Thomas Hart Benton

Self-portrait, Thomas Hart Benton,
1939, Thomas Hart Benton

What do you do when you're the name bearing grandson of a well-know US senator, expected by your parents to follow the family tradition, and enter politics? The answer is, you become an artist, disappoint the entire family, and go on to become more famous than your grandfather. An unlikely scenario? Yes, probably, but that's exactly what Missouri artist Thomas Hart Benton did. Born in 1889, Benton first studied art for a brief time at the Art Institute in Chicago, but his real heart lay in Europe. In 1908, he set sail to seek his fortune, so to speak, in the art capitals of France, England, and Italy where he studied for three years.   
   

The Arts of the West, 1932,
Thomas Hart Benton

Although influence by Cubism and something called Synchromism (which is a sort of abstraction with primary emphasis on color planes and organization), what Benton brought back from Europe had little to do with these French Avant-Gard movements. His greatest influences were Italian--Michelangelo, Tintoretto, and El Grecco (not Italian, but himself influence strongly by Michelangelo). Upon returning to this country, Benton settled in New York and did some nationally acclaimed work there His growing popularity soon brought him back to his midwestern roots as he began receiving commissions for public works involving murals with historic themes in states such as Indiana, Illinois, and his home state of Missouri.   
   

Thoma Hart Benton mural,
Springfield, Missouri

The mural was an ideal outlet for the style and grand influences Benton brought back from Europe.  Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Jose Orozco had found popularity in this country by bringing with them from south of the border the nationalistic themes that struck a responsive chord in depression-ravaged hearts of their northern neighbors. Governments were also in the mood to support public works of art in everything from state capitols to local post offices. But Benton brought to mural painting something different, a new style, new color, new compositional elements, and evolved it into what basically amounted to a new art form, no longer static and stately, but writhing with energy, packed with narrative elements, vibrant colors, and flowing, undulating compositions which guided the eye through complex streams of visual consciousness never before seen on the walls of the Midwest or anywhere else. He died in 1975 at the age of 86, his kinship to his famous grandfather little noted outside his home state. 

Thomas Hart Benton's Home

Just the way he left it when he died in 1975
(except for the sign in the front yard).

The street address, 3616 Belleview Avenue, in Kansas City, Missouri, might easily be mistaken for any upper-middle-class home in the city. The house is approximately 7800 square feet on three floors, containing 24 rooms, four fireplaces and a fully finished basement. The Benton family purchased the one-third acre property in 1939 for six-thousand dollars. Today the historic site is owned and managed by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. Tours are provided that show the furnished house and studio as Benton left it when he died on January 19, 1975. (His wife, Rita, died eleven weeks later.)

Though slightly dated after some forty years, the Benton house kitchen
still appears modern and quite functional. (The photographic distortion is due to my having stitched together two somewhat incompatible images.)

As with Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, and several other 20th-century artists, we tend to think of them in terms of the distant past, born in the 19th-century and therefore living in a manner quite antique by today's standards. True, there's no fifty-inch TV hanging on their wall in their living room, and no attached garage with an electric door opener, no Jacuzzi in the master bath, nor an iphone next to the easel. But neither do we find an icebox in the kitchen, a coal stove in the living room, or a dozen candles burning in the dining room chandelier. Let's face it, any famous artist from the recent past, living and working in America during the 20th century, even by today's standards, would likely be considered wealthy, living a comfortable, if not lavish, lifestyle in accordance with the so-called "American dream." That would pretty accurately describe the American painting icon Thomas Hart Benton and his Kansas City home of forty years.

Self-portraits, 1970 and with his wife, 1922.

Finding the home of Thomas Hart Benton in Kansas City (Missouri, not Kansas) is far from easy. There are no billboards and the house is located in a residential area so restrictive zoning applies. Similarly, there are few maps featuring the historic site. Some city promotional materials don't even take note of its presence or location. I had to make up my own map (below).

The location indicated is, at best, approximate.

