While Pollock was still struggling to master Benton’s style, Benton had moved from being famous to being notorious, the subject of constant attacks and protests. The reason for this has always somewhat mystified me but is clearly deeply bound up with notions of social class and of what constitutes proper etiquette in making a work of art. At some level Benton wanted to turn his back on all his sophisticated knowledge and make paintings for people like his father. He liked the idea that people who usually didn’t know or care about art and who thought, as his father did, that artists were fairies and sissies, would like his paintings. And, as I’ve witnessed many times, his paintings still conjure up an almost magical intensity of response from people of this sort.
One incident springs to mind. In 1989 one of Benton’s major murals, The Arts of Life in America, was hauled to the museum in Kansas City for a big show of Benton’s work. When the shipment arrived at the loading dock, I went out to greet it and was met by two drivers from Mineral Wells, Oklahoma, who sported ten-gallon hats, big belt buckles, and cowboy boots and who looked like they had just stepped out of the very mural they had been hauling in their truck. To my amusement, they both immediately began to lecture me about how much they liked the painting. “It’s really incredible—you should see it!,” one of them commented. While they carted art all the time, they made it clear to me that most of what they handled excited them no more than a bale of hay. But Benton’s work directly touched them.
Of course, not everyone has shared Benton’s desire to communicate to truck drivers and cowboys—to hold the mirror up to ordinary
American life so that working-class people can see themselves reflected there and seize a vision of their place within the
rhythms of a grand American composition. As his student Earl Bennett once remarked:
Hell, Tom Benton went out and looked at America like nobody did. He knew where America was and what America was because he
went out and mixed with the people, slept with the people, ate with the people, drew the people, won their confidence and
he didn’t give a damn about high society. Now that irritated a lot of people.
A major turning point occurred in 1933, when Benton managed to alienate a large group of his early supporters. The controversy began with what was surely intended as a joke, although it badly backfired.
While it brought him considerable attention, Benton’s America Today mural was widely condemned as vulgar and tasteless, both for its brash visual form and for its working-class subject matter. Annoyed by the criticism, in his next mural, for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Benton decided to turn up the volume, filling it with large-scale figures of thoroughly vulgar working-class Americans engaged in daily amusements, such as dancing, playing music, pitching horseshoes, and going to church. One scene showed bootleggers, a cocktail hostess, and a woman singing on the radio; another, cowboys in a frontier setting; and one of the largest panels showed African Americans, or “Negroes” as they were then called, singing, dancing, playing craps, and attending church. This was the very mural I went out to greet at the loading dock in Kansas City. I’ve mentioned the enthusiasm of the two truckers for this piece, but in the 1930s well-bred New Yorkers reacted with horror—much as if live people of this sort had been allowed to step into this sanctum of high culture. Paul Rosenfeld, for example, complained that Benton had portrayed “cornfield Negroes” from “the primitive fringe of American life” and that the effect was “crude, gross and ungracious.”
It seems clear that Benton intended his painting as an act of inclusion: as a reminder that much of America consisted of people who didn’t live in New York, who often were poor, and who nonetheless found ways to bring fun and entertainment into their lives. By the time the battle was over, however, this message had been fundamentally reversed. Benton was widely pictured as a bigot and racist, and those who wanted to keep Negroes out of the library as socially enlightened.*
Today criticism of Benton usually focuses on the contention that he was opposed to abstraction and modern art. But this was not the issue that concerned people in the 1930s. Instead, Benton’s work came under attack from two seemingly quite different groups: those who defended traditional academic history painting, and those who supported revolutionary Communist ideology. What is surprising is that both sides were offended by essentially the same thing. Both camps focused on subject matter and on Benton’s alleged breach of artistic decorum in his choice of it. Both conservatives and Communists were distressed by Benton’s vision of American history and by the fact that he presented what he had actually seen and what had actually happened, rather than presenting an ideal.
Contrary to the generally accepted view of things, Benton was far more committed to free expression than his opponents, although as the battle continued, he was pushed into increasing conservatism and isolation. This struggle was to prove of long-term significance for the course of American art, since through a complex concatenation of circumstances, Benton’s effectual defeat on this issue of freedom of expression set the stage for the collapse of Regionalism as a viable artistic movement and the eventual triumph of abstract painting.
