Typhoon Camille

CITY JOURNAL
December 7, 2012

Typhoon Camille
by James Panero

A review of Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, by Camille Paglia (Pantheon, 202 pp., $30)

When Camille Paglia published Sexual Personae, her 1990 study of “Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,” she became an unexpected combatant in the cultural wars. In a 1991 cover article that resembled a poster from the Wild West, The Village Voice plastered a picture of Paglia alongside mugshots of Roger Kimball, Dinesh D’Souza, Robert Brustein, Eugene Genovese, and Allan Bloom. The newspaper accused Paglia of being a “counterfeit feminist” who was “wanted for intellectual fraud.” The second-wave feminist Sandra M. Gilbert similarly wrote in The Kenyon Review that Paglia “loathes liberalism, egalitarianism, feminism, and Mother Nature.” Paglia was nothing if not primed for the fight. In her book, and in the interviews and articles that surrounded it, she attacked French post-structuralist theory and called out American feminist leaders as “drones,” “Stalinists,” and “sanctimonious . . . PC divas.” Like Susan Sontag, her one-time idol, Paglia became an intellectual sensation, and she made the most of it.

The Left saw Paglia as an enemy from within, a “dissident feminist” who happened to be a lesbian and atheist. For the Right, she was an unpredictable ally. Her tastes could range from the sacred to the secular to the commercial to the profane. “I would be someone who would look into the latrine of culture, into pornography and crime and psychopathology,” she wrote in her essay collection Vamps and Tramps, “and I would drop the bomb into it.” In her column for Salon.com, she could be the defender of high culture one minute, the oracle of Madonna (or Lady Gaga) the next. Her final chapter inSexual Personae was titled “Amherst’s Madame de Sade: Emily Dickinson.”

Such seeming idiosyncrasies are part of her fascination. The contrarian streak continues in her latest book, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, a defense of the life of art that manages to be both enlightening and maddening.

“Modern life is a sea of images,” she begins. “Our eyes are flooded by bright pictures and clusters of text flashing at us from every direction.” Therefore: “We must relearn how to see.” For Paglia, great art can be the teacher, a visual sutra to clean the lenses of our overstimulated eyes. “The only way to teach focus is to present the eye with opportunities for steady perception—best supplied by the contemplation of art. Looking at art requires stillness and receptivity, which realign our senses and produce a magical tranquility.”

In her opening chapter, she makes an energetic appeal to the canon: “Museums have embraced publicity and marketing techniques invented by Hollywood to attract large crowds to blockbuster shows, but the big draw remains Old Master or Impressionist painting, not contemporary art.” Then comes the hook: “George Lucas is the world’s greatest living artist . . . nothing I saw in the visual arts of the past thirty years was as daring, beautiful, and emotionally compelling as the spectacular volcano-planet climax of Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith (2005).” On the face of it, these two arguments are contradictory. It’s odd to condemn museum blockbusters only to praise a Hollywood blockbuster. Nor is it easy to understand how the needs of a culture “flooded by bright pictures” and in need of “steady perception” might be served by the “spectacular volcano-planet climax” of a billion-dollar film franchise.

A cynic might call such rhetoric clever marketing. A book of art criticism could do worse, publicity-wise, than hitch its wagon to Hollywood. One can only imagine how other books might have done if their authors had sprinkled similar pixie dust over their titles. The Closing of the Jedi Mind and From Dawn to Darth Vader might have flown off the shelves. There might also be something smug in assuring your reader that the summa of great art is—look no further!—right there in your Netflix queue.

But I’m tempted to give Paglia the benefit of the doubt. A line of aesthetic decadence runs through all of her chapters. She embraces art’s mystical power and rejects academic materialist interpretation. “Marxism sees nothing beyond society,” she writes. “Marxism lacks a metaphysics—that is, an investigation of man’s relationship to the universe, including nature.” It’s therefore possible that Paglia really does believe Revenge of the Sith is the most “daring, beautiful, and emotionally compelling” work of visual art she’s seen in the last 30 years. At the least, it’s an interesting point to consider—one that her decadent hero Oscar Wilde, or certainly Andy Warhol, might have appreciated.

Her book is rife with other contradictions, leading one to conclude that Paglia’s passions often get the best of her arguments. At one point she praises the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for having the “perspicacity and courage to exhort the arts community to renounce its infantilizing dependence on the government dole.” A page later, she seems to praise “cautious optimism about increases in federal arts funding.” She admires and defends “Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic, sadomasochistic photographs” but calls out the art world’s defense of these photographs as “demagogic.” She seems to bemoan the rise of Pop Art, which turned Abstract Expressionism into “the last authentically avant-garde style in painting,” but she then praises “Pop Art’s happy marriage to commercial mass media.”

