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BENTON: AN ARTIST IN CONFLICT WITH HIMSELF

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From: The Boston Globe
Date: 19891108
Author:Robert Taylor, Globe Staff

THOMAS HART BENTON:

An American Original

By Henry Adams

Knopf, 357 pp., $60 Thomas Hart Benton's role of gadfly art-world reactionary (from the 1930s onward) obscures his earlier experiments as a modernist painter who ran a gamut of isms: Impressionism, Pointillism, Cezannism, Synchronism and Constructivism. The small, completely abstract canvases he made around 1920 anticipate the color-field abstractions of the '60s and '70s. Yet Benton dropped out of the modern movement, and critic Hilton Kramer seems on target when he speculates why. "It was the work of a young ...

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