Artists

Like last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, this weekend’s paper brought a book review worth noting here. (I’m not the only one, btw, who appreciate’s the WSJ’s Saturday Review section — last month, Peter Osnos, founder of Public Affairs Books, published an essay praising the section in The Atlantic.)

This time, Henry Allen has reviewed Thomas Hart Benton: A Life by Justin Wolff, a book I heard about in the making, because gossip had it that Wolff would change people’s minds about the man and possibly the art. The book is 400 pages long, so maybe it does, but Allen’s review doesn’t make that case.

Allen describes Benton accurately as someone for whom the public bore distaste “ for his own loud rancor toward museums, Modernism, Europe, curators, capitalism, Marxism, homosexuals, on and on.”  And, of course, his realist kind of art was overtaken by the Abstract Expressionists, including his own pupil Jackson Pollock.

But let’s go back further, as Allen does:

It’s hard to believe, but my old book from 1940 began: “America today is developing a School of Painting which promises to be the most important movement in the world of art since the days of the Italian Renaissance.” Time magazine had put Benton’s self-portrait on its cover in 1934. He’d published his autobiography in 1937. His work was both praised and reviled with passions that no art arouses now, except a Super Bowl halftime show.

Despite his vigorous reading and colorful writing, Benton was no finely sliced aesthete. Instead, he was an angry, hard-drinking, harmonica-playing, well-read little backwoods aristocrat from a small town in southwestern Missouri, a man given to the sad pugnaciousness called a little-man complex. He was called “virile” back when that was a compliment.

Benton was contradictory. He celebrated the American spirit while being a Marxist. He was an American nationalist accused of defaming America by showing its ugliness along with its beauty. He was a good enough politician to get hired to paint historical murals in public buildings. He was fired from his job at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1941 after saying that the typical museum was “run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait.”

Is it any wonder then, that as Allen notes, Benton did not survive later critics the way Edward Hopper and Grant Wood did? Some artitsts are lucky enough to escape the personal (say, Caravaggio, Picasso, etc.), but not Benton. He stirs animosity still. I appreciate his talent, but find much of his work, like Persephone (above), creepy.

Allen, though, is a believer in Benton. He ends his review with this: “If only Mr. Wolff could be 9, lying on the floor on a rainy day, looking at the beauty, vulgarity, dark passions and bright fields of “Persephone.” Open your eyes, ignore cultivated tastes, and it explains itself.”

James Hall –  a freelance art critic and historian who has written two books about Michelangelo – ends his review of Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal with this note: “…biographers will undoubtedly be redrawing Michelangelo for many centuries to come.”

Nonetheless, the book in question, by Michael Hirst, a London-based Michelangelo scholar, is long-awaited and does seem to have its virtues. I enjoyed several of Hall’s observations and anecdotes, presumably drawn from Hirst. The review tells us, for example, that Michelangelo’s magnificent David (1501-04) was made from marble that “had been lying around in the cathedral workshops since the 1460s after a previous attempt to carve a statue.” Michelangelo recycled the abandoned block.

And who knew that Michelangelo was as busy writing letters in his day as people using Twitter today? Hall writes:

There are around 1,400 surviving letters to and from the artist (Saturday was his letter-writing day), as well as memorandums, contracts, bank-account details, poems—even the odd shopping list. He is easily the best documented Renaissance artist. Most of the letters and memorandums were given to the city of Florence in 1858 by Michelangelo’s last descendant, but on condition that they not be copied. It was only in 1964 that this stipulation was lifted. The material has now been published in eight big scholarly volumes, the last of which appeared in 2005. The restoration of the Sistine Chapel from 1980 to 1994, and of many other works, has also furnished masses of new information.

This book deals with Michelangelo’s career up to 1534, when he moves permanently to Rome at the age of 59 to paint “The Last Judgment.” Known for his crankiness, Michelangelo had to help support his brothers and fathers, although he falsely claimed noble heritage. “Michelangelo preferred to think of himself as a self-made genius,” but while “we still don’t know who taught him how to carve,” Hirst shows that the artist learned a lot in the studio of Ghirlandaio, which he entered at age 13, and — says Hall in the review — “The younger artist was hugely indebted to Ghirlandaio’s painting methods and his workshop organization, with its careful division of labor. When painting the Sistine Ceiling, Michelangelo initially had six assistants, virtually the same number as Ghirlandaio used for his major fresco cycles. ”

We also learn that Michelangelo’s “first sculpture, “Bacchus,” was rejected by the cardinal who had commissioned it—no doubt because this god of wine really does look very tipsy” and that “It was the St. Peter’s Pietà (1498-9), made for the tomb of a French cardinal, that made his name. It is the only work that Michelangelo signed, and he did so with a lover’s boldness, on the strap that passes between the Virgin’s breasts. From then on, he was never seriously short of commissions or money. His perennial problem was making realistic proposals, completing work and knowing when to say no.”

Hall’s review of the book is lukewarm, saying it lacks “passion and vision.” Hence, the first sentence of this post. But if you’re curious about the artist’s life, the “day-to-day detail,” Hirst’s 438 pages, published by Yale University Press, are for you. And a second volume is planned.