Academic history painting in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries tended to push history into the realm of the ideal. Historical events were presented in a prettified form and in fact, toward the end of the nineteenth century, were frequently pushed into the realm of allegory, with the result that a rendering of a woman in a white dress holding some attribute could stand for almost any historical circumstance. With very few exceptions, muralists avoided the so-called lower class and concentrated on heroes. When they did show workmen or modern industry, as John White Alexander did in Pittsburgh, they felt obliged to add allegorical flying figures, in order to raise the scene above the level of real life.
To those accustomed to this kind of sanitized history painting, Thomas Hart Benton’s work came as a very brutal shock. Benton did not focus on heroes but presented a true people’s history, like that of Charles Beard or Frederick Jackson Turner. Indeed, Benton enjoyed thumbing his nose at the sort of front-parlor manners that academic history painting glorified. His murals are filled with impolite reminders of the seedier aspects of American life, such as bootleggers and gangsters, train robberies, holdups, barroom shootouts, lynchings, chain gangs, Ku Klux Klan rallies, and even, in his Whitney panorama, the first garbage pile in the history of mural painting. What made this even worse was that Benton rendered such scenes with gusto and clearly based his murals on what he had seen in real life.
In the course of his long trips around the United States, Benton had developed the ability to make life drawings with phenomenal speed. Because they were executed very rapidly, these drawings often possess a cartoon-like quality, and indeed Benton took a certain plea sure in reducing a scene to its expressive essentials. From his friendship with Ralph Barton, Benton had grown to appreciate the power of caricature. When he made use of these drawings for his murals, he did not attempt to cover up their distortions but retained all their simplifications and exaggerations. Rather than attempting to polish them up to an academic standard of realism, he concentrated his effort on integrating them into the complex three-dimensional rhythms of the design. To do this required a special kind of virtuosity, for even a small section of a Benton mural may contain figures sketched years apart, in disparate locations. In his Whitney mural, for example, the drunken, unshaven cowboy Lem, whom Benton sketched in a shack in New Mexico in 1928, plays cards with the broncobuster Tex, whom Benton sketched at a rodeo in Saratoga, Wyoming, in 1930. In the nearby music scene a fiddler sketched in Tennessee joins the guitar player Wilbur Leverett, from Galena, Missouri, while Jackson Pollock adds to the harmony with his harmonica.
Benton’s technical virtuosity was lost, however, on those accustomed to the nineteenth-century manner of mural painting, who expected a more academic and more idealized approach, not unlike that of a retouched photograph. Thus, even in the Midwest and in rural places, where Benton enjoyed much popular support, his art was also quite controversial, as was reflected in the many attacks on Benton’s Indiana and Missouri murals on the part of proper-minded local painters, historians, civic boosters, and members of the chamber of commerce. These people complained that Benton’s cows and hogs looked too skinny, that his figures had hands and feet that were too large, that his subject matter was sordid rather than heroic, and that in general Benton’s work represented “a low type of painting,” unsuitable to a public building. “I wouldn’t hang a Benton on my shithouse door,” commented one such viewer, Matthew Murray, the Missouri state engineer.
Today, of course, the academic approach toward history painting is virtually dead, and few people would attack Benton’s work from this standpoint. By contrast, the Marxist attack on Benton is still alive, even though the political viewpoints that generated it have long since been discredited. This criticism of Benton, in fact, was largely a reflection of a short-lived Stalinist phase of the American Communist movement, which briefly attracted the support of American artists. The attack on Benton was led by supporters of Stalin and precisely coincided with the moment when Stalinists played a major role in the American Communist Party.
This assault took several years to gain force, for the Marxists did not publicly take issue with Benton’s first mural, America Today, which received mostly favorable reviews in the press. When Benton completed his next mural in 1932, for the Library of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the leftists attacked him with full force. The New Republic published an editorial denouncing it; a petition was circulated at the Art Students League to have it destroyed; and when Benton delivered a talk defending his work at the John Reed Club, an outraged party member threw a chair at him. In fact, Benton’s Whitney mural was not markedly different in its subjects and themes from America Today. What had changed was the political situation, both in America at large and within the Communist Party.