Sandwiched between such statements and the “Egypt” and “Star Wars” of Glittering Images are 27 digestible chapters that look at individual works of art: some well-known masterpieces, others (of course) more idiosyncratic. One could do worse than absorb the survey of Western art presented in these 190 pages. Here we find Paglia’s bewitching eye, matched with her gift for language, at its best. “French rococo interiors have clarity, yet they are suspended, elusive, unresolved,” she concludes in her chapter “Swirling Line.” “So much pretty motion, and yet so much golden paralysis.” In “Arctic Ruin,” she writes how The Sea of Iceby Caspar David Friedrich evokes “the stainless-steel spires of Art Deco skyscrapers or the cantilevered concrete slabs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.”

Her most unexpected selection also makes up her most interesting chapter: “Dance of the Mind” looks at Portrait of Doctor Boucard, a 1929 art deco painting by the relatively unknown Tamara de Lempicka, “a liberated new woman with her own agenda,” writes Paglia, “which included cocaine-fueled bisexual adventures in seedy riverside bars.” One reason we’ve likely never heard of Lempicka is that her work “does not support the ruling paradigm of art as leftist resistance.” Instead, the artist offers up a “hallucinatory resynthesis of classic artworks,” where Boucard’s heroic “eyes rake the horizon as if he were a ship’s captain on a voyage of discovery—an effect heightened by his rippling coat flap, his ballooning lapel, and the silvery collage of sail-like Cubist planes behind him. It’s as if he feels the wind of history at his back.”

Paglia writes with her own following breeze. She is a critic to be enjoyed under full sail, just as long as you don’t get blown overboard.

"Future Tense" Now Available in Hardcover

James writes:

I am excited to say that Future Tense: The Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval, Essays from The New Criterion is now available in hardcover from Encounter Books.

Future Tense examines our pivotal era through a variety of lenses and includes "What's a Museum?" my essay on the cultural capital of art.

Beginning with a meditation on memorials after the 9/11 attacks (Michael J. Lewis), the essays also address patriotism in relation to Pericles (Victor Davis Hanson), twenty-first century American pride and leadership (Andrew Roberts), the future of religion in America (David Bentley Hart), and the unwinding of the welfare state (Kevin D. Williamson). Continuing this arc, pieces examine self-knowledge and modern technology (Anthony Daniels), and the difficulties of making law in the modern world (Andrew C. McCarthy). In its penultimate essay, the book explores the possibility of a forthcoming political revolution (James Piereson), then closes with a reflection of culture’s role in the economy of life and the fragility of civilization (Roger Kimball).

Future Tense is now in stock and on sale at Amazon.

UPDATE: Tom Carson at The American Prospect offers an early review. Spoiler: he's a fan, (but calls my contribution "fun and smart").  

American Scenes

Thomas Hart Benton, Cut The Line (1944)

UPDATE: Welcome Painters' Table readers! Be sure to check out all of our art-related features.

THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
April 2012

American Scenes
by James Panero

A review of Thomas Hart Benton: A Life, by Justin Wolff; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 432 Pages, $40.

Thomas Hart Benton was a painter who could appear on the cover of Time magazine one year only to be drummed out of the New York art world the next. He was a child of privilege--the son of a U.S. Congressman and the great nephew of a famous senator--who developed his own progressive artistic style to elevate provincial Americans over East Coast elites. A mentor and friend to Jackson Pollock, he nevertheless railed against the rise of Abstract Expressionism and served as a whipping boy for the avant garde.

He was a “man who could be so charming and so crude, who was an anti-intellectual intellectual, and who scorned a career in politics but was profoundly political,” writes Justin Wolff in his new biography These contradictions make “Benton such a magnetic subject for the writer. We want to pin him down precisely because we cannot.”

For over half a century, art history has tried to wrestle Benton to the ground. He was “the favorite target of leftist critics and proponents of abstract art.” A goading antagonist, he often asked to be taken down. He went after the “coteries of high-brows, of critics, college art professors and museum boys.” After fleeing New York for Kansas City in 1935, he ranted that mid-Western artists

lisp the same tiresome, meaningless aesthetic jargon. In their society are to be found the same fairies, the same Marxist fellow travelers, the same ‘educated’ ladies purring linguistic affectations. The same damned bores that you find in the penthouses and studios of Greenwich Village hang onto the skirts of art in the Middle West.

