‘Thomas Hart Benton,’ by Justin Wolff

Detail from "Threshing Wheat" by Thomas Hart Benton (1938-1939).

In 1934, Thomas Hart Benton, purveyor of muscular scenes of American life, was the country's most famous painter and one of the very few ever to have his picture on the cover of Time. In 1949, Jackson Pollock, painter of abstract drips and swirls, appeared in a four-page spread in Life teasingly headlined "Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?" Yes or no didn't really matter: he was the nation's new art star.

THOMAS HART BENTON

A Life

By Justin Wolff

Illustrated. 400 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $ 40.

Missouri Division of Tourism

Thomas Hart Benton

What changed in the 15 years that separated the public elevation of these two artists and their radically different art? The world changed, for one thing, moving out of the Great Depression, through World War II, and into a bomb-haunted cold war. America changed from a mighty fortress to an outreaching global imperium. And American art, including Pollock's, changed from illustrating provincial sagas to dramatizing universal myths.

Benton, however, did not change, or changed in the wrong, retrograde direction, going from experiments with vanguard modes, including abstraction, to the nativist realism that briefly made his name. He was barely at midcareer when he had to watch that realism pass into obsolescence, a sight made all the more galling by the fact that Pollock, the most visible agent of a new art order, had once been his student. Benton's response was to stick to his guns, insist that his brand of art was the only valid art, and fire away at all who disagreed.

This is the story, or part of it, told in "Thomas Hart Benton: A Life," by the American art historian Justin Wolff. Benton, who lived from 1889 to 1975, is not a significant presence now. The particular audience he painted for is long gone; the one that has replaced it knows nothing about him. Generally speaking, the elite art establishment of museums and scholars that he reviled has pegged him as at best a period artifact and at worst, as, in Pollock's Oedipal words, "something against which to react very strongly."

Small wonder that, faced with a shelf of books on American art, few readers are likely to go for one about Benton. Yet Wolff, who teaches at the University of Maine, makes the artist interesting, largely by taking a balanced view of him. He neither praises nor critically buries Benton but rather, and with what feels like an undercurrent of empathy, works hard to give him his day in court. To this end, he pays relatively little attention to the artist's cranky, embittered and intensively documented late years and dwells at length on the less familiar story of how he became the person he was.

Benton was born in Neosho, Mo., into a family of lawyer-politicians, big-deal types who, in Benton's words, "drank heavily, ate heartily and talked long over fat cigars." His great-uncle had been a United States senator; his father, Maecenas Benton, known as the Colonel, was a congressman. As a boy Benton accompanied his father on rural campaigns. He made note, and later made use, of the Colonel's pronouncement-prone stump style. And he never forgot the experience of hearing everyday people talking about what mattered in their lives.

But professional politics was not for him. He wanted to be an artist. His father, who considered art an unmanly trade, was furious; the two were never close again. But with the support of his mother, Lizzie, a strong-minded woman with social ambitions, Benton embarked on what would be a long, awkward and episodic cultural education.

Still in his teens, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, focusing on illustration and newspaper cartooning. But he soon became interested in painting and decided to head to Paris, where he landed with little money, no French and only a vague idea of how to wield a brush. He stayed for three years, splitting his time between copying old masters in the Louvre and immersing himself in a modern art scene that was, in the years before World War I, on the boil.

Holland Cotter, an art critic for The Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2009.

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