Is there a post-postmodern approach to the art of Thomas Hart Benton, the opinionated, controversial polymath? One that expands an understanding of this larger-than-life artist in humanistic terms while laying bare his manifold contradictions: the short man who drew elongated bodies; the Parisian-trained painter who disavowed the avant-garde and its “cubes”; the man of ideas who read John Dewey while lambasting urban intelligentsia; and, last but not least, the scion of politicians who eschewed public service to travel around the country to reach out to the everyman? In the 1970s and 1980s, art historians strove to unfix Benton’s status as modernism’s reigning critic: retrograde, kitsch, folksy. The twenty-first century has seen even more flexible, nuanced interpretations of the painter and his work. The recent biography by Justin Wolff, for example, unpacks the panoply of incongruities in Benton’s life, leaving an untidy, beautifully complicated portrait of the artist.¹ In Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound, Leo Mazow similarly exposes unresolved tensions, while skillfully repositioning Benton’s work and his persona within a multi-sensorial framework of the fleeting, clanging, melancholy sounds of America in the first half of the twentieth century. Examining Benton’s words, collecting habits, and travel, Mazow replenishes the paintings with the oral history, folk music, regional dialects, radio skits, and back stories that first inspired them, allowing readers to hear period attitudes toward nostalgia, historicity, and progress along the way.

Mazow organizes the book into four chapters devoted to, respectively, musical imagery; non-musical sound; Benton’s collecting and preserving efforts; and, finally, his radio programs and Regionalist agenda. There is also an epilogue that shifts the focus to the sense of touch, as well as two appendices: the first delineates selected radio, television, and film broadcasts featuring Benton, and the second lists the lyrics and the title of songs cited in The Arts of Life in America (1932) murals. In general, the first two chapters focus on Benton’s work, while the last two explore his persona, but each chapter imbricates the other. Indeed, even within each chapter, it becomes quickly apparent that much like the polyphonous, borderless compositions he is analyzing, Mazow maintains a brisk rhythm and pace to make sure that various people or songs and their histories can be heard.

Undoubtedly, Benton seems to have been obsessed with creating an art that could affect everyone, that was accessible to all. His use of sound-based narratives seemed to be but one approach of many to reach his audience. As Mazow notes in the first chapter, Benton wanted to capture popular sentiments by exploring the folkways of some of the most well-known songs of the time, such as “Frankie and Johnny,” “The Wreck of the Ole ’97,” and “John Henry.” Wisely, Mazow lets the lyrics of these folk songs—filled with trains, whistles, guns, dancing, and barroom brawls—speak for themselves, so that the reader’s mind is filled with the words while looking at the images. Mazow’s discursive, archival-based approach to these songs seems to serve his subject well in that, much like the lively lyrics that inform them, these busy, dynamic compositions are no longer quiet artifacts of a prior era. Benton’s visualizations of these tunes offer a heavy dose of nostalgia, and, as Mazow demonstrates through careful analysis of both lyrics and song structure, with their typically tragic endings, these narratives offer a distinctly anti-modern, anti-progress, fatalistic message. Perhaps because of Mazow’s deft handling of works from different periods of time, the reader is left wondering how these works fit into Benton’s artistic production overall. How many paintings based on folk songs as opposed to other subjects did Benton make? Further, would it have been more productive to have organized and discussed these works chronologically so that a compositional or thematic evolution or pattern emerges? Such a methodology might have revealed a more nuanced agenda on the part of the artist as he painted these sound-based subjects throughout his life—how Benton’s picturing of sound changed, if at all, through the years, for example. Instead of this meta-analysis of Benton’s music-based works, Mazow chooses to emphasize the folk songs themselves and the artist’s many provocative remarks and actions around them. A different path, but enlightening nonetheless. By recovering these lost folkways, Mazow reveals these paintings as complicated visualizations of not only the artist’s but also a widely held cynicism toward such looming ideas of the changing times as modernism, corporations, and progress.

Setting out to examine the stylistic techniques Benton uses to represent sounds other than folk songs, in the second chapter Mazow examines several works, such as Farm Sale with Pop and the Boys (1962) and Lord Heal the Child (1934), that were the result of extended conversations between the artist and his subjects—exchanges that Mazow frames as “listening with the eyes,” borrowing a term from Les Back. Mazow wonderfully recreates in this chapter the different kinds, and the inordinate amount, of listening that Benton accomplished: he drove through the South, Midwest, and West for months at a time and for many years, speaking with locals; attending church, speeches, and musical events; and recording oral histories of the region’s denizens along the way. (“Absorbing the oral histories of those he met, he effectively painted their sounds, or attempted to do as much. By painting the sound, he took positive steps toward capturing the transitory stuff of so-called everyday life” (52).) Mazow covers vast territories in his interpretations of Benton’s pictorial strategies in this second chapter, touching on such topics as the oral history of a father and his sons playing the banjo in Independence, Missouri; Benton’s synchromist experiments in Paris; noise pollution; Depression-era music; the fox trot; subway rattle in New York; telephone advertisements Benton created in 1955; a portrait of hearing-impaired Martha’s Vineyard residents; and a portrait of a pianist friend whom he visited in Vermont. (The interlude of synchromism, a movement based on the correlation between color and music, that Mazow introduces could have led to another possible inquiry, that being how the artist considered modernist painting’s approach to sound as a failure in relation to regionalism and realism’s championing of sound.) Throughout the discussion of the works related to these noises and sounds, Mazow elucidates Benton’s populist agenda and how the artist depicted sound as a critical aspect of civic life. In such works as the now lost panels from The Arts of Life in America Mural in which the lyrics of popular songs are written on futurist vectors of exhaust smoke emerging from what seems to be a car, Mazow says,“the popular music—the sounds of the people—is the force propelling the American machine” (87). At the same time, Mazow shows that Benton had not only an indefatigable ear, but also an incredible sense of wanderlust—a point that Mazow could have considered in aural terms given the multi-directionality and mobile nature of sound waves. Indeed, a case could be made that Benton’s regionalism was just as much about travel and motion as it was about sound; consider, for example, that his autobiography is divided into chapters covering regions through which he traveled (south, west, Missouri, mountains, cities, rivers), and his compositions are filled with moving bodies, thrusting diagonals, and sweeping, almost cinematic, views.