“His poor judgment, profanity, and belligerent baiting of any artist walking a different stylistic or ideological path scandalized New Yorkers, New Englanders, and Missourians equally,” writes Wolff. “Over the years he opposed abstract art, curators, homosexuals, intellectuals, Harvard, New York City, Kansas City, women, and old friends like [Alfred] Stieglitz and [Lewis] Mumford, to name a few.” For a biographer who himself once dismissed Benton as a “conservative crank,” Wolff has now written a keen critical recuperation, if not a defibrillation, of this unique American artist.

“We were all in revolt against the unhappy effects which the Armory show of 1913 has had on American painting,” Benton once said of the seminal exhibition that first brought European modernism to New York. Benton represented the American reaction to this influence, an anti-avant-garde, but he came of age at the center of the vanguard of new art. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Academie Julien in Paris before settling into the progressive art circles of New York in the 1920s. Stanton MacDonald-Wright, the abstract painter, became a close friend. For fifteen years he experimented with cubism, pointillism, and synchromism--or rather “wallowed in every cockeyed ism that came along,” as he later admitted.

Thomas Hart Benton, Rhythmic Construction (1919)

Benton (the artist) once said that Senator Benton--his famous namesake, known as “Old Bullion,” who championed Western expansion--gave him “a kind of compulsion for greatness.” In 1924, he visited his home state of Missouri to attend to his ailing father, Maecenas, who had tried to persuade him to pursue law. Following the trip he determined to seek out his own American path in art. Benton soon got over his “French hangover,” according to the writer Tom Craven, and shed the “worn-out rags and fripperies of French culture” to “find himself as an American.”

A professor in art history at the University of Maine, Wolff is at his best exploring the philosophy behind the rise of Benton’s new signature style, which he locates in the pragmatism of John Dewey. Benton did more than merely react to the avant-garde. He developed a compelling counterpoint to modernism that he believed was far more populist and progressive than the art theories coming out of Europe. He came to see, writes Wolff, that art “should be instrumental (a favorite term of Dewey’s) and work to clarify ordinary experiences rather than interrogate the mysteries of the world. Based on such philosophies, Benton concluded that art should be realistic, not abstract, and that it should serve practical rather than intellectual ends.”

Thomas Hart Benton, People of Chilmark (1920)

The “distinctly American philosophy” of pragmatism, an anti-theory theory that related knowledge to “practical purposes,” meant that Benton was “more interested in common American experiences than in what many deemed the elitist aesthetic theories of avant-garde artists, who sought to justify experimentation and abstraction with a specialized, professional language. For many, then, Benton was one of them: he spoke their language, painted their lives, and believed wholeheartedly in the significance of their experiences.”

The critic Lewis Mumford gave Benton his regional focus, where “regional customs and spontaneous rituals, not our theories, account for the nation’s dynamism,” and “local customs and common experiences trump political or ideological categories,” writes Wolff. Mumford emphasized definitive, verifiable, and local knowledge. “The region provides a common background,” Mumford maintained, “the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the landscape we see, the accumulation of experience and custom peculiar to the setting, tend to unify the inhabitants.”

By the late 1920s, writes Wolff, Benton came to believe in “a devotion to experience, an anti-elitist concept of art.” He also saw that “centralized intellectual and political power was contrary to democracy.” The new art that he developed therefore sought to elevate people’s “regional” characteristics. He pursued a “Regional Survey” to reveal a population “with respect to soil, climate, vegetation, animal life, industry and historic tradition” (Mumford’s words). The format that Benton found most suited to this form of expression was the mural--large, populist, and capable of telling a multi-part story. He populated these expanses with colorfully molded characters drawn from studies made in small towns and urban ghettos across the country. He packed these fluid figures in energized, dense, and often cacophonous compositions in a style that became known as the “American Scene.”

Thomas Hart Benton, A Social History of the State of Missouri (1936) in the House Lounge in Missouri State Capitol. Jefferson City, Missouri

In his compositions, Benton was in part inspired by the realism of the nineteenth century French writer Hippolyte Taine. Folk songs also “appealed to Benton’s sense of narrative structure,” writes Wolff. “As in his murals, these songs present history anecdotally: in folk tunes, colorful characters and scenarios serve more general stories about injustice, labor, or outsider status.” He sought to restore republican virtues “through the rejuvenation of American folk traditions and values.”

Thomas Hart Benton painting Persephone (1938)

Benton shot to fame with his new style, appearing on the cover of Time magazine in December 1934, an unprecedented recognition for a living artist. In an article that profiled Benton and his fellow regional painters Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, Time declared that Benton was “the most virile of U.S. painters of the U.S. Scene.”

