5

Mixed Up with Modern Art

A warm autumn day, 1909. An outdoor table at Le Dôme. Although at the height of his career Thomas Hart Benton would favor working-class all-American attire, at that moment he was dressed somewhat foppishly, in French artist’s garb, in the fashion of the Quartier Latin—a black suit with a black cape and a black-flat-brimmed hat and finally, to cap off the effect with appropriate flair, an impressively large black Balzac cane with a gold knob. (A few years later he lent the cane to Rudolph Valentino, when they were making a movie together in New York.) A hapless American at a table nearby spoke only stumbling French, and Benton helped him order from the waiter. They then struck up a conversation, and the young man, who called himself “Okie,” revealed that he had just come from California with a very talented artist-friend. They gabbed on for half an hour or so and agreed to meet again the next day at the same place. When Benton showed up, Okie was already there with a pasty-faced young man in expensive clothes who introduced himself somewhat pretentiously as “S. Macdonald-Wright.”

It soon became apparent that Macdonald-Wright was something quite peculiar—a figure who was never quite what he claimed to be. He ordered a beer with an impeccable French accent. After completing the task, he commented to Benton that he had spoken French since childhood, having had a French governess. A little later, however, when the waiter addressed him, it became clear that Macdonald-Wright did not comprehend what he was saying. Clearly his knowledge of French consisted of a few rote phrases he had learned from a tourist’s booklet. Indeed, at a later meeting, Okie informed Benton that Macdonald-Wright had brought such a booklet with him on the voyage over and had learned how to pronounce sentences from his cabin steward. Macdonald-Wright’s enunciation was so perfect, however, that his account of his French governess momentarily seemed convincing. As Benton commented, “Later on as I got to know him, Wright’s acute ear and talent for mimicry would continue to amaze me. In a few months he would speak a much better French than I and better than some Americans who had lived in France for years.”

Benton’s best friend in Paris was Stanton Macdonald-Wright, whom he later described as “the most gifted all-round man I ever knew.” He later recalled that when he first saw Macdonald-Wright’s paintings, “their bravura, their confident brush stroking, took my breath.” (Wright, Self Portrait [c. 1910]. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation.)

This first exchange with Macdonald-Wright went well and was followed by a few others, equally enjoyable. Then their contact ceased for several months. Benton had established a liaison with a working-class French girl, Jeanette, and to his surprise and dismay she became pregnant. As her pregnancy advanced, she became increasingly fearful that Tom would abandon her, and he virtually ceased going out of his apartment. After long months, the ordeal came to a shocking end, as Benton watched in horror, when she gave birth to a stillborn child in the studio. Only after this miserable experience was over did Benton start going out again to the cafés. When he finally stopped in again at the Café Dôme, he found Macdonald-Wright sitting at a table with a phrase book. Miraculously, by this time Macdonald-Wright had become fluent in French and was having an animated conversation with the waiter. As Benton greeted him, Macdonald-Wright hastily shoved the exercise book in his pocket and rushed over to grasp his hand.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked. “I’ve asked everyone about you. Nobody knew where you lived or what became of you.”

“I’ve been sick,” Benton fibbed.

“You look like a ghost,” Macdonald-Wright remarked.

They then sat down and exchanged stories. Macdonald-Wright, if one could credit his account, had tried most of the art schools in Paris—those of Julian, Friesecke and Miller, Carol Delvaille, and others, each one of whom he dismissed as “fat heads.” He was now working on his own in his studio. Benton confessed that he had not tried as many places but had come to the same conclusion. He had quit the schools and was working on his own. He talked about his Impressionist experiments, his studies in the Louvre, the life sketches he made in the cafés, and his theories about color values. Macdonald-Wright listened attentively, and as Benton wound down he remarked: “Benton, you’re great. Really great. You’re the only intelligent man I’ve met in Paris.”