As several writers have noted, one thing that had changed was the intensity of the Depression. Millions of Americans were out of work, and most artists were in an embittered mood. In addition, there had been recent internal changes in the leadership and the political programs of the American Communist Party. Because of these changes, Benton and his art were no longer acceptable.
The Communist Party in the United States was formed surprisingly late, in 1919, and its early years were troubled ones. Because of factional differences, for several years there were two rival Communist parties, with different leaders and slightly differing programs; and the party was hit hard in 1920 by the notorious Palmer raids, orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover, in which thousands of alleged Communists were arrested or deported. By the late 1920s, however, the Communist movement had become more unified, and it had begun to attract support among impoverished writers and artists.
Through the 1920s, Benton was extremely close to the Communists and actually considered himself one of them. One of his best friends, Boardman Robinson, had traveled with John Reed in Russia; Benton voted the Socialist ticket, headed by the imprisoned activist Eugene Debs; and he once hosted a meeting of the outlawed Communist Party in his apartment. As late as 1933 Benton showed his work at the John Reed Club, and in that year he also made the illustrations for a Marxist history of the United States, We, the People, written by his friend Leo Huberman. Throughout the 1930s Benton advocated collective ownership of the tools of industrial production, an essentially Marxist or socialist idea. Even at the height of the attacks on his work, Benton remained surprisingly good-natured in his statements about the Communists. “Don’t get the idea that I have any hatred for Communists,” Benton stated in 1935. “I used to be one of them myself ten years ago, and I am still a collectivist.”
Benton’s break with the Communists, it is clear, was due not so much to a change in Benton’s message as to a shift that occurred in the Communist movement at just this time. Up through the 1920s, the term “Communism” applied to a rather loose spectrum of political ideas somehow associated with the notion that the wealth of the United States should be distributed more equally and that the workers, the proletariat, should achieve some form of control over the instruments of production.
About 1933, however, the Communist movement became increasingly dominated by the Russian Communism of Stalin, and in fact Stalin made a conscious attempt to gain leadership over the American Communist Party. To an increasing degree the Communist Party became concerned not with reaching out to American workers but with purging dissidents from within its own ranks.
One of the symptoms of this ideological shift was the creation of the John Reed Club, which was founded in October of 1929 by the American Communist Party as an extension of the International Union of Proletarian Writers and Artists, which had its headquarters in Moscow. The club adopted a manifesto based on the guidelines established for the arts at the International Congress of Proletarian Culture, held at Kharkov in the Soviet Union. The essence of this six-part program was opposition to the decadent capitalist notion of art for art’s sake, that is, of art that was essentially formal or decorative in its appeal. The club’s manifesto declared that the purpose of art was to further the struggle against capitalism: specifically, to fight against imperialist war, against fascism, against white chauvinism, against the influence of middle-class ideas, and against the persecution of revolutionary writers and artists.
In 1934 the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers made Social Realism the official style of Soviet art and prohibited all other forms of artistic expression. In the United States, however, Moscow adopted a less stringent approach and encouraged the creation of so-called populalar front movements, such as the American Artists’ Congress, the American Writers’ Congress, the United American Artists, and the Artists’ League of America. Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933 gave added strength to the Stalinist movement. Communism was widely held to be the most potent alternative to Fascism, and any “middle-class ideas” that represented an alternative to Stalinism were equated with the Fascist threat.
Curiously, the leader of the attack on Benton, Stuart Davis, was both a Communist and an abstractionist, and therefore something of an ideological oxymoron. In his attack on Benton, however, Davis avoided the issue of artistic style but focused on political content. The artists whom Davis singled out for praise were not modernists but Stalinist Social Realists, such as the now-forgotten American painter Jacob Burck, who executed murals in a thoroughly boring, literal, and humorless Social Realist style and whom Davis termed “one of the outstanding revolutionary artists.” Davis was never a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, perhaps out of fear of future Palmer raids, but there can be no question that he was a defender of Stalin in this period and allied himself with Stalin’s minions. Thus, for example, Davis signed a group statement declaring that Stalin’s Moscow trials, in which scores of Russian intellectuals were condemned to death, were morally justified.