By the early 1930s, Benton had successfully championed an art form that was equal parts populist and conservative. He received large mural commissions from the New School for Social Research (for a cycle called “America Today,” 1930-31) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (“The Arts of Life in America,” 1932). He also worked as a celebrated instructor at the Art Students League starting in 1926.

Yet a year after the Time article came out, Benton became embroiled in a controversy surrounding another famous muralist. It was an episode that would define his political trajectory as a “communist turned patriot,” writes Wolff, and also blacklist him in progressive art circles. Benton first met the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera while studying in Paris. Both artists used the same style to advance their own political positions. For Rivera, that meant Stalinism. In 1932, the Rockefeller family commissioned Rivera to paint a mural for the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Center, which the artist called “Man at the Crossroads.” For one figure in the finished cycle, Rivera swapped in the face of Vladimir Lenin. This forced Rockefeller to pull the commission and cover over the work.

The New York art world was in an uproar, but Benton remained ambivalent. A group of Left-leaning modernists seized on the opportunity to take him down. The artist Stuart Davis rallied the Arts Students League against him. In one altercation at the school, someone threw a chair at him. Benton “should have no trouble in selling his wares to any Fascist or semi-fascist type of government,” declared Davis. “[His] qualification would be, in general, his social cynicism, which always allows him to depict social events without regard to their meaning.”

Writing in Partisan Review a short time later, the historian Meyer Schapiro “excoriated Benton’s apparent nationalism and ‘strong masculine’ figures, which he felt were dangerously similar to the xenophobia and idealizing style of fascist art,” writes Wolff. In his populist murals, wrote Schapiro, Benton did not display the necessary Leftist political commitment, instead depicting “an escape from the demands of the crisis” that was “pitiful and inept.”

After the Rivera episode, Benton “never again pretended to stand on common ground with the radical Left,” writes Wolff. “Having a chair thrown at him by an angry communist, or being called a fascist, had as much to do with Benton’s reaction to radical leftism as did his pragmatism.” He left New York for the Midwest. The episode also demonstrated a flaw in realistic art that proved to be as equally fatal to Benton as Rivera: Politics of both the left and right could easily sully and co-opt realism. It was no coincide that didactic realism became the style of choice in both Fascist Europe and Communist Russia. Abstraction had no such political vulnerability. After backroom discussions between the Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr and Time’s Henry Luce, the same magazine empire that had crowned Benton king of the realists in 1934 championed the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock in 1949 with a profile in Life magazine that asked, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”

The irony is that Pollock’s greatest influence was none other than Benton, his former teacher at the League. Benton started out an abstractionist only to become an infamous realist; Pollock went the other way, working through a regionalist style to arrive at his famous dripped abstractions. Much has been made with Pollock’s break with Benton. In 1944, Pollock declared Benton to be “something against which to react very strongly.” He once cursed Benton, exclaiming “God-damn you, I’m going to become more famous than you.” In the years following his drunken, fatal car crash in 1956, Pollock’s prophecy came true.

The critic Carter Ratcliff has argued that Benton’s influence on Pollock was a negative one. Benton was a surrogate for a “weak and absent father” says Ratcliff, and “didn’t want a son so much as a sidekick, a young and manipulable version of himself.” Pollock also “shamed himself” in aping after Benton’s style. But Wolff documents how Benton stayed close to Pollock until the end. “He answered Pollocks’ desperate late-night phone calls, refused to discourage his awkward infatuation with [Benton’s wife] Rita, and supported his career.” While dismissing his style, Benton also called Pollock “one of the few original painters to come up in the last ten years.”

Posterity has been far less charitable to Benton. As his style fell out of favor, several of his commissions from the 1930s were let go. The New School’s panels are now owned by AXA Equitable, which restored and now displays them in the lobby of its headquarters on Sixth Avenue in New York. The Whitney Museum sold of its panels in the 1950s to the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut.

While I would have preferred a more chronological narrative and a more typical biographical structure, Wolff’s book makes a compelling case for making the pilgrimage to see them and giving Benton another look. “The panels of the America Today mural... floored me,” says Wolff. “the mural surpassed merely entertaining narrative. It possesses a palpable urgency.”

With our generation’s renewed interest in local culture and a skepticism of international progress, Benton’s philosophy seems ripe for reevaluation. “I believe I have wanted, more than anything else, to make pictures,” said Benton, “the imagery of which would carry unmistakably American meanings for Americans and for as many of them as possible.” While it may be arguable whether Benton achieved these ends, their pursuit now seems singularly compelling.

Thomas Hart Benton, The Arts of the South, from the mural The Arts of Life in America (1932) now in the New Britain Museum of American Art