“It was as if he’d put a bond between two superior men,” Benton later recalled. “Liar or not, he himself was superior, and I was happy that he thought me so. Nobody else did.” After that, they met frequently at the Dôme. One day, at Benton’s suggestion, they went to Macdonald-Wright’s studio, and he showed off his paintings. Because of Jeanette, Benton was reluctant to reciprocate. According to American middle-class mores of the period it was both a sin and a social lapse to live with a woman outside of marriage, and he was fearful that Macdonald-Wright would disapprove and cut off their relationship. But one day he got Jeanette to agree to stay away for a few hours and invited Macdonald-Wright over. The Californian arrived on the minute, immaculately dressed and sporting a new and extra-tall gold-headed cane. He came into the studio with head high, like a young general, and sniffed a little.

“There’s a woman here,” he exclaimed.

Flustered, Benton confessed that this was the case.

“Don’t be a fool, Benton,” Wright responded. “I know about these things. I know about you too. Everybody in the Quarter does. You don’t have to be sneaky with me.”

“What a nervy son of a bitch,” Benton thought. But at that moment Macdonald-Wright’s whole demeanor changed, his posture drooped, his face took on a vulnerable, almost pleading look, and his conversation became conciliatory.

“I came to see your work,” he said, and with a little coaxing, Benton began to show his paintings. First Stanton admired a figure study, one of the first and best things that Benton had painted in Paris; then he expressed interest in seeing the more recent, experimental work. Benton took canvas after canvas out of the stack in the corner. Wright looked at each with interest, making friendly comments and asking questions as he went. By the time he left they had become not just friends but artistic comrades. By April the two had begun doing things together almost every day.

Macdonald-Wright was a year younger than Benton, but he was unwilling to concede the loss of status that would have occurred had he confessed that he was the younger of the two. Although his actual age was eighteen, Stanton assured his friend Okie that he was nineteen, then, when he learned that Benton was twenty, raised his age by two years to twenty-one. Benton carefully noted such factual discrepancies, but nonetheless their friendship flourished.

Benton probably never did manage to break through the screen of stories that Macdonald-Wright constructed about himself, to discover the actual circumstances of his early life, but in at least rough fashion recent scholars have managed to do so. Improbably, Stanton’s parents were utterly conventional. Archie Wright was a quiet, sober-minded hotel manager, by temperament somewhat retiring and timid; his wife, Annie Van Vranken Wright, was deeply devout. Yet starting at an early age, both Stanton and his older brother, Willard, marked out a bold and unconventional course for their lives. How could it be that this conscientious, pious couple produced two such madcap children? Certainly part of the explanation lies in their indulgence and devotion to their children’s unmistakable gifts. Growing up in elegant hotels, with a father who was a leader of the business community, the boys never doubted their special destiny. Throughout their childhood the family enjoyed the accoutrements of luxury: they had servants; they dined well; they made periodic visits to New York, where they stayed in good hotels, ate in fine restaurants, visited the zoo, and attended the theater. As a child, Stanton cherished the fantasy that he was a prince.

Both boys were remarkably precocious, reading and writing long before their peers and showing exceptional talent for music and drawing almost as soon as they could talk. While both attended public schools, the Wrights also employed private tutors to teach them art, music, and foreign languages. Willard liked to sight-read scores by his favorite composers, such as Brahms, Debussy, and Mahler, and at one point he considered becoming a composer himself, or a conductor. Stanton also played the piano and composed music. His knowledge of musical harmony later played a major role in his exploration of color theory. When it came to discipline, both Archie and Annie were exceptionally permissive. By the time the parents realized that more discipline would have been salutary, it was far too late.

The family opened the new century by moving to Santa Monica, California, where Archie constructed a beachfront hotel, the Arcadia. For the boys the move to California opened new worlds. Both Stanton and Willard quickly developed an aversion to polite tea and garden parties and became attracted to foul language, liquor, smoking, girls, and other fascinating vices. They spent much time on the sea, swimming, boating, and diving. A few miles north of the Arcadia was the Long Wharf, where boats from around the world docked and one could meet and befriend exotic characters.