Davis engaged in deceit in his campaign against Benton. He enlisted some friends to entice Benton into giving an interview, which he would never have done if he had known that Davis was behind the project. He then ran Benton’s remarks, which by themselves would not have seemed particularly inflammatory, alongside a series of articles accusing him of racism, Fascism, and other misdeeds. It seems obvious that Davis was intensely jealous over the publicity that Benton received in this period, particularly after an article in Time magazine raised his fame to a new level. His attack on Benton came within days of the Time article.
Benton always believed that the ultimate cause of Davis’s fury was a personal slight suffered more than twenty years before. The two first met in 1912, in the studio of Samuel Halpert at the Lincoln Arcade, where Davis was showing Halpert a group of his figure drawings, executed in the fashion of the Ashcan School and his teacher Robert Henri. Something about Davis’s cocky manner set Benton off. Having just returned from Paris, where he had learned about Fauvism and Cézanne, Benton told Davis that his drawings were terrible and that he should go to France to learn something about modern art. As it happened, it was good advice, but Davis never forgave the insult.
When one reads through Davis’s assault on Benton, one can’t help sensing that Benton’s belief that Davis held some form of personal grudge must have been correct, for one of the odd features of Davis’s diatribes is his repetitious claim that his grievance against Benton is not personal, a phrase that invariably precedes either crude bathroom humor or some slanderous personal remark. At the time, Benton specifically complained that Davis did not concentrate on political issues but “dropped back to the level of a personal attack.”
On the surface, however, Davis attempted to make a political case and relied heavily on the support of his hard-line Stalinist friends. At least his central complaint was that Benton’s ideology was not socially progressive and not in harmony with Communist doctrine. Davis’s language, however, while remarkably heated, was also somewhat cryptic, for his summary of Benton’s position was often so grotesquely twisted, and so far from Benton’s actual statements, that the real cause of his fury remains unclear. Davis, for example, maintained that Benton thought political ignorance was preferable to knowledge and that “social understanding usually hurts the artist”; but this was a ridiculously and deliberately inaccurate summary of Benton’s position, namely, that for numerous pragmatic reasons, the Russian version of Communism was not suited to American workers and would never be embraced by them.
Davis, in short, constructed imaginary positions for Benton so that he could easily destroy them, with the result that the true cause of his anger remains elusive, and his specific responses to Benton’s paintings somewhat baffling. For example, it is difficult to understand why Benton’s Whitney mural was so much more offensive to Davis and the leftists than America Today.
In fact, it appears that the central grievance of Davis and his allies was remarkably similar to that of the academic critics, although presented from a different political standpoint. They objected that Benton painted America as he found it, rather than as they believed it ought to be. They were deeply distressed that Benton did not present proletarian heroes but instead painted ordinary American people doing ordinary American things.
Benton’s America Today mural was apparently acceptable from a revolutionary standpoint, if only barely so, for it showed poor Americans, some of them black, hard at work, busy being exploited by capitalism. The Whitney mural, however, was not acceptable, for it showed poor people, including poor black people, actually having fun, singing gospel songs, going to church, feeding the baby, playing cards, and roping horses, seemingly unaware that they were the miserable victims of the capitalist system.
In a sense, Benton was thumbing his nose at the leftists, because it seems fairly self-evident that the sort of working-class Americans he painted were not waiting with bated breath for the latest proletarian position paper from Kharkov. Indeed, to underscore this message, Benton later repeated one of the vignettes in the Whitney mural, portraying a tenant farmer sitting on the hood of an old car in the middle of nowhere, in a lithograph that he titled Waiting for the Revolution. The clear implication was that this poor hick was going to have to wait a very long time—until Doomsday, in fact.
In April 1935, in an interview with a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, Benton nicely summed up the position that so outraged Davis and the Communists. As he stated:
If the radical movement is to get anywhere in this country it has got to drop Marxism as an outworn historical and economic
notion and rely wholly on a pragmatic observance of developing facts. You can’t impose imported ideologies on people. The
point I wish to make is that social revolution has got to come from the grass roots. But the way the Communist intellectuals
are going about it—never! Communism is a joke everywhere in the United States except New York.
Not everyone, of course, could keep up with these ideological shifts. Thus, although Stuart Davis angrily denounced Benton’s mural as “Fascist or semi-Fascist,” Henry McBride, the genteel art critic for the New York Sun, accused Benton of “being a Communist.” By the time of the Whitney mural, however, the political tide had turned. While his own attitudes had changed little if at all, Benton from that time onward was regarded as an adversary by the denizens of the radical left.
