... you can write about anything — this is a café post — but I am inviting you to consider whether this painting is deplorable.(Double click the image to enlarge and see details much more clearly.)
Does it deserve a place of honor or is this something that good citizens should pressure the museum to store in its basement along with other disreputable junk from America's shameful past?
And if these proddings amuse you, encourage me by using The Althouse Amazon Portal.
ADDED: Here's the wall card for that painting (at the Indianapolis Museum of Art):
Not very informative — politically — is it? Why did Thomas Hart Benton lead "Regionalists" and why did these people "favor images of America, especially the rural Midwest"? It's 1942. It's WWII. It's the year FDR relocated Japanese Americans to internment camps. Why so hot to show us the America of the rural Midwest where farmers still plow with a horse? Isn't this the kind of image Hitler would have enjoyed? Hitler too objected to the abstract art of the Modernists. He himself painted rural scenes. For example:
And yet, what a difference between Hitler's rural scene and Benton's. Benton had everything rolling and flowing, pulsating with life. Hitler doesn't even have a person or an animal, and there's no activity in his inanimate things. Hitler's painting looks like a snapshot of a real place — a boring place not even worth photographing. Benton's painting refers to reality, but everything is transformed. He takes the most humble subject and pumps it up into the mythic, heroic, and phantasmagoric.
But who knows? Maybe that's what Hitler meant to do too, and he was too crappy a painter to achieve the intended effect. And more importantly, similarity/difference to Hitler is not a good enough political test, especially for art.
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dustbunny said...
Thomas Hart Benton was Jackson Pollack's teacher and mentor.
That explains it. If Pollack was an artist I'm, as one of Twain's characters would say, King of Proosia.
I like the Hitler painting. It is simple, not the mishmash of trash in postmodern art. It is serene. It is an interesting combination of city and country; on a dirt road, hay on the roof, but with a steel barrier on the outside of the curve. It isn't a Bob Ross happy little tree but it is pleasant.
"If what Althouse says about sex and hats is true, it give a whole new meaning to Oliver Sacks' book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat."
Suddenly, everything makes sense!
The man wasn't wrong at all. He was right and everyone else was wrong. And that's the way of the world, if we could only see things from a different point.
As Bob Dylan sang: "We always did feel the same/We just saw it from a different point of view."
Hitler's painting looks like a snapshot of a real place
Hitler's paintings looks like a snapshot because he painted from other people's photographs. I make the case for that here.
Hitler's paintings looks like a snapshot because he painted from other people's photographs.
So did my late husband. He was a talented artist if not original.
buwaya said...
On my office walls I have bullfight advertising posters of my childhood hero, El Cordobes.
Your hero was (is?) a guy who dressed up like Liberace and pranced around while he tortured cows?
Robt C said...
Oliver Sacks' book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
You can't trust that guy: "In February 2010, Sacks was named as one of the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers."
Benton's art was very American, as opposed to Soviet art, which often featured rustic or industrial scenes of simple-yet-heroic farmers and proletarians. Many Regionalists' works were displayed in post offices and state universities, and were a visual fanfare for the common man, and were commissioned by the WPA, contrasting with Soviet artists who were compelled to work for the state and party, and whose works were shown in government-owned spaces to advance Communistt propaganda of the workers' paradise.
Would you hate Hitler's art if you didn't know who made it?
Fernandinande said...
buwaya said...
On my office walls I have bullfight advertising posters of my childhood hero, El Cordobes.
Your hero was (is?) a guy who dressed up like Liberace and pranced around while he tortured cows?
Pretty obviously we would expect you to identify with the bull.
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