BOOKS
take its first original steps." The future lies in the small towns and the
country. "The great cities are dead. They offer nothing but coffins for
living and thinking."
The first steps are the murals of Benton of which the originality lies,
I think, in the coincidence of homely popular genre and artificial,
energetic, monumental effects. He aspires to create an official art, local
in content, national in scale. It is monumental about small things, small
about crucial momentous changes, full of activity, but with little move-
ment of ideas and sentiments. His murals are enlargements of intimate,
trivial and amusing scenes, well adapted to the casual eye of the tourist
or hearty philistine spectator. The small occasions of life are not
deepened as in older genre painting, but simply magnified. In his most
recent murals, reproduced in part on the jacket of the book, the fore-
ground is filled with ingratiating domestic details-the dogs, the mother
wiping her baby's bottom, the munching, overalled boy beside the mother
rolling the dough, and the naked muscle-bound backs of the men, one
sawing wood away from the spectator, the other washing his neck to-
ward the spectator. These are arranged in a banal symmetrical scheme,
unrelated to any larger meaning of the figures, and are cast in a visual
melodrama of diagonal perspectives, strained, insistent, metropolitan,
with the formal strategy of a piece of advertising. The visceral involve-
ment of groups is a formalized linking of essentially disconnected ob-
jects. Since the composition of Benton has been compared with Rubens',
it must be observed that in Benton the analogy and contrast of adjacent
lines is relatively inexpressive, at any rate has little to do with the human
connections of the represented figurcs. It relates to Rubens' as modem
blank verse to Shakespearc's. The exaggerated awkward energy is the
male counterpart of the effeminacy that he cannot tolerate in homo-
sexuals and that he cheaply denounces in this book as a menace to the
coming American culture. It is a mannered art, for Benton imposes his
tics and ambitions on everything. His lack of delicacy, of refinement and
of pathos make us regret that he is not more feminine. The coarse,
sweetish coloring reminds one of commercial painting; its absence from
his black-and-whites make these at once more agreeable and releases their
touch of honest poetry.
Benton has been criticized as fascist, but such a judgment is pre-
mature. To accept his ideas and art on their face value, to welcome them
as an expression of "democratic individualism," would be no less absurd.
Benton repudiates European fascism, but fascism draws on many streams
including the traditional democratic. The appeal to the national senti-
ment should set us on guard, whatever its source. And when it comes as
doesBenton's with his conceited anti-intellectualism (he has also his own
pretentious intellectuality), his hatred of the foreign, his emphasis on
the strong and the masculine, his uncritical and unhistorical elevation
of the folk, his antagonism to the cities, his ignorant and violent remarks
on radicalism, we have good reason to doubt his professed liberalism
and to expose its inconsistencies.
MEYER SCHAPmo
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