Not surprisingly, since many of Benton’s antagonists were Jewish, over the course of these fights Benton was often accused of being racist or anti-Semitic. Indeed, when I moved out to Kansas City to work at the art museum there, with the knowledge that I was obliged to put on an exhibition of Benton’s work, I shared this common view, only to be somewhat startled by the large number of Benton’s close friends in Kansas City who were Jewish, many of whom regarded him with the warmth and affection they would feel for a family member, as if he were an eccentric but lovable uncle.
Notably, during the very period when Benton was being most heatedly denounced as an anti-Semite, he was vigorously praised by the future Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman, a Jew, who, after a visit to Martha’s Vineyard in 1938, wrote glowingly of Benton as “a constantly active bundle of energy, informal and straightforward, who transmits to all who meet him his boundless courage, the courage of a man who has spent his life fighting for ideas and ideals.”*
As it happened, Benton’s distrust of Stalinist orthodoxy was simply a few years too soon, for after 1939 even Stuart Davis
came to share it. The Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact, which was signed in August of 1939, and which was followed by the
Soviet invasion of Finland in November of that year, led to the rapid collapse of the American Artists’ Congress. The popular
front suddenly became unpopular. Some supporters, such as Meyer Schapiro, resigned with considerable public fanfare; and even
Stuart Davis realized that he had been mistaken in his admiration for Stalin and quietly withdrew from political activism.
While full knowledge of Stalin’s activities would take years to emerge, it is now well established that he was one of the
greatest murderers in human history, responsible for slaughtering about twice as many people as Hitler. When interviewed late
in life, in a gambit reminiscent of some modern politician under investigation, Davis claimed complete amnesia about his political
activities in the thirties. Asked about the causes he campaigned for at the time, he declared:
I’d forgotten all about that—thank God. You know, there were so damn many things going on. You just can’t keep all that crap
in your head. The only reason it went on was because nobody had anything else to do, and the fact that they were able to do
something in concert was very important. It didn’t make any difference whether the people who instigated it were communists,
or whatever.
It’s surely ironic that within a few years Stuart Davis was presenting himself as a high-minded advocate of individual freedom
and artistic self-expression. This, of course, was in direct contradiction to his position of the 1930s, when he had urged
vigorous suppression of political viewpoints that differed even slightly from the party line. By 1939, however, Benton had
left New York, and it was too late to take full advantage of the changed climate of political debate.
Rudderless
Throughout this period, Pollock remained at the center of Benton loyalists. In January of 1933, when Benton gave the talk
at the John Reed Club that ended in a chair-throwing brawl, Jackson was one of the group who jumped onto the stage to defend
him. But just at this point, Jackson lost both his real father and Benton, his surrogate father, with devastating effect on
his emotional stability. In December 1932 Benton accepted a commission from the State of Indiana, and hurriedly left New York
for Indianapolis where he worked frantically on the project for eight months. Initially, Jackson Pollock reacted enthusiastically
to his teacher’s success. As he wrote to his father on February 3, 1933:
Benton has a huge job out in Indianapolis for one of the state buildings—two hundred running feet twelve feet high. The panels
are to be exhibited at the Chicago World Fair when finished in May. After a lifetime struggle with the elements of every day
experience, he is beginning to be recognized as the fore most American painter today. He has lifted art from the stuffy studio
into the world and happenings about him, which has a common meaning to the masses.
Benton’s departure, however, left Pollock alone, without his most important mentor, and largely rudderless.
What is more, only days after Benton left, Jackson received news that his father was having severe heart problems. On March 4 Franklin Roosevelt gave his famous inaugural address, which Roy Pollock listened to with approval and enthusiasm, sensing that a new age was coming for downtrodden common men like himself. By the next morning he was in severe pain, and by early evening he was dead. For Jackson, his father had been only a distant presence for years. Because money was so tight, he didn’t travel to California for the funeral. “I always feel that I would have liked to have known dad better,” Jackson wrote to his mother in a note of condolence shortly afterward.
