Word: aestheticized
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Your critic's judgment that future generations will not derive much aesthetic pleasure from Benton's "big machines" misreads the genius of this Midwestern artist.
To be a modern artist in Europe was not the same thing. There, at least in Paris, one had an accessible field of new art. However poor, however rejected or unsuccessful he might be, the Parisian artist could afford to feel that he was part of a continuum known as...
The big problem for artists who did not want to follow the usual pattern of expatriation was how to be both modern and at the same time American. Most modern American art from the teens and '20s had a homemade, do-it-yourself, rule-of-thumb look. Arthur Dove...
But to a mass audience, the old regionalist's pronouncements were oracular. He was, after all, a reformed modernist: up to 1918 he had painted "lifeless symbolist and cubist pictures," full of "my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns." He had studied in Paris, the Antichrist's lair...
Revisionist Nostalgia. But Benton lived long enough to feel the coming of another revival. His easel paintings now fetch up to $90,000, a fat $40 book on him was published last year, and next year's Bicentennial will pour gallons of revisionist nostalgia upon the American regionalists-Benton...