Benton v. Adams

Thirty-nine years ago this month, a Missouri boy named Thomas Hart Benton arrived at Chicago's Art Institute to learn cartooning. "Besides cartoonists there were painting addicts," he recalls. "A few of them, with that strange propensity of addicts toward the corruption of others, began to work on me."

This week Tom Benton showed up in Chicago again--with a one-man exhibition which he described as a "plain bid for Chicago's approval." The country boy had not grown much bigger with the years, but he was twice as cocky.

Most of Benton's recent pictures stayed comfortably close to the farm, and included a diversity of crops (Shucking Corn, Sugar Cane, Rice Threshing). But among his new claims to fame was one stylized, swirling arrangement of "Cowboys" and wooden-looking Indians which Benton had first envisioned through a glass of beer. Said he: "As far back as I can remember, the Anheuser-Busch brewery used a picture of Custer's last stand on their calendars. I've seen it in every saloon and pool hall in the Southwest." Benton decided to paint his own version because he was confident that Cassily Adams' bloody panorama (for which Adolphus Busch Sr. paid $30,000 in 1892) was "not much of a picture." A good many barroom judges will still prefer the original.

In a catalogue foreword. Artist Benton begged off from being judged as an artist. His art, he explained, "is for the most part, as were also the great classical works, illustrative, storytelling and popular in content, or so intended. ... I ask then, Chicagoans, that you let the question of how 'good' these paintings are pass in favor of another question: 'How like are they to the things you know, to the experiences you have had in the America in which you live?' "

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