Finding the place is made all the more difficult in that, architecturally, the house is in no way exceptional. And, while not unattractive, with its stone and frame exterior, neither would it elicit even a passing glance as one drives by along Belleview Avenue. Built in 1903 for an electric utility executive, and sitting atop a small hill, the house has a somewhat fortress-like ambience little changed by the Benton family during their time in residence. Given the fact that the artist and his family first moved there during the war years of the 1940s, even today, in it's 1970s incarnation, there is still a restrained, conservative element in the décor. Although Benton, his wife, and children (a son and a daughter) endured difficult times during the depression when the American Regionalist painter was still struggling to make a name for himself, by the time they moved to Kansas City they could be said to have been reasonably well-off. Their home reflects this.

 

Inside, the word "comfortable" comes to mind.
(Ignore the tourist-gray floor protectors.)

As usual, when one sees an artists' abode, it's only when upon entering that artist's custom crafted, personal workspace that the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The studio of Thomas Hart Benton is no exception. First of all it's large. Benton worked large, his mural-like canvases often measuring in feet rather than inches. Add to that his penchant for history painting and live models, the result is barnlike, light and airy, but not inviting. Here we do find an antique coal stove. With their often high ceilings and huge, north-facing windows, artists' studios are notoriously hard to heat. And as unpleasant as such a drafty environment may have been for the artist, consider the plight of Benton's often nude models. Benton is said to have commented: "Development of my art skills stopped in the second grade when a teacher couldn’t recognize a watermelon in my drawing. However, I would have definitely applied more effort if I knew that a career in art allows for unlimited hours alone with nude women, who will not complain if their features will not look so flattering on the painting. It’s art, you know."



A reflection of the man and the artist, probably in a
much neater, more organized state than when he was alive.

Thomas Hart Benton in his studio, painting one of his most famous works, The Rape of Persephone, done about the time he moved into his new home. Dating from the late 1930s, Benton's allegorical nude was considered scandalous by the Kansas City Art Institute. However, it was borrowed by the showman, Billy Rose, who hung it in his New York City nightclub, the Diamond Horseshoe. It is now owned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Karal Ann Marling, the museum's art historian, calls it, "...one of the great works of American pornography."

 

1920s Art

Artist John Held Jr. perfectly captured the awkward frivolity
of both the era of the 1920s as well as its art.

Virtually every decade in art has its own peculiar stereotype. Some have to do with a prevailing style popular at the time. Some are marked by the important social issues or news events (such as decades strewn with wars). Fortunately, there were no major conflicts during the 1920s to harden the art of that era. In fact, quite the opposite; this period reveled in the desperately optimistic hope for an unending peace following the "war to end all wars." It was an era blind to the fact that a forced peace was sprouting the seeds for yet another world war more terrible than the first. No, instead, two elements came together to form our enduring image on the art of the 1920s, an Art Deco-flavored transition to Modernism and a hopeful optimism that the good (though somewhat decadent) times would go on and on forever...or at least the foreseeable future. As it turned, out the foreseeable future was dismally short, lasting a little less time than the decade itself.

 

Never was there a greater contrasts in the art of two decades.

One might hesitate to consider the 1930s documentary photos of Dorothea Lange (above, right) as art. However, one might also make a case that images of the Charleston dance craze (above, left) were far from high art as well. Yet the two accurately depict radically opposing eras separated by just a few months...a few years at best. I could go on and on contrasting these two eras but I've already covered the art of the 1930s, while that of the 1920s, in its simplicity and superficiality, needs a more comprehensive look.

Cloth hats, cropped locks, and straight vertical lines were "in."
Art Deco for women?

No art is more superficial than that of the fashion designer, particularly in designing for women. Not that men's fashions don't exhibit a certain air for flair, but nothing like the frocks and locks (and in the case of the 1920s, hats) which festoon the fairer sex. If the female fashions of the 1920s seem to have a decided similarity to those of the 1930s, it's no accident. During the Depression decade, even fashion conscious ladies often found that updating their wardrobe to the new, more "tailored" look of the somewhat more conservative decade to be a luxury they could little afford. Poverty and art have long been considered antithetical.

Though the Vitaphone sound-on-
disk recording system was
considered a huge technical
breakthrough at the time,
far less than half of The Jazz
Singer featured sound.

