Deep South — America Today: A Time Capsule of The 1920s
(Deep South, from America Today, 1930–31 / The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of AXA Equitable, 2012)
America Today, a mural painted by Thomas Hart Benton for New York's New School, to adorn the school's boardroom in its international style modernist building on
West 12th Street, shows a panorama of American life throughout the 1920s.1 The 10 panels present viewers with scenes of rural and urban life on the eve of the Great Depression. Resting on the east wall of the gallery, the Deep South panel depicts the American cotton-picking business in the 1920s. Contrasting with the cotton scenes in the painting’s background, a standing black cotton picker looms over the seated white man on his harrow, while workers load the Tennessee Belle2 steamboat with cotton in the center. In Deep South (and some other panels in America Today), Benton worked to embed the racial realities he considered essential to modern America.
In the Deep South panel, Benton chose to use a complementary color palette. The panel’s background colors consist of cornflower blue, flax, lavender, and wisteria. Contrasting with this tonal background, a standing black cotton picker on the bottom right corner of the panel looms over a seated white man on his harrow. The tonal background seems to set the black cotton picker apart as a powerful figure, and this in turn forces viewers to pay more attention to him. Perhaps Benton forced viewers to acknowledge African Americans visually. He did so by depicting blacks, with their rippling muscles, in expected and relatively accepted roles as cotton pickers in the Deep South panel. The black cotton picker, together with the black chimney smoke at the
1 “Thomas Hart Benton's America Today Mural Rediscovered, The Metropolitan Museum Of Arts, http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/thomas-hart-benton. 2 Paul Theroux, “The Story Behind Thomas Hart Benton’s Incredible Masterwork,” Smithsonian Magazine, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/arts-culture/story-behind-thomas-hart-benton s-incredible-masterwork-1-180953405/.
background, probably symbolizes how Benton perceive black race in America: they are indispensable in both agricultural productivity and modern industrialization.
Along with the contrasting colors, Benton used line in a clever way through his brushstrokes. The tonal background was rendered with blurred brushstrokes while streaked brushstrokes were used depicting the figures. During the 1920s, Benton traveled by car throughout the U.S, taking extensive notes and making hundreds of drawings of all facets of American life. America Today was commissioned by Alvin Johnson, director of The New School, for the school’s modernist building on West 12th Street in New York.3 In 1930, Benton returned to New York and began America Today.4 The background in blurred brushstrokes was based on Benton’s memory and his sketches of the cotton-picking scene near a Tennessee riverside. Benton was not able to create the scene the moment he saw it since the mural had to be executed in New York. Benton used blurred brushstrokes in an attempt to return to the Tennessee riverside while he was painting. However, the figures he embedded in the panel were actually based on specific individuals. The black worker in the panel is a composite since the artist Reginald Marsh5, who was white, posed for the body. This is probably the reason Benton was able to create these figures in concrete, streaked brushstrokes, since he had the physical model in front of him.
Besides color and line, Benton used different figures to reveal the social realities back in 20s. There are two major black figures who appear in America Today, one in 3 Ibid. 4 Lance Esplund, “Thomas Hart Benton’s ‘America Today’ at the Met,” The Wall Street Journal, URL. 5 Ibid.
Deep South and the other in City Building (see page 5). These men stand at both ends of the mural panels and anchor the entire cycle. They are dressed identically, and their arms are raised in similar gestures. The rural black figure in Deep South and the urban black figure in City Building represent the foundations of capitalist America. From Benton's perspective, both agricultural productivity and modern industrialization are dependent on black labor. The black cotton picker's arms encircle his face, just like the black driller in the City Building panel. Perhaps Benton is using this frame as a subtle visual metaphor emphasizing each black figure, suggesting that there’s a kind of psychological boundary which symbolizes certain realities of black American life. Juxtaposed to the black cotton picker, the white farmer in the lower left corner of the Deep South, J.T Morton6, also appears in a portrait Benton drew in 1928. In his autobiography, Benton wrote about the plight of the white southern sharecroppers and tenant farmers, describing these “landless” farmers as “slaves of out modes land system”.7
Benton showed his pioneer political vision in this panel; however, his artistic aesthetics are conservative. Benton executed this mural in egg tempera with an oil glaze on linen mounted on wood panels. Egg tempera was “known from the classical world” and “was the main medium used for panel painting,” such as in the “Byzantine world and Medieval and Early renaissance Europe”8. Despite the fact that Benton was socially
6 Museum label for artist, Deep South, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 7 Museum label for artist, Portrait of J.T.Morton, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 8 “Egg Tempera,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempera.
progressive in his artwork, he was artistically conservative. He declared himself as an “enemy of modernism”9. His choice of art technique is proof of his artistic claim.
With this 10-panel mural in the gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, America Today offers viewers a grand tour of the 1920s. Most of the 10 panels have an approximate height of seven-and-a-half feet. They are connected seamlessly across the walls, allowing viewers to take in the scene uninterrupted. Conveying details from chimney smoke to cotton filled along the riverside in the Deep South panel, Benton brings viewers back into the 20s time capsule.
9 “Thomas Hart Benton (painter),” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hart_Benton.