Benton

Carpenters, plasterers, electricians and harried directors worked fast last week to complete one of the finest modernist buildings in New York, the New School for Social Research, in time for its opening next week. In the board room ready to be looked at were nine vibrant mural panels which have already attracted national attention and brought fame to the New School as a building, whatever may be its success as an institution. The artist is Thomas Hart Benton. Artist Benton was born in Neosho, Mo., on the edge of the Ozarks, a great-nephew of Andrew Jackson's trusted Senator Thomas Hart Benton, son of Congressman Maecenas Eason Benton. At 17, Maecenas' son was carrying a chain as a surveyor's assistant in Joplin. Shortly thereafter he began a long, arduous, uninteresting art apprenticeship as a newspaper cartoonist, then as an art student in Chicago, Paris, New York, where he kept himself alive painting scenery for the old haphazard cinema studios of Fort Lee, N. J. Six months in the Navy during the War knocked the French impressionism out of him. He began to develop his own style. In 1919 he started work on a project that bore its first tangible fruits last week: a gigantic pictorial history of modern U.

S. For ten years he worked on it, experimenting with various techniques of mural painting. He traveled up, down and across the country making sketches, collecting material.

A great many people saw these sketches, were impressed. Back in New York he hired a loft, erected a number of huge panels, and with no commissions in sight began his mural history. Director Alvin Saunders Johnson of the New School for Social Research, which describes itself as an institution for adult education (advanced courses in the arts, economics, psychology & social science primarily for people beyond college age), determined that he must have a set of such panels for his new million-dollar building which Architect Joseph Urban was erecting on West 12th St. (and which critics consider Architect Urban's best work). The Benton panels are entitled "America Today." They cover nearly every inch of wall in the red-ceilinged, modernistic board room. Between jagged curving strips of moulding, hundreds of figures in jangling brilliant color jostled each other: stockbrokers, bootleggers, revivalists, stevedores, politicians, cowboys, burlesque queens, soda clerks--the walls squirm with life. "To the critical objections to my murals that they are too loud and too disturbing to be in good taste," said Artist Benton, "there is only the answer that they represent the U. S. which is also loud and not in 'good taste.' . . . Every head is a real person, drawn from life. Every detail is a thing I myself have seen and known." Recognizable heads: Artist Benton himself drinking highballs with Director Johnson (see lower right corner of cut); Communist Max Eastman in the subway, gazing reflectively at a Miss Peggy Reynolds of the burlesque stage. Upstairs in the same building Artist Jose Clemente Orozco of Mexico, another of the most important American mural painters (TIME, Oct. 13), was slowly at work last week painting with water color in true fresco. Artist Benton's method is different; "America Today" is in tempera on gesso. The panels are built of plywood, then covered with canvas, which in turn is given coats of thin plaster. No oil is used in the pigment, which is mixed with equal parts of egg yolk and water (method of the Italian primitives).

Artist Benton is stocky, swart, amiable, intensely serious.

So great is his friends' belief in his work that they habitually refer to him not as Tom Benton, Tom, or Mr. Benton, but just BENTON, like WHISTLER, or REMBRANDT.

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