56
PARTISAN REVIEW
wealth and idealizes an earlier stage of popular rule as a norm of
democracy constantly threatened and regained.
Although Benton talks as if he represents the people as a whole,
this fiction disappears when we regard his comments on oppressed groups
or his particular choice of material and even his style of painting. In
describing the South he is forced in 1937 to observe the oppression of
the Negroes and the poor white farmers; in his earlier realistic painting
their misery is for him a local and picturesque affair. If it is now a
condition to be improved through good will, the chief obstacle is the
peculiar psychology of the
southern
masters. He may at one point praise
the liberals who try to improve these conditions; but against those who
wish to organize the Negroes politically, he argues that the Negroes are
too uneducated and that this will only antagonize the whites and bring
on fascism. The conciliation which underlies this view appears in other
details. In the face of insecurity and discontent he hopes to recreate a
respect for old ways, for local history and peculiarities, to win people
back to native traditions. The division into regions becomes more im-
portant than the division into classes. The more crucial history, including
our own time, is obscured or fractioned into bits of local genre. If he
represents a political meeting in dramatic linear contrasts, it is without
reference to the clash of interests, but has the sense of a local domestic
custom; the kids squabble and a mother changes the baby's diaper. His
theory of art, like the liberal aesthetics of the colleges, supports the
same attitude, though it hardly does justice to the complexity of his own
art. The real purpose of painting is to get people to see the qualities of
things, apart from their use. This is a domestic impressionist view which,
in opening our eyes to our surroundings (a value we must not under-
estimate), detaches art from fantasy and drama and from the more
massive and disturbing reality of passions and conflicts. It admits change
only at the expense of history, by infusing all things equally with the
same phenomenal motion.
If Benton's Middle West was once intolerable to him as an artist
because its hard practicality made a disinterested love of nature and art
impossible, he now regards it as the region most favorable to art because
it seems to offer him an escape from the demands of the crisis. How-
ever much he may attribute radicalism in art to the influence of un-
American intellectuals, he himself cannot evade the conditions which
have given a new value to these foreign ideas. But how pitiful and inept
are his alternative conclusions! and how they illuminate the character
of his art! This man who speaks of having read Marx and Dewey
builds a new American culture on the "failure of capitalism" and on the
"great change which is already taking place. "The age of raging greed
is past ....
Approaching death leads to reflection and reflection leads to
appreciation of the drama of life, of the values of simple existence which
stand apart from ends and purposes." And this in turn promotes a new
interest in art in the Middle West, which bears the promise of a great
American art, "for it is in the drama of things that are that art must
