http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/arts/thomas-hart-bentons-america-today-mural-at-the-met.html 2014-10-03 01:23:44 Thomas Hart Benton’s ‘America Today’ Mural at the Met “Thomas Hart Benton’s ‘America Today’ Mural Rediscovered” offers a raucous, wide-angle look at America as it entered the Depression. === The prickly American Regionalist Like many New Yorkers, it has survived several moves, passing from its intended site, a boardroom and classroom in the New School for Social Research, through the hands of an art dealer and the collection of AXA Equitable Life Insurance (which displayed it in the lobby of its corporate headquarters in midtown). In 2012 AXA, facing a renovation, donated the mural to the Metropolitan Museum, where it is now being unveiled in the American wing in the In a reconstruction of its The Met’s presentation of “America Today” might even convince a few anti-Bentonites to look anew at this cantankerous and controversial figure, who in his W.P.A. days, was a mentor to Pollock but was later shunned by Abstract Expressionist painters, who considered him hopelessly retrograde and insufficiently cosmopolitan. Or maybe it was Benton who shunned them, abandoning the East Coast for Kansas City, Mo. — he called New York “a highly provincial place” — and adopting a strident anti-intellectualism. (The Met tries to smooth over some of his rougher edges, but they come through.) The show’s curators, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Randall Griffey, surround “America Today” with preparatory works and tangentially related pieces from the museum’s collection. Visitors should begin, however, by plunging into the fray of the mural. It starts in New York City and moves South and West, through farms and forests and oil fields, pausing for a quasi-Futurist celebration of dynamism and industry (speeding trains, combustion engines) before circling back to the Northeast by way of coal country and the Rust Belt. The progression is wonderfully theatrical (and even cinematic, careening through a momentous period of American history like a flickering newsreel). Benton’s early experience in the theater, as a set builder, is apparent in the staginess of the mural’s architecture (the Western boom towns and big-city bank facades) and in the antic, exaggerated movements of its figures. The New York City scenes, especially, seem like showstopping Broadway numbers: An evangelist preaches as burlesque dancers shimmy; prizefighters slug it out; men ogle a woman on the subway; and a couple makes out furiously by the Coney Island roller coaster. The architect Toward the later panels, the colors deepen, from the peach and lavender view of the Mississippi to the fiery russets and smoky grays of the steel plant and coal mine. And the figures become more dynamic, with stiffly rectilinear agrarian laborers giving way to the lurching diagonals of the factory men. Perhaps the biggest complaint against Benton is that his figures can read as crude The figure studies offer insight into Benton’s complex process, which began with three-dimensional clay models (a technique used by his hero, Just as illuminating is the exhibition’s section of works by “Thomas Hart Benton’s Circle.” Included are the Mannerist Abraham Bloemaert’s late-16th-century painting Not to be missed are two works from 1943: Benton’s own Brueghel-esque harvest scene “July Hay,” and The junction of these two paintings is an excellent place to begin re-evaluating Benton. So is “America Today,” which manages to knit together abstraction and figuration, American and European modernism, New York City and the rest of the country, and, above all, optimism and despondency. Benton may not have regarded himself as a unifying figure; in his later career, he was given to provocative