Considering the cultural and social upheavals of the 1920s, one of the greatest reflections to be found during most art eras--motion pictures--was surprisingly dim. Moviemaking became a corporate industry. Money was the dominant factor, not art. Most movies from most of this decade were short, unimag-inative, formulaic, and at best, forgettable. There were exceptions, such as Eisenstein's 1925 Battleship Potemkin, but even among these, few were made in the U.S. and even those were more entertainment than art. They were, that is, until October 6, 1927, when Warner Brothers' producer, Darryl Zanuck, debuted the company's "Supreme Triumph," The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jol-son, as a fine Jewish lad who embraced the "sinful," avant-garde, jazz of his time. While the film was mostly silent, it did contained sequences of prerecorded synchronized music and dialogue, something movie audi-ences had never heard before. Considered a fad at the time, the movie's most memorable line, "You ain't heard nothing yet," was nothing if not prophetic.

Having "invented" it, then wrung Cubism dry, Picasso morphed it into a Synthetic Cubism as seen in his 3 Musicians from 1921, before discarding the style entirely for a new classism represented by his
Woman in White from 1923.

In reviewing what I've written regarding previous art eras, I came to realize that I have "doted" on the fine art of painting. Though painting was a vibrant artform in the 1920s, I think I can best express the diversity of the era by highlighting the contrasts between just two --Pablo Picasso and Thomas Hart Benton. One made tremendous international strides as he searched his soul and bent his style to his varied themes. The other remained only a region force to be reckoned with, his style and content remaining virtually unchanged over the course of his entire career. Though Picasso was notorious for almost randomly changing his style of painting, the contrasts between the two paintings above, spanning a mere two years of the decade, is little short of remarkable.

Self-portrait With Rita (his wife), 1922, Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton was, as they say, "no Picasso," nor did he try to be. Picasso was Spanish/French. Benton was an American--a Missourian. His father was a Congressman, his grandfather, for whom he was named, was a five-term senator from that state. Though Benton studied in Paris for a time, his somewhat lyrical realism was firmly established by the 1920s. And though the scope of his work rivaled that of Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, his style was all his own, and would remain so until his death in 1975 at the age of 86. Picasso led the international art world into Modernism. Americans in the 1920s were not ready for Picasso nor his radical, even whimsical, stylistic gyrations. Neither was Benton; yet both men neatly reflected the nationalism and nature of the painter's art during this period of cultural upheavals.

Chrysler Building, William Van Alen, architect.

If painters were beset by a myriad of competing styles, the same was not the case as to the architect's art. Having long-since discarded the decorative niceties of Art Nouveau, architecture during the 1920s had but one dominant style--Art Deco. In fact, so pronounced was this transitional movement between Classicism and Modernism, in one manifestation or another, it permeated much of the stylistic elements of virtually every artform of the time. William Van Alen's and Walter Chrysler's Art Deco "race into space" (The Chrysler Building, above) was to stoke the latter's ego. Their efforts saw the construction of the tallest skyscraper in the world, completed in 1930. However, just eleven months later, its 77 floors were superseded by over 400-feet in height. The 102-story Empire State Building, just twelve blocks away, held "World's Tallest Building" honors for the next 41 years.

Domestic architecture eschewed the streamline Art Deco in favor of yet another "revival," this one referred to as Colonial Revival.

The Colonial Revival style (above-top), which was only slightly reminiscent of colonial architecture. Rather, it was economical, compact, and practical for the nation's first (but rapidly-expanding) suburbs. The two-story houses, frequently built just a few feet apart, offered large front porches for escaping the summer heat and socializing with close neighbors. Often the space between such homes offered barely enough width for a driveway to a garage in back for the Model T (I grew up in one such abode). For the ambitious, yet frugal do-it-yourselfer, such houses (above, slightly simplified and later heavily remodeled) could be purchased as a package from a catalog. The Craftsman Style building materials, right down to the front doorknob, could then be delivered by railroad to the proud new homeowner's local community.

Inspired perhaps by the "Gatsby" look, Art Deco furniture and interiors were often stark, simple in design, and maybe just a little too stiff, uncomfortable, and formal looking.

