As a student, Benton, too, had been impressionable and eager to please, jumping from one influence to another, from Impressionism, to Neo-Impressionism, to Cézannism, to Cubism, to Synchromism, to Constructivism, always “casting around for solutions.” In politics, his views had changed “with every whiff” of fashion. After meeting a Marxist named John Weichsel in New York in 1916, he declared himself a Marxist. Later he met the philosopher John Dewey and adopted Dewey’s more pragmatic view of history—just as easily as Jackson modeled himself after the mystical Krishnamurti, only to be remolded a few years later by the hard-headed Benton. In a phrase that could apply as well to Jackson, Benton complained of the “lurking uneasiness underlying all my contacts with the world.”
Beneath the similarities, however, Benton felt another kind of appreciation for the boy he saw in Studio 9 every Tuesday and Friday, hunched over his sketch pad, scribbling furiously. Ever since Neosho, he had been especially attracted to young men less sophisticated than himself. Most of his boyhood friends were rough, “uncultivated” country boys. During his service as a navy draftsman in Norfolk, Virginia, he fondly recalled being “thrown among boys who had never been subjected to any aesthetic virus … boys from the hinterlands of the Carolinas, from the Tennessee country, from all over the South, in whom I discovered, despite all the differences in our experiences, bonds of sympathy.” For years after his vivid experiences among the sailors of Norfolk, he made long summer trips to the South, abandoning his wife and “disappearing into the hinterlands,” often taking along favored students like Bill Hayden, “a very young, very good-looking” man, according to his account, with whom Benton shared the back of a station wagon—“fixed up as a sort of combined kitchen, bedroom, and workshop”—for months at a time during several such sojourns. In picking favorites among his League classes, he was guided by the same standard, almost invariably choosing westerners and other “uncultivated” types.
Benton’s preoccupation with his own sex was balanced by an indifference to the opposite sex that verged on misogyny. According to his biographer, “He was inclined to ignore his female students completely.” One of those students recalled that “Benton didn’t think women should be painters.” Rita Benton, with considerably less reticence, used to tell friends that “Tom hated women because of his mother.”
Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, Benton grew less circumspect in his displays of interest in rustic young men, once commenting on the “beauty” of Italian peasant boys: “Who wouldn’t be attracted to them?” While he continued to vent his rage against the reign of “pansies” in the art world and recoiled at even the most casual physical contact with other men, he found it increasingly difficult to disguise his exaggerated preference for the company of younger men, and his virulent attacks on homosexuality began to sound shrill and defensive. “Tom,” his sister Mildred warned him late in life, “you’re protesting too much.” Eventually, not only his sister but his son, several of his close friends, and his biographer began to believe that, all along, Tom Benton had been fighting a losing battle with his own homosexual urges.
Whatever the sources of his teacher’s affection, Jackson reveled in it. Deprived of his own father’s attention for so long, he found in Benton’s sympathies the male approval that had always eluded him. Benton even looked like Roy Pollock: the same short stature, the same self-conscious pugnacity, the same creased face and big, leathery hands. For the first time in his long struggle to prove himself, Jackson had finally found an ally.
He quickly seized the advantage. In class, he tried to replicate Benton’s technique and subject matter “down to the last brush stroke,” according to one classmate. Imitating Benton’s Regionalist style was common among his students, but Jackson embraced Regionalism not just as a technique but as a philosophy and a life-style. He “tailed after Benton like a puppy dog,” recalled Harry Holtzman. “Whatever Benton did, he wanted to do too.” If Benton saw himself as “a western artist,” then Jackson would be a westerner, too—the most western of them all. He began by spreading stories about his “frontier family,” about the cows he milked while growing up on a ranch in Wyoming, about the wild stallions, wolves, and buffalo that had been a part of his boyhood. When he began appearing in the League cafeteria dressed in cowboy regalia—“high-heel boots, cowboy hat and so forth”—he was so convincing that fellow students like Reginald Wilson who had heard Jackson’s Wild West stories assumed “it was no costume.” “Jackson always walked around wearing his cowboy hat,” remembered another classmate, Philip Pavia, “and he had complete contempt for all of us ‘foreigners,’ as he called us. He loved the West and the Midwest.” When Benton asked him who his teachers had been in Los Angeles, he replied, with down-home derision, “Only California nuts!”
Charles’s girlfriend, Elizabeth, thought she saw Jackson’s campaign for what it was: a contest with Charles for Benton’s favor. “In the beginning he presented himself to Benton as kind of a laddy boy and wheedled around to get what he wanted,” she recalls. “He wasn’t at all the sweet dear boy some people thought he was.” Even Jackson’s friends, many of whom had labored in Benton’s classes for a year or more and had seen Jackson’s clumsy drawings, sensed that ambition was at work behind the appearance of the idolizing student at the feet of the master. “He was highly committed,” recalls one of them, “a very intense person with a good sense of reality and a good sense of how he could take advantage of certain relationships.”
