Word: benton
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Death came to Wood and Curry in the 1940s, when both men were still in their prime. Terrible-tempered Tom Benton, the surviving member of the triumvirate, is 64, has not had a New York show in twelve years...
...Kansas City home, Benton last week spoke almost mellowly of the good old days...
...20th century America, fashions in art have altered just as often and drastically as fashions in women's dress. Cocks of the walk in the 1930s were three Midwestern artists who are scarcely mentioned today: Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton. Their paintings (opposite and overleaf), included in a current retrospective show at Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art, are nostalgic reminders of a vanished era in recent U.S. history...
...Benton dates his rise from the Great Crash: "Because of the breakdown of our economic society in 1929 and the early 1930s, the effort to come out of the Depression occasioned a terrific concentration on America -what it meant, what it was composed of, why it was the way it was -by Americans. Frankly, Wood, Curry and I profited from this concentration." With a flash of his old fire, Benton adds: "I will say that in the 1930s, art had more public value than it does now. It belonged to the public. Today it's the property...
...that kind of work, although he never quite shook the slavishness to subject matter that is its mark. But Curry did have the boldness to conceive a Cineramic view of the land he loved. At the height of his fame, he called Wisconsin Landscape "my greatest." Grant Wood, like Benton, sowed some Midwestern oats in Paris. There he sported shocking pink whiskers and a Basque beret, painted hazy, impressionistic canvases. Back home in his native Iowa, he mainly taught art for a living. He shaved his round face smooth, and assumed an exterior as mild as a cup of Ovaltine...