Moving away from the sounds inside the artwork, Mazow allows the artist’s voice to be the guiding archival source in the third and fourth chapters. Benton was an archivist himself, particularly in terms of American music. “The old music cannot last much longer,” he once wrote, “I count it a great privilege to have heard it in the sad twang of mountain voices before it died” (Mazow, 11, citing Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America, 3rd ed., Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968, 114). Mazow explores in the third chapter Benton’s collecting impulse, what he calls a desire to anthologize or accumulate documents from the past, much like the musicologists and folk music archivists he knew. In the amassing of historical recordings of musicians such as banjoist Moran Lee “Dock” Boggs, Benton becomes a “sonic witness to vernacular America” (91). Of course, Benton not only transcribed the folk music that he heard during his travels, he also visualized and portrayed them as significant moments in American music and cultural history. One of Mazow’s most moving discussions of Benton’s artwork is centered on The Sources of Country Music (1975) and Benton’s depictions of famed “jawbone-of-an-ass percussionist” Chick Allen. Mazow convincingly argues that Benton is preserving the pictorial dimension of a vibrant aural tradition that Allen kept alive. In other words, Benton was archiving American music in parallel tracks, each of which was mono-sensorial (one wholly visual and one wholly aural) and each of which was fading away. An interesting, if not entirely developed, tangent to this anthologizing that Mazow discusses in this chapter is the sometimes combative relationship between Benton and Alfred Stieglitz. Benton’s criticism of the hagiographic America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait (Garden City, NY: Literary Guild, 1934), Mazow argues, reveals how Benton was more populist than Stieglitz, but at the same time, how both strived for an authenticity in their art, through the medium of sound.

In addition to country music, another aural mode that captured Benton’s imagination was the radio, which Mazow examines in detail in chapter 4. Arguing that Benton’s art mimicked radio’s static, dynamic passages, and sense of interconnection, among other things, Mazow parses out the dialogue and context of a radio dramatization of the artist’s work and life on the NBC program that aired in early 1940. Showing how Benton manipulated the format of radio to lambast modernism and remain in the public sphere, Mazow presents interesting dialogue from these programs that otherwise would remain lost, and he underscores the artist’s deep-seated desire to demystify art and resituate it in the vernacular. In an October 1939 episode of Art for Your Sake, a fictional character named Dr. Benton, whom Mazow argues is probably based on Benton himself, discusses the place of art to a father, son, and daughter, disagreeing that art is for “people who can spend a million,” by responding, “there’s some way in which everyone can participate” (133). In support of such claims, in 1940 Benton offered mail-order lithographs that could be purchased for as little as five dollars. As earnest as these efforts appear and as much as Benton sought to connect with the American population, Mazow argues that Benton’s project of reaching out en masse to promote Regionalism effectively essentialized the United States as a one-class, monolithic group. Mazow agrees with other art historians such as Meyer Schapiro that his Regionalist agenda was naïve. His preservation efforts were unsuccessful attempts to impose a fixed identity on the American people, which was also part of the Regionalist agenda, and the country was much more diverse than Benton had realized.

In his introduction, Mazow states that “for Benton and the regionalism he championed, constructing a national identity in the 1930s and 1940s . . . was only one part of the movement’s agenda. Getting through to the nation—physically, emotionally, and often aurally—was just as important” (12). One of the finest contributions of Mazow’s project is that it seamlessly links Benton’s Regionalist agenda with his aural endeavors, highlighting the artist’s interest in not only folk songs, but also his interest in numerous modes of civic discourse. The reader can see that Benton’s life was filled with town hall meetings, lectures, sermons, and, one can imagine, many “shooting the breeze” conversations with the citizens of the regions that he visited for months at a time. With so much imagery and so many overlapping themes and issues regarding sound in Benton’s oeuvre, imagining Benton’s own oral history is no small task. In effect, Mazow dissects the artist’s crowded, hyperbolic narratives to point out significant sonic moments—their visual language, the biography of the subjects, and the circumstances of the scene—while building an overall cohesive framework that organizes these sound bites of history for the reader. The results can be uneven at times, partly because there is so much ground to cover, but overall, Mazow successfully guides the reader through the cacophony of subjects in Benton’s paintings and murals, ultimately recasting the artist’s fascination with America’s past and present in terms of its voices, noises, and music.