For the more upscale home of the 1920s, whose owner could afford the services of an interior "decorator," though the exterior might exhibit traces of the colonial past, inside the rooms and new furniture (above) swung to the prevailing Art Deco stylings. As compared to the fuss of Art Nouveau and the real fussiness of earlier Victorian interiors, Art Deco offered a clean, hopeful, modern look Americans saw as an optimistic future.

From an artistic or aesthetic point of view, auto design
progressed little in the 1920s.

And finally, during many decades one can trace art and design tastes through the "art" of automobile design (especially in the Post-WW II era). However, during the 1920s, though the automobile rapidly changed virtually every aspect of human endeavor, the auto designer's art changed little. The emphasis was on reliability, convenience, and price rather than chrome (then reserved only for radiator housings) or the art of streamlining, and tail fins. Henry Ford, at the beginning of the decade, dictated that the buyer could choose any color so long as it was black (an enamel which dried quickly on his assembly line). He treated his famed "Model T" as an everlasting design ideal, and nearly ran his fledgling company into the ground by his obstinacy. Only as the 1924 upstart, Chevrolet, began to gain popularity (and market-share) did Ford bring forth his "Model A" and a somewhat more colorful palette for the buyer to peruse. Only Chrysler made any effort to blend the prevailing Art Deco influences into the design of the company's slightly "jazzy" output. For some arts and artists, the "roaring 20s" was, indeed, a rousing cheer for a newfound peace and prosperity. For others, it could best be described as a contented purr.

Though Norman Rockwell designed
his first Post cover in 1916, it was
during the rambunctious 1920s
that his art first became the social
icon we recall today.

 

Early Pollock

Jackson Pollock

We've all got them. Stashed away in the back of some closet, or in the attic, or perhaps in a bank safe deposit box--what we jokingly refer to as our "early work." We have saved it for a variety of reasons, not the least of which may be for when we need a good laugh. Perhaps too, we've saved them for sentimental reasons, or to look back upon to chart our progress as artists; all of which are perfectly valid, practical reasons to have saved some of our first paintings, drawings, photos, etc. And for some of us, they've been saved simply because no one would buy them or even wanted them. However buried deep in the back of our minds, maybe in our subconscious, is the persistent thought that maybe, just maybe, as soon as our obituary hits the streets (or perhaps today, the Internet), museums all over the country will be calling our survivors, wishing to acquire a piece of our "early work" to flesh out their collections and give their exhibits "perspective." I'm exaggerating of course, but the point is these pieces do, in fact, do just that.

She Wolf, 1943, Jackson Pollock

Take Jackson Pollock for example. The man died on August, 20, 1956, in a smash-up, while speeding his convertible down a back road toward his farm near East Hampton, New York, located out on the eastern end of Long Island. A heavy drinker, he was no doubt drunk. He was 44. The next day, hardly before the body was cold, his paintings doubled in value, whether hanging on museum walls or still spread out across the paint-splattered floor of his studio. His name and his work were not quite "household" at the times, but now are so familiar just the mention of them brings vividly to mind the colorful, controlled, rhythmic gyrations of his body as he dripped, slung, and splattered paint over his gigantic canvases with an instinctive harmony of colour, line, and mass that today makes his work impossible to forge. If anyone else tries it, the results look like spaghetti with a bad marinara sauce.



Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1934, Thomas Hart Benton.

Having died in his prime, Pollock, like Marilyn Monroe, or Jack Kennedy who came later, became an icon, more image than living figure. And being an artist, Pollock's work therefore is also frozen in our minds as if it all erupted at once in a single nightmarish jag of creative frenzy. We all know it didn't happen that way but by the same token, few if any of us can bring to mind a single image from Pollock's "early work." History tells us he was a student of Thomas Hart Benton during Benton's tenure at the Art Students League in the 1930s after he ran away from home at the tender age of sixteen to study art. In fact, Benton used Pollock as a model for the harmonica player (above, bottom, center figure) in his 1934 Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley. One of Pollock's earliest, "school boy" works, Going West (below) from 1934, has some of the swirling masses of Benton's work but less of his dynamic realism. It's more abstract, yet recalls the frontier heritage of Pollock's Wyoming home. Pollock's sketchbook from the period contains nearly 500 drawings from the historic masterpieces Benton required his students to study. With all its planar dynamism, it is today, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Going West, 1934, Jackson Pollock

