards the large movement
of modern art he adopts a purely philistine attitude, judging it not by its
best works or in the light of problems posed by the time, but by his own
uneasiness with it and by the personalities of secondary rival painters.
He ignores its distinctive character as an art and describes it as a product
of neurotic minds or simply as a theory, an exhibition of principles
formulated in talk. His own obvious indebtedness to it he veils by refer-
ring naively to the time when he finally rid himself of all its traces. "We
were essentially Bohemians adrift from the currents of our land."
In turning from geometrical forms to objects, Benton imagines that
he has entered fully into the life of his time. The mere representation
of railroad trains and farmers gives him the illusion of a mystical rap-
port with a superior American reality. Just as he once assumed that
geometrical forms brought the artist in touch with the inner structure
of the world or the essence of art, so he now seems to believe that
by
depicting native objects he is grasping the essence of American life.
But this essence is only an aspect or a segment, and its claim to perman-
ence or inherence or primacy is refuted by its own history. We have
only to read Benton's story of his conversion, short as it is, to see the
limitations of his view.
When America entered the War, he and Craven "were well aware
of the fact that the country was out to defend the affairs of citizens with
