Still thinking about not much but the American wing that’s just reopened at the Nelson Atkins. Very likely going back ASAP. So glad to be able to look at this amazing THB painting. I still maintain that—while it is stylistically very much a part of the past—Benton had to have been deeply aware of the various social/moral problems he’s presented here.
For some reason the Nelson-Atkins isn’t able to have a Zoomfinder up to see way up close on this one, but here are a few of my other Nelson favorites:
Ross Braught, Tchaikovsky’s 6th: With stylized landscape painting being such a trend at the moment, I really wish there was someone working outside of the whole Radiohead album cover vein, and more like Braught here.
Thomas Eakins, Female Study: Go to the Zoomfinder, get right up to that delicate brushwork, check out that pencilled grid. Delicate. Unsexy. Lovingly painted.
Gilbert Stuart, Dr William Aspinwall: There’s a portrait painting trick I learned about one time: Yellow on the forehead, changing to red around the cheeks and nose and blue and blacks around the mouth. Which makes me look at this painting as a Rothko with sad eyes.
George Caleb Bingham: Dr. Benoist Troost: Eh. Okay painting. Kind of fun to look at because our local ‘bad street’ is named after the doc here.
Thanks for these links, Chris. That viewfinder option is niiiice. I’m inclined to agree with you re: Benton. I do wonder what the reception was like for that painting, when it was new.
Here’s a quote from the Thomas Hart Benton profile on the website for Ken Burns’ American Stories;
At times, Benton took pleasure in the profane. Persephone, his notorious nude, cost Benton his job at the Kansas City Art Institute but hung for a time in showman Billy Roses’ New York nightclub, The Diamond Horseshoe. “A good deal of Tom was out there to shock,” says Burns, who also points to Benton’s Susannah and the Elders, a nude with red fingernails that infuriated the clergy. “He knew art works on more than one level.”
[...] Speaking of which, no Wednesday is complete without ogling a little Thomas Hart Benton. [...]