An Orange Head, 1938-41, Jackson Pollock

As a hungry young artist, Pollock's late 1930s Flame (below, left) though still done with a brush and still quite modest in size, shows a further movement in the direction of his classic work. His 1940 Bird (below, right) shows the influence of Mexican muralists. And Orange Head, (left) from the same period, vividly details his nervous breakdown and subsequent Jungian (Carl Jung) psychotherapy. It also defines his interest in Picasso's iconographic imagery. During the war years, we see Pollock's work being influenced by Miró's linear dream works as seen in Stenographic Figure. His 1943 She Wolf  illustrates an interest in Palaeolithic cave painting. And finally (he's moving quickly now), in his 1943 Guardians of the Secret, the first seminal peek at his mature style as he synthesises all this into a daring, wall-size composition packed with archaic forms and his hallmark swirls of dripped paint first seeing the light of day. His Gothic from 1944 and his Shimmering Substance find him immerse in totally non-representational work by the end of the war.



Flame, 1940, Jackson Pollock

Bird, 1938-40, Jackson Pollock

In 1950, Pollock had his first one-man show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City. It was a smashing critical success--one of the high-water marks of the entire Abstract Expressionist period. Yet only one painting sold, Pollock's No. 1, (Lavender Mist) (bottom). Despite this, both his mature style and his career had arrived. For the next six years, Pollock was the darling of Peggy Guggenheim, Harold Rosenblum, and the whole New York art world as he lived up to his "Jack the Dripper" image with all the hard drinking, hard living, hard painting, hard edged willfulness he possessed. And by 1956, his early death was as predictable as his work had become. But were it not for the few sparse castaway efforts snapped up by museums in the weeks and months after his tragic demise, we would know little more about where this man and his work came from beyond the name of his hometown, Cody, Wyoming.



No. 1 (Lavender Mist), 1950, Jackson Pollock



Jack Beal

The painting is called Trout. It's a still-life. The setting appears to be the hood of a car. A newly caught trout lies out across an intricately decorated, elongated, octagon-shaped plate that is just a little too small for the fish. A half-open penknife lies nearby while a round plate next to it bears delectable white grapes and the long evening shadows that permeate the entire painting.  Jutting diagonally across the picture plane are two portions of an old-fashioned rod and reel. The metal of the hood is dull, oxidized gray allowing the pinks and greens of the fish to dominate coloristically as they compliment the yellowish green of the grapes. The painting is by Jack Beal, and if you've never heard of him you should take steps to rectify this lapse.  He's been legitimately termed "The Father of American Realism."

Born in 1931 near Richmond, Virginia, Beal studied at William and Mary as well as the Art Institute of Chicago. Artistically, he came of age during the Abstract Expressionist era, but found himself just one of many hundreds of budding young artists struggling to make an impression (or should we say expression)  in a style in which he was neither comfortable nor exceptional.  Realizing there were all too many painters like himself overpopulating and imitating the New York School, he saw the "handwriting on the wall," so to speak and decided there was nothing new to be done in the aging Abstractionist movement, so in the early 1960s he jumped ship.  He briefly joined Richard Diebenkorn, and Philip Pearlstein in Figurative painting, then along with Pearlstein, moved toward Realism.  His work is often compared to Pearlstein's photo-realism, and in terms of his still-lifes, such at Trout, it's a valid comparison.

But there is an element of Thomas Hart Benton arising as well.  Like Benton, in the 1970s, he began painting murals. His four murals on The History of American Labor were completed in 1977 after three years of nonstop work.  They can be seen in the Department of Labor Building in Washington, DC.  His work can also be seen in prestigious museums like the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as major corporate collections such as that of the Brunswick Corporation and Philip Morris. There is a shade more realism in Beal's work than that of Benton but one will also notice the same very low or very high points of view, strong, dynamic diagonals, and an affinity with many of Benton's color choices. A self-portrait depicts a brooding man, younger perhaps, but with an uncanny resemblance to Thomas Hart Benton.

