BOOKS
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whom we had little or nothing in common. We could see no point in
taking risks for dollars which we could never share." Through a friend
of the family-the Bentons had been politically important in Missouri-
he managed to be placed as a draftsman in the Norfolk naval base,
making pictures for the architects. "My interests became, in a flash, of
an objective nature. The mechanical contrivances of building, the new
airplanes, the blimps, the dredges, the ships of the base, because they
were so interesting in themselves, tore me away from all my grooved
habits, from my play with colored cubes and classic attenuations, from
aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns. I left for good the art-for-
art's sake world in which I had hitherto lived." He got along well with
the southern boys at the naval base, feeling more secure with them than
with "the cultivated people of the art worlds"; they were like his child-
hood friends in Missouri. "They were objective. They were interested
in things, rather than in selves." After the War, returning to the city,
he "proclaimed heresies around New York. I set out painting American
histories in defiance of all the conventions of our art world. I talked
too much, and trod on all sorts of sensibilities and made enemies. But I
didn't care." Apparently, in substituting blimps for cubes he was still an
abstracting eye, remote· from the "main currents of our land." He still
belongs to this art world that he affects to despise; and his work remains
infected with a clumsy, stiff formalism inherited from his abstractionist
days. His objectivity as a painter, limited to buildings and machines and
the picturesqueness of native "types," exacted no deeper insight into
American life. And although his conversion was a result of the war on
which he held such decided and penetrating views, he disavows any
"social ideas" and feels no need to reconcile his new sympathy for the
people with his indifference to their betrayal in the War.
His idea of a realistic art is expressed as an opposition to two ex-
tremes. In criticizing abstract art, he isolates objects as the true field of
painting; in criticizing a realism guided by radical values and a desire
for change, he poses the stable, unpolitical everyday world and the cor-
responding historical past as the proper subjects for art. If we must not
escape from this world, neither should we try to change it. He thus
implies a "just middle," like the academic compromise in the last cen-
tury. Benton's vehemence against both sides, his constant assertion of
individual freedom and his petty unconventionalism conceal his essential
conformity. The common energy of his figures, each moving in its own
way, a vast perspective field, resembles the optimistic idea of an ex-
panding American world in which everyone is active and free to follow
his own ends in a limitless space. His reduction of the tense historical
reality of our time to fragmentary candid shots, interchangeable in-
cidents, figures and machines in a formally supervised panorama of un-
focussed activity has also its political parallel. It corresponds to the
liberal conservatism (resting especially on the support of the lower
middle class) which addresses the people as a unity without classes,
which admits only an
accidentally
privileged, immoral minority of