For amusement the boys also frequented the town’s bars. At one point Willard was fined the impressive sum of $120 (about three or four thousand dollars today) in damages for a bar brawl at William Reckitt’s Café—one wonders whether Reckitt’s name was what inspired the ruckus. Evidently concerned about his eldest son’s gift for misbehavior, Archie sent him to military school shortly after their move to California, but after ten months of tromping around in a cadet’s uniform at the New York Military Academy at Cornwall-on-Hudson, Willard persuaded his father to take him out. In later accounts of his life, Willard always omitted any mention of this experience.

Like his older brother, Stanton had a wild streak. By his early teens he had become interested in girls and drinking, was a habitué of Chinatown, and was a customer at the local brothel, where he established a regular relationship with one of the girls. In 1907, after he was expelled from the Harvard Military School in Los Angeles for committing acts of vandalism (his second expulsion from a private school), Archie used his social and business connections to find his son jobs in a medical office and a department store. Unfortunately, in both cases Stanton lasted only a few weeks. A subsequent position as a salesclerk in an art supply emporium also came to a hasty conclusion when it was discovered that Stanton was giving very deep discounts to his friends and fellow students. In an early bid for independence, most likely in the summer or fall of 1907, Stanton ran away from home on a windjammer bound for Nagasaki but was picked up in Honolulu and returned home by detectives hired by his father.

Only a year later Stanton found a more effective form of escape: he married Ida Wyman, a girl from Wisconsin, who had been staying with her mother at the Arcadia Hotel. The courtship lasted just two weeks: they were married on January 14, 1908, in Los Angeles, without informing Stanton’s parents. On the marriage license both reported their age as twenty-two, although Stanton was seventeen and Ida is said to have been about ten years older. Information is scanty about Ida: the fact is that she never made much of an impression on anyone. Thomas Hart Benton, who met her in Paris, described her as “a frail and timid American girl,” and she was to prove no match for Stanton’s forceful personality. Stanton seems to have been attracted as much by her money as by any other attribute, since it provided the freedom he had been yearning for. The newlyweds spent most of the next year in San Francisco before leaving for Europe in the company of the bride’s mother. For the next six years Stanton lived off his wife’s money. Determined to become a great painter, he pursued an independent course of reading and art education, feeling no need to become bogged down by the formal instruction of the schools. It was at this carefree time, while he was free from responsibilities or financial worries, that Macdonald-Wright first connected with Benton.

The chemistry between Macdonald-Wright and Benton at first seems curious, for they did not, in outward respects, seem much alike. They made a physical contrast. Macdonald-Wright was tall and slender, with pale, pasty skin, a receding chin, and a look of premature weariness. He was a hothouse plant who physically verged on the effete. Benton, on the other hand, was short, solid, and thickly muscular, with blunt features and a large scar, from a boyhood accident, that ran across his forehead. Macdonald-Wright always had a debonair manner, the product of growing up in luxury hotels, and his accent had a somewhat pretentious quality, like that of a mandarin Englishman; whereas Benton always had a scrappy toughness, as if in readiness for a barroom brawl, and never quite shed the accent or mannerisms of his hillbilly frontier background.

Their views on social questions turned out to be completely at odds. Benton was a Democrat, raised in the Populist atmosphere of Missouri, and from his exposure to Bernard Shaw and other English Fabians he leaned toward socialist theories based on the idea of universal equality and justice. Macdonald-Wright, on the other hand, was a Republican, with ties to the Huntingtons, the autocratic Californian railroad magnates. He believed that the people should be kept in their place, as natural servants of the wealthy and wellborn, among whom, of course, he included himself. Unlike most Republicans, he saw the Civil War as a tragedy because it had destroyed the slave system, which was necessary to maintain an aristocratic class. He looked forward to the time when Americans would see their mistake and reenslave the blacks. While he admired the artistic traditions of France, he disdained the country’s egalitarian rhetoric, admiring instead the military aristocracy of Germany, which he believed would one day have to take over France to restore the country’s “noble soul.” As Benton recalled:

He would get started on a monologue and if left unchecked build up a fantastic dream world, so mesmerizing himself with the flow of his words that he became convinced it was a real one. Now and then these imaginative creations would get transferred to overt behavior and he would put on the most astonishing acts completely indifferent to their effects upon others.