Whether out of ambition, or empathy, or emotional need, over the next few years Jackson’s campaign to win a place in Benton’s innermost circle—and, in the process, to displace Charles—succeeded. But success had its price. Benton may have claimed a kinship with his fellow Norfolk sailors, men whose “egos were not of the frigid, touchy sort developed by brooding,” but no one was more preoccupied with self, no one more given to brooding than Tom Benton. Beneath the posturing, he was no more the heartland man’s-man than Jackson was the uncultivated country boy. To Jackson, however, who knew little if anything of Benton’s past, the ideal of the macho artist seemed to answer many dark, nagging questions. Was art a “sissy” activity? Benton’s answer was to expunge the feminine by exaggerating the masculine—by drawing masculine figures with a muscular line; by discussing art in hard-boiled, hillbilly terms; by sketching in a man’s world of whorehouses and gymnasiums; by talking, dressing, cursing, drinking, and fighting like a man.
Left: Oil Field, Texas Panhandle, Thomas Hart Benton, 1926–27, sepia, ink, and pencil on paper, 7” × 8¾”. Right: Copy by Pollock, early 1930s, oil on gessoboard, 18” × 25⅜”
But Benton’s preoccupation with the male persona, as well as the male physique, came from a different source altogether. For Jackson, there was no synthesis, no resolution in Benton’s ideal artist, only, somewhere down the road, a confrontation with his own inchoate feelings. In the interim, Benton’s ideal, with its implied license on “masculine” behavior, only exaggerated the symptoms of Jackson’s problems—the self-abusive drinking, the violent outbursts—without beginning to address the problems themselves. It succeeded only in giving Jackson’s rage a voice and a character, not in giving it rest.
In the fall of 1930, Benton began work in earnest on a set of murals for the New School for Social Research, his first major mural commission. The school, founded only a decade earlier by a group of progressive scholars and educators, was just completing its handsome new home at 55 West Twelfth Street. It had already commissioned a mural from José Clemente Orozco when, after protests from Benton supporters, the school’s director agreed to offer an additional commission to “an authentic American” artist. Benton’s mural would fill the third floor boardroom, a generous space, about thirty feet square, at the back of the building looking south over a garden toward Eleventh Street. Orozco, as at Pomona, was given the dining room.
As Benton’s favorite new student, Jackson was undoubtedly privy to much of the planning process. If he was frustrated by the close wor
k and extended concentration required in class he must have despaired as he watched his mentor’s laborious preparations for the New School murals. As a teacher, Benton could be a taskmaster and disciplinarian; as an artist, he was meticulous to the point of preciosity. After choosing his theme—technology and the transformation of American society—he began by sorting through his vast store of sketches for appropriate images. “He had a bureau drawer just chock full of sketches that he’d made all over the country,” a student recalls. From these reams of sketches, gathered over the previous five years on “walking tours” into the hinterland, sifted and resifted, a “general image of America” began to emerge. Benton then divided the sketches into broad themes: industry, regions of the country, people and popular culture. Gradually, through a long series of preliminary oil sketches, he subdivided the three themes into nine smaller panels to be arranged around the doors and windows of the boardroom.
Within the panels he subdivided his material again into scenes. A Changing West panel would include scenes of oil drilling, pipe welding, surveying, cow-poking, and sheepherding. Some scenes he could borrow directly from his sketchbooks—the oil rigs from his record of a 1927 trip to the Texas panhandle, for example. Others required new sketches. For a panel on the steel industry, he traveled to a Bethlehem Steel plant in Maryland to sketch scenes of workers on the forging line. He posed family members, friends, and students for featured figures. His wife and son posed with Caroline Pratt, founder of the City and Country School, for the scene representing education; Charles’s girlfriend, Elizabeth, posed for a scene in a movie house; Max Eastman, the editor of The Masses and a Benton friend, posed for a subway scene with Peggy Reynolds, a well-known burlesque performer; Alvin Johnson, Benton’s patron, sat for a “signature” scene in which he shares a glass of bootleg hootch with Benton himself. At this stage in the laborious process, Benton invited Jackson to the studio for what he called “action posing.” Although he later denied including Jackson’s likeness anywhere in the murals, Benton made numerous sketches of his body, posing him pantomiming various activities depicted in the background: harvesting crops, sawing logs, surveying, mining coal, forging steel.
Next, to help refine the compositions and, in particular, to establish the right balance of light and dark areas, Benton fashioned a clay bas-relief, or diorama, of each section of the mural and, using a naked light bulb to exaggerate the shadows, lighted the scene from various angles. Occasionally, he would paint the little figures to see how color affected the intensity of the light. From these clay models (adapted from a technique used by the Renaissance painter Tintoretto), Benton produced yet another set of studies, in watercolor, distemper, and egg tempera, in an exhaustive effort to anticipate and resolve any problems that might arise when the actual painting began: the interaction of colors, the effects of washes, the placement of highlights.
