To understand the significance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installation of Thomas Hart Benton’s ten-panel America Today so many decades after it was created for the New School for Social Research in 1930 and 1931, you need to know a little about the school in those heady days. Founded in 1919, by the 1930s the New School had become the very definition of educational optimism, internationalism, and all things progressive. Its faculty included Franz Boas (anthropology), Sandor Ferenczi (psychoanalysis), Berenice Abbott (photography), Martha Graham (dance), Aaron Copland (music), and eventually W.E.B. Dubois (African-American history) among other luminous makers and doers. For its new building on West Twelfth Street it hired the Vienna-born architect Joseph Urban and commissioned murals by both José Clemente Orozco and Thomas Hart Benton. Those were the days.
“Changing West” from America Today by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), 1930-1931. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of AXA.
“City Building” from America Today by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), 1930-1931. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of AXA.
“Deep South” from America Today by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), 1930-1931. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of AXA.
“City Activities with Dance Hall” from America Today by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), 1930-1931. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of AXA.
“Outreacing Hands [overdoor panel]” from America Today by Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), 1930-1931. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of AXA.
Benton’s ten muscular hymns to American greatness were inspired by sketches he made during his travels around the U.S. in the 1920s. Hung in the school’s boardroom, they connected viewers to patriotic scenes from sea to shining sea: City Building, a grand expression of the industrial heroic; Midwest, the agricultural heroic; Deep South, a bold depiction of king cotton where blacks and whites figure equally; and so on through Coal, Steel, City Activities with Dance Hall, and finally to a smallish panel over the door titled Outreaching Hands, where a note of apprehension enters that is not surprising in the wake of 1929.
It must have been a grand experience to be in that room, but in 1982 the school sold the series. It was kept together and eventually acquired by Equitable Life, now AXA, and installed in their headquarters on Seventh Avenue and later at their headquarters on the Avenue of the Americas. Lined up along the lobby walls the series was too disjointed to have the immersive impact of its original setting. And jettisoned from the school it did not have the heat, but by that time neither did the New School.
In 2012 AXA donated America Today to the Met, where it will be installed in a facsimile of its original boardroom home and on view from September 30 to April 19, 2015. Situated in the American Wing and co-curated by the museum’s departments of modern and contemporary art, the installation is important for many reasons not least among them the suggestion that the wall between those two areas in the museum may have been removed.
America Today is Benton at his best and in many ways his most surprising. The moldings painted in aluminum leaf and used to section the spaces within each panel were an inspired innovation. A brilliant collaboration between Benton and Urban, they give the paintings a cool rhythmic beat that keeps their emotional heat in check as they draw in and move the viewer around the room.
We can no longer see our country in the clear unnuanced light that Benton gave it in that room on West TwelfthStreet, but it is crucially important to know how it once felt to do so. The Met has made that possible.
Thomas Hart Benton’s America Today Mural Rediscovered • Metropolitan Museum of Art • to April 19, 2015 • metmuseum.org