Benton, for all his fondness for Stanton, always retained an uneasy feeling that he was a bit of an airhead and that much of his thinking was delusional; Stanton sensed something bold and forceful in Benton’s character but found him a bit too earthbound. What was the bond that linked them? Benton is the only other artist whose name appears in Stanton’s French journals; he clearly was his closest, if not his only, friend. Benton felt an equally intense attachment: he later credited Stanton as “the only artist in all my life who, as an individual, was able to get past my suspicions of bright and clever people and have an influence on my ways.”

For all their differences, there were some powerful links. Benton and Macdonald-Wright had both quit high school in their junior year believing that they knew how to educate themselves. They were both readers and particularly loved poetry: Poe, Byron, Swinburne, Rossetti, and the Yellow Book poets. They both enjoyed argument. They were both champion talkers—they came from talking families—and they both had a self-confident way of taking on subjects about which they actually knew very little. They both loved to theorize, whether or not their knowledge justified it. “We were an odd pair of friends,” Benton later recalled. “We were totally unlike and argued incessantly. We agreed on only one thing. That was that all in Paris, but ourselves, were fools.”

On one crucial point their solidarity was complete. They both felt strongly that the academic system of art-making, as taught at all the schools in Paris, was a bore—that some new approach was needed to make an art of burning significance. Their partnership gave them the confidence to reject all the formal programs of training and to paint together instead—constantly experimenting with new ideas and approaches, constantly arguing about what they were doing, and had done, and should do next.

Benton noted that whenever Stanton faced a new situation he always took on a persona that was either lordly and supercilious or one of shocking effrontery. This seemed to be some sort of protective device, as if to forestall possible attacks on his pride. In fact, when he relaxed he was exceptionally congenial and proved to have a craving for friendship.

His tendency to play the role of “the great man” sometimes led to forms of behavior that were truly amazing. At one point, for example, Stanton developed the notion of having himself photographed before the important monuments of Paris and hired a photographer to assist him. After seeing a few of these shots, Benton became curious and asked to accompany him on the next round. The site chosen was a pedestrian bridge, the Pont Neuf, or “New Bridge” (which despite its name is actually the oldest bridge in Paris, dating back to medieval times). While the photographer set up his camera and wrapped himself in his black hood, Macdonald-Wright established himself in the middle of the bridge, with the towers of the cathedral of Notre Dame behind him, and took an erect and commanding posture. As Benton recalled:

Folding his arms he stared out like some conquering young Siegfried, over the passing train of French secretaries and petty functionaries on their way to and from work. He drew a crowd of amused spectators, but neither they, nor their humorous comments, fazed him. He was living a dream and all else was as nothing. He was the master of Paris.

The episode brings to mind the writings of Nietzsche (one of Macdonald-Wright’s favorite authors), along with the novels of another writer he admired, Balzac, and the famous description of Lucien de Rubempré, fresh from the provinces, standing on a hillside, overlooking Paris, dreaming of conquering the big city. In summing up, Benton noted:

All of this sounds crazy, too crazy to put up with. But a few seconds after such performances a complete change of personality might occur and the lunatic young ham turned into an intelligent, reasonable and considerate friend. When he sensed I was low on funds, which frequently occurred at the end of each month, he would lend me the money to tide me over. I never asked him to do this. He divined my needs.

Benton’s girlfriend, Jeanette, took an instant dislike to Macdonald-Wright and never referred to him by his real name, instead using colorful French phrases such as “Monsieur L’Epateur,” “Monsieur Polisson,” “Monsieur Sournois,” or “Monsieur Pesteux”—loosely translated as Mr. Bigshot, Mr. Sleazebag, Mr. Shifty, or Mr. Nuisance. Nonetheless, she was sufficiently impressed by his elegant attire that she insisted that Benton go out and buy a new suit. Benton’s neighbor John Thompson disliked Macdonald-Wright and his pretension even more strongly, generally referring to him as “that pasty-faced prick.”