As interminable as these preliminaries must have seemed to Jackson, Benton could justify them. Like the Renaissance masters he admired, he had chosen to work in egg tempera—dry pigment mixed with egg yolks and water—a medium so difficult and out of favor that he was forced to turn to a 400-year-old text for instruction. Considered a draftsman’s technique because of its potential for precise lines and sculptural modeling, tempera offered Benton more control than oil. It could be applied in layers to produce deeper, more translucent colors and, when dry, was more durable and longer-lived than oil. Finally, its historical association with the Italian Renaissance appealed to artists who, like Benton, advocated a renaissance in American art. But tempera was an unforgiving medium. Oil paint could be retouched—a slip, an errant drop, the wrong brush, or even a change of heart about a color could be easily corrected. Mistakes in egg tempera were forever. It was, in short, the perfect medium for a meticulous planner like Tom Benton.
City Activities with Dance Hall, Thomas Hart Benton, panel from the New School murals, 1930–31, distemper and tempera on linen with oil glaze, 92” × 134½”. Elizabeth Pollock posed for movie patron, center; Rita and T. P. Benton for mother and child, center right; Benton himself for the drinker at far right.
When the preparations were finally complete, months later, the work moved into a large loft space arranged by Alvin Johnson on Twelfth Street not far from the New School. Before Benton could start painting, however, he had to construct the mural’s nine panels. Egg tempera made special demands on the painting surface as well as the artist, and Jackson, working beside Benton and his chief assistant Herman Cherry, found himself involved in another elaborate preliminary step. On wallboard reinforced with one-by-three-inch cradling, they glued heavy linen, then spread seven coats of gesso—a paste-like mixture of glue, water, and whiting—and two coats of Permalba, a commercial composite oil paint that brought the panels to a frosty white. All nine hundred square feet of surface were then sanded down to a smooth finish. Without assistance, Benton drew a proportional grid on each panel and then painstakingly transferred and enlarged, square by square, the images on his sketches to the pearly linen panels. When the blueprint was complete, he began by roughing in the images with an underpainting of distemper, a quick-drying mixture of glue, pigment, and water also borrowed from Renaissance muralists.
Steel, Thomas Hart Benton, 1930–31, distemper and tempera on linen with oil glaze, 92” × 117”; Jackson posed for worker at right.
Finally, the panels were ready to be “painted.” Benton worked alone—no one else touched the canvas. When Jackson was present, he merely watched. It was the first time he had seen an accomplished artist at work on a project of this magnitude. During this last stage of painting, Benton was “an artist of incalculable energy,” according to Thomas Craven, “driving himself constantly, and … working from twelve to fifteen hours a day.” But the energy Craven speaks of showed itself in Benton’s commitment to his art and his attention to detail, not in his brush. He worked systematically, meticulously, seldom departing from his detailed plan. “There was a formula and he followed it,” says Mervin Jules, who assisted Benton on a later mural. “It was all very mechanistic, passionless. Everything was seen in terms of rendering light and dark, modeling, and use of color. That’s why it was so easy for his students to ‘do’ a Benton painting.”
For Benton, the passion had already been expended at the point of contact, at the place on a Tennessee road where he stopped to sketch a farmer, or at the bar in Borger, Texas, where he caught the face of a “big-boned” oilman in a few quick lines. The challenges had been confronted and overcome in endless sketches and studies, in the effort to make the image of the oilman harmonize with the other figures in the scene and that scene with other scenes in the panel. By the time the Texas oilman reached the smoothed surface of Changing West, he was nothing more than an element in a larger design, an area of color and shading and form in an unforgiving medium. “He drained people of their humanity,” says Jules. “They became mannequins.” Craven called him a “master designer … an artist who can resolve and harmonize diverse and seemingly impossible contradictions of subject-matter,” but acknowledged that his art lacked “greater depth of feeling.”
Jackson’s copy of Steel from Benton’s New School murals, early 1930s, detail from oil on gessoboard, 18” × 25”
As he watched his teacher—painting finally—deeply concentrated, but always in control, Jackson must have tried, and failed, to see himself. So far, at least, “depth of feeling” was about the only thing he had.
The mural project drew Jackson even more deeply into his teacher’s professional and personal life. More and more often, after class or a day at the studio, Benton would invite him back to the apartment on Hudson Street. From the League, they would ride the subway to Fourteenth Street where crowds of unemployed men shuffled into the giant Art Deco mouth of the recently opened Salvation Army Temple. From the studio, it was only five cold blocks past Abingdon Square between rows of dark and idle warehouses. Jackson had visited the Benton apartment earlier in the fall, but always as Charles’s lit
tle brother. By early 1931, with Frank holed up at Columbia growing daily more disenchanted with New York, and Charles trying to juggle his teaching job with his commitment to Elizabeth, Jackson usually came alone. In the undeclared contest with Charles, he could claim his first victory.
In his autobiography, Benton would argue that there was nothing unique about Jackson’s visits. “I was given to treating my students like friends,” he wrote, “inviting them home to dinner and parties and otherwise putting them on a basis of equality.” That may have been true later, but when Jackson began his regular visits, he was the only League student who enjoyed the privilege of casual access. Not even fellow Missourian Joe Meert or chief assistant Herman Cherry accompanied Benton home in the evenings. Later in 1931, when Benton organized a musical group, Monday night rehearsals would bring a crowd of students into the Hudson Street apartment, but few were fed and fewer still came back between rehearsals.
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