The work of Jack Beal is copyrighted but can be seen at: http://www.jackbeal.net/

Regionalism

The Wreck of the Ole 97 Train, 1943, Thomas Hart Benton

At a time when the Group of Eight and their Ashcan School were rocking the New York art scene, there was taking form in the Midwestern hinterlands an equal and opposite reaction we have come to call Regionalism. In the early years of the twentieth century a quiet little war was going on between these realists and the big city modernists...naturalism versus abstraction (or at least its fore bearers). After the century's first real war, this conflict simmered down a bit as the country increasingly became isolationist and later settled into the throes of the Great Depression. Turning inwardly for its art, there began to spring up in the U.S. several non-New York centers of artistic achievement in such places as Chicago, Kansas City, Iowa City, Madison (Wisconsin), and Indianapolis.     

Sanctuary, c. 1936, John Steuart Curry

From this blooming group three artists flowered most profusely, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood. They were not country hicks. All three had studied in Paris and brought back with them a solid foundation in formalistic art from Impressionism to Cubism. Yet, by and large, there was little stylistic influence from their studies, only technical fluency. Benton, from Missouri, evolved a sculptural style of mural painting influence by no less than Michelangelo, Tintoretto, and El Greco, in his dramatic murals of Midwestern life and history. Curry employed life-and-death drama in his scenes depicting the never-ending struggle for survival amid the harsh realities of Depression rural life. And Grant Wood, though a political radical by Iowa standards, at the same time chose a more sedate style in gently underscoring with humor the inanities of Midwestern life.        

The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931, Grant Wood

Their work was scoffed at by east-coast art critics as being reactionary, chauvinistic, and provincial. Moreover, it was largely ignored by the buying public. Their style was too sophisticated to be considered folk art and too countrified to be taken seriously by the wealthy patrons inclined to buy other than New York avant-gard. Yet as government support for art and artists grew as a result of the Depression, and public commissions demanded themes of past or present American culture, the Regionalists found a stage upon which to perform and one upon which they felt right at home. This was art the public could understand (perhaps taking its last bow), but nonetheless rising heroically over the moral, economic, and political shambles of the 1920's and 30's.

September Paintings

 City Building from America Today, 1930-31, Thomas Hart Benton. Ten-panel mural cycle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The month of September is home to Labor Day, back-to-school, football, soccer, falling leaves, and the greatest tragedy (so far) of the 21st-century. Thomas Hart Benton may have painted the greatest tribute to the hard-muscled, middle-class, American workers who built the country we enjoy today when he created the ten-panel America Today mural cycle (one panel, City Building can be seen above). The mural now resides in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was originally created for New York's New School for Social Research to adorn the school's boardroom in its International Style modernist building on West 12th Street. It depicts a sweeping panorama of American life throughout the 1920s. America Today ranks among Benton's most renowned works and is one of the most remarkable accomplishments in American art of that period. The mural is a gift to the Met from the AXA Equitable Life Insurance Company. Despite the fact the mural was created in 1930-31, during the darkest days of the Great Depression, it is steadfastly optimistic in its theme and content (perhaps even unduly so).

Snap the Whip, 1872, Winslow Homer. The first day of school?
It must be September, they're all barefooted.

Although many schools now start a week or two earlier, day following Labor Day has long been the traditional start of the school year, whether that of the energy-to-spare kids on the playground as depicted in Winslow Homer's 1872 Snap the Whip (above), or Norman Rockwell's awkward farm boy so touchingly portrayed in his 1954 Breaking Home Ties (below). Incidentally the long-lost painting was discovered about ten years ago behind a false wall in a Vermont Home. (The deceased owner had been hiding it from his ex-wife.) In 2006, it sold at Sotheby's for $15.4-million (a record for a Rockwell painting).



Breaking Home Ties, 1954, Norman Rockwell, his second
most popular Saturday Evening Post cover. In first place is
one titled Saying Grace dating from 1951.