While the way they touched brush to canvas was quite different, and remained so for the rest of their lives, Macdonald-Wright and Benton were both eager to throw aside conventional ways and do something new and original—the expression of their special, God-given genius. Neither was content with the facile decorative Impressionism of their peers, such as Abe Warshawsky or Leon Kroll. Neither was content to make a career painting picturesque scenes of Paris for American tourists. From the standpoint of making paintings that were pleasing to look at, this was not always an advantage. In this regard, Stanton was the better favored of the two, because of his exceptional mastery of sweeping brushstrokes. Benton’s paintings generally looked awkward to most of his friends—indeed, even to himself; ambition still ran way ahead of achievement. Stanton was almost the only one who saw something in them.

Few paintings by either survive from this period, so their development is known mainly from Benton’s descriptions. Sometimes Macdonald-Wright, sometimes Benton was the more adventurous. Generally, Macdonald-Wright was a little ahead, although he fell behind for a while in 1910, when he was chasing a good-looking model and devoted the summer to painting very realistic and conventional portraits of her in the nude, except for a big floppy hat. They both started with essentially academic styles, although with bold brushwork, and then moved on to a kind of Impressionism. By the spring of 1910 they had discovered Gauguin, Matisse, and the Cubists and were exploring all these different approaches. As Benton later recalled, “Almost each week a new discovery would send us flying into some new experiment.” Even when the results looked strange, they both were convinced that they were destined to come up with some amazing new form of artistic expression, which would overwhelm their peers.

For more than a year they had no friends who shared their advanced artistic taste, but early in 1911 Benton and Macdonald-Wright met Arthur Lee, the sculptor, who in turn introduced them to a good-looking young American, Morgan Russell, another sculptor, who had a studio nearby and had attended the school of Henri Matisse.

Russell was desperately poor and quickly running out of money. From the moment of their first meeting, he was cool toward Benton but effusively friendly to Macdonald-Wright. Benton on his side took a dislike to Russell from the first. No doubt in large part this was simply a matter of competition. For several years he had been Stanton’s best friend, and he could sense that he was being supplanted and replaced. He resented that Stanton, in his sublime egotism, did not see that Russell was angling for a free meal ticket. Was there something else as well? By this time Benton had already developed an intense anxiety about effeminates and homosexuals—in part no doubt because of an unpleasant experience in Chicago, when an older man named Mr. Hudspeth had gotten him drunk, persuaded him to undress and climb into bed, and then had slipped a lubricated finger up his anus. Perhaps something feminine about Russell’s manner set off alarm bells.

On the positive side, Russell brought them into a new social circle filled with enthusiasts for modern art. In the spring of 1911 Benton and Macdonald-Wright met the stage designer Lee Simonson, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and Leo Stein (the brother of the more famous Gertrude), who was himself still painting, or apparently so, and invited them to his studio. Shortly after this friendly meeting with Leo, Macdonald-Wright and Russell visited Gertrude Stein at the rue de Fleurus, but Benton lost his nerve at the last minute and did not go. He later was glad of this, for something about Stanton’s attitude annoyed the Steins and the evening was not a social success. In describing it afterward, Stanton launched into an anti-Semitic tirade, describing Gertrude by every obscenity he could think of, including the phrase “a fat-assed kike.” (In Stanton’s journal of the period he referred to “Steinitis: the Disease of Paris.”)

Surely if Benton had stayed longer in Paris, he would have become part of the circle of modernists that gathered around the Steins. Unfortunately, Benton’s position in Paris was financially precarious. His uncle Sam, who had died of tuberculosis in Arizona, had left him with a small fund for his education, but the money was running out. He hoped that his mother, who had inherited money from her parents, would continue to support him. But in March of 1911 Benton’s mother unexpectedly arrived in Paris, discovered that he had a French mistress, and took her boy home.