Copyright, Jim Lane

Tackle!, 1973, Jim Lane

If it's September and college students are back in school, that can only mean one thing-- FOOTBALL! Being from Ohio, even though I'm a Ohio University alumni, I'm also partial to Ohio State. Several years ago now, I did a series of OSU football paintings for an art gallery in Columbus that was representing me. The OSU Mon-tage (below) was the centerpiece of that exhibit flanked by paintings of numerous individual players in action. Though the one below was not, all the others were painted with the rough texture afforded by a palette knife. This one sold, but a few of the others I still have (if anyone is interested). Of course, one need not drive all the way to Buckeye Stadium in Columbus, Ohio, to see a good football game, as evidenced by an earlier football painting I titled Tackle (above, left) from 1973.

 

Copyright, Jim Lane

OSU Montage, 2007, Jim Lane

Copyright, Jim Lane

Soccering, Jim Lane

I'd probably hear a chorus of comments from my international readers if I failed to mention that there is more than one game of football. Not only that, as popular as it is in this country, American football comes in a distant second to the worldwide sport we here call soccer. There was once a time during the early 1900s when European soccer was actually more popular in the United States than American football. However internecine conflict between the various leagues, and probably more importantly, the hard times of the 1930s, nearly killed off the sport in this country. It has only been in the last fifty years that athletes in short pants and long socks one more began kicking a round ball up and down a grassy field. When I was growing up during the 1950s, soccer had not yet made a comeback. My high school didn't even have a football team. Where I lived, the number one September sport was raking autumn leaves (mostly of the colorful maple variety). September Garden (below), by Steve Sanger, pretty well captures the nature of that "game." Though few municipalities continue to allow the burning of leaves, I can still recall the distinctive aroma.



September Garden, Steve Sanger

From sporting events to September aromas, much about September has changed just in my lifetime. Labor Day, football, soccer, and leaf raking aside, perhaps the greatest change in the month of September occurred in just a few horrifying seconds on the eleventh day of this month in 2001. A great many artists have tried to capture that day, commemorating the lives lost, the bravery seen, the shocking horror, and the monumental changes it brought to our American way of life. A total of 2,996 people died that day in three different location while another 6,000 were injured. Property damage alone mounted to at least $10-billion. It's estimated the attack caused a total economic loss in the neighborhood of $3-trillion.

 

The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: September 11, 2001, Graydon Parrish

In combing through the dozens (if not hundreds) of painted tributes to those who died (411 of which were police and firemen), I searched for more than a simple depiction of the dastardly event itself. Eventually I came upon The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy: September 11, 2001 (above), by Graydon Parrish. The painting is imbued with the predominant gray of ground zero with the twin towers represented by the blindfolded twin human figures in the center (not buildings but suffering individuals). Everywhere there is destruction, death, and chaos far too deeply steeped in symbolism for me to either understand or adequately explain. Unlike most other such paintings I found, this one has real depth and significance. Though on a somewhat smaller scale, the death and destruction of 9/11 was not limited to New York's World Trade Center. The military at the Pentagon also took a direct hit. Casualties there alone totaled 189. F-16 over the Pentagon, 9-11-01 (below), was apparently a joint effort by aviation artist, Gil Cohen, and Air National Guard historians Susan Rosenfeld, and Charles Gross.





F-16 over the Pentagon: 9-11-01, Gil Cohen

 

Famous Fall Foliage

Copyright, Jim Lane                                                 

Hyde Park Ride, 1978, Jim Lane                                      

Tis the season to be...raking leaves...the jolly season comes later once they're all piled up and composted. I was about to start on ours, then looked up into our still pretty heavily green oak trees and realized less than half of their annual autumn attributes are still firmly attached to their arboreal anchorage. I guess I'll wait and get them all later. I hate raking leaves anyway. I mean, why bother, they'll all be covered up with snow soon enough anyway. Or, maybe I'll just take my paints, set up my easel in the front yard, and make the most of them. I'd venture to say there's few painters alive today who have not, at one time or another, done just that...or maybe in the back yard. Of course, the urge is not at all hard to understand. Never is nature more glorious than when she gets dressed up for Halloween. With the possible exception of snowy winters, I'd rather paint fall foliage, preferably not on the ground, than any other. Summer is monotonously green. Spring is delicate and fragile. Winter is brutal. Autumn seems warm and cozy.

 

The Studio Boat, 1876, Claude Monet

Landscape with Trees, 1881, Vincent van Gogh

I suppose it would surprise no one that some of our greatest artists down through the centuries, even those who are not well known for painting landscapes, have succumbed to the temptation to try and capture the fleeting frills of fall foliage. I tend to fall into that category. I've always prided myself in being able to paint almost literally anything...and I have. Though portraits and modern-day genre have long been my preferences, I've painted more than my share of landscapes (top) for one simple reason--they sell. I'm assuming that's why so many other artist paint them too. The impressionist loved landscapes, starting with Monet (above), Renoir (below, left), van Gogh (left), Gauguin (below, right), even Picasso (below) have done some pretty heavy dipping into their red oxides, ochers, sienas, yellows, and cadmiums in an effort to avoid raking leaves.

 

Breton Landscape David's Mill,
1894,Paul Gauguin

The Duck Pond, 1873,
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Landscape of Gosol, Catalonia, 1906 (Rose Period), Pablo Picasso

Sweet Memories, Norman Rockwell

Even artists whom you wouldn't normally expect to find painting landscapes count at least a few such paintings tucked away in their museum-owned portfolios--Norman Rockwell (left) and David Hockney (below), for instance. In other cases, artists you'd fully expect to paint the prettily pigmented panoply, have done so with surprising rarity--Anna Mary Robertson Moses, for example. I finally found one, but I had to look long and hard among the works of Thomas Hart Benton to come up with a fall scene, his Sorghum Mill from 1968. The famous American landscape artist Thomas Moran's Autumn Landscape, (below, left) however, practically jumped out into my lap. Rembrandt painted fall scenes (bottom). Yet English artist, J.M.W. Turner, apparently didn't.

Woldgate Woods, 2008, David Hockney

Of course, among those artists not so rich and famous, the avalanche of colored leaves assaulting the web surfer's tired eyes is very nearly overwhelming, from childlike hen scratches to stunning realism so astounding you almost forget what you came looking for. I've looked at fall scenes from virtually every country on earth, and (I'm trying not to show bias here), but I think I can safely say, the very best such paintings seem to come from the United States. Part of that has to do with geography and climate, of course. Over most of this broad patch of woods from Maine to Monterey there tends to be four very distinctive seasons of the year. Thus the landscape reflected in the eyes of artists changes predictably over the months offering endless, if repetitive, source material, whether, in plein air, photographic, or imaginary.

 

Autumn Landscape, 1876
Thomas B. Moran

I'll Catch, 1955-56,
Anna Mary Robertson Moses

But there's more to it than that. Influenced, no doubt, by the rich tradition of landscape painting flowing across the sea from northern Europe, once the landscape in this country ceased to be threatening, it became glorified. Starting with the earliest days of our republic in the Hudson River Valley and moving westward with the frontier, American artist have always striven to get a handle upon its wild and wondrous beauty. I mentioned Moran (above, left), but there's also the Bierstadt, Innes, Homer, Avery, Church, Sloan, Wood, Hassam, Moses (above, right)--a nearly endless embarrassment of riches nearly beyond belief--and that doesn't even count the huge congregation of Impressionist worshippers from the early 20th century (so many I've gotten tired of writing about them).

 

Sorghum Mill, 1968, Thomas Hart Benton

I think I'd be safe in saying the entire category of landscape painting, at least in the U.S., is the largest single content area in painting (photography too), even outstripping portraiture, the usual leader in most other countries. One reason for that is, in fact, photography. In Europe and elsewhere, they painted people's faces for hundreds of years before they began photographing them. On this side of the Atlantic, painted portraits dominated the art market for less than a century before photography nudged it aside. However, photography, until the time of Ansel Adams at least, was seen as woefully inadequate in capturing the colorful, expansive, magnificence of the American landscape, with or without its autumn leaves. Of course, advancements in color film and today's digital color have changed all that; but for some unknown reason, it doesn't seem to have changed our love of the painted landscape...or my hatred of fallen leaves.

Landscape with Castle, 1643, Rembrandt van Rijn. Notice, the castle gets top billing, not the colorful season of the years.