Jackson seems to have regularly responded to stress or bad news by going on drinking binges. Not long after his father’s death he was arrested for going on a rampage in a nightclub and hitting a policeman. He was arraigned the next day but let off with an admonishment. In an effort to get him to straighten out, Charles brought Jack to live with him in the Eighth Street apartment, despite the objections of Charles’s wife, Elizabeth. By the next winter, however, Charles wasn’t willing to house Jack any longer. For a few months, Jack lived by himself in a shabby apartment on Houston Street. That summer, Sande lost his job doing layout work for the Los Angeles Times. He landed in New York that fall, having hitchhiked from Los Angeles, arriving with thirty-four cents in his pocket and wearing his California clothes—not even an overcoat. He moved in with Jack in October, taking over Charles’s role as his brother’s caretaker.
Once Benton left for Indiana, Pollock was clearly at a loss about how he should continue his artistic studies. He signed up for John Sloan’s drawing class, but unlike Benton, Sloan was neither patient with slow learners nor tolerant of divergence from his own approach. After less than a month, Pollock dropped the class in disgust. Interestingly, when he did so, he abandoned drawing and painting altogether to concentrate on sculpture, studying stone carving in a class at Greenwich House and modeling in clay at the Art Students League. His fellow students thought his work was a joke. “He just wanted to make small figures like the ones he did for Benton’s murals,” Philip Pavia commented. “He was just imitating Benton. There we were, serious sculptors, and he was doing these little Bentonesque figures.” For all that, Pavia had to confess that Pollock did have a remarkable grasp of rhythm. “Pollock had the rhythm down,” Pavia later recalled. “He really had a feeling for it.”
By the autumn of 1933, Jackson’s drinking seems to have become less desperate, due both to the attentiveness of his brother Sande and to the fact that the Bentons were both back in New York and providing him with a home-like framework. In September of 1933 Benton returned to New York and moved into an apartment on Eighth Street, across from the Brevoort Hotel. Pollock promptly resumed his visits, and his drinking tapered off. While he had stopped taking art classes at the Art Students League, he regularly attended the Monday night evenings of the Harmonica Rascals, and he also posed for one of Benton’s most remarkable paintings, The Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, in which he plays the harmonica in the company of another Benton student, Glenn Rounds, and a Tennessee fiddler.
With help from the Bentons, Sande and Jackson both found a job at the City and Country School on West Thirteenth Street. They
cleaned the five-story school every night and swabbed it down once a week, for which they received five dollars apiece. Not
long afterward they both joined the newly formed government art program. Rita also managed to sell some of Jack’s ceramics
and paintings from a space that she had fixed up in the basement of the Ferargil Galleries. An aggressive negotiator, at one
point she exchanged one of Jack’s paintings with a tailor for a suit of new clothes; and she also sold a painting on approval
to the actress Katharine Hepburn, although Hepburn returned it after a few days. With Tom and Rita in New York to care for
him, Pollock’s emotional life seemed to be stabilizing and his career gaining momentum. But then he lost Benton once again—this
time a break that was never fully healed. Something happened that neither could have predicted: Benton became famous beyond
his wildest dreams.
* While the Missouri of Benton’s childhood was obviously not free from racial prejudice, it’s surely psychologically significant that Benton grew up in very intimate contact with African American people. Indeed, as a small child, Benton was largely raised by an African American woman, the most respected midwife in Neosho, Aunt Mariah Watkins, a remarkable woman who also played the role of foster mother for another notable figure in American culture, the great African American scientist George Washington Carver. At some level Aunt Mariah clearly served as an important model for Benton, showing what a self-confident, powerful woman could achieve. It’s striking that Rita Piacenza, the wife he chose, was not lily-white, snobbish, helpless, and given to fainting spells, like his mother, but somewhat dark-toned, gregarious, unsnobbish, forceful and capable in practical affairs, rather like Aunt Mariah.
* The role of racial issues in Benton’s art and in the attacks against him is too large a subject to deal with adequately here, and it’s certainly true that Benton’s art is often impolite and not in “good taste.” It is worth noting, however, that in several interviews and written statements Benton explicitly denounced racism. For example, in 1940 he declared: “We in this country put no stock in racial genius. We do not believe that, because a man comes from one racial strain rather than another, he starts with superior equipment. We do not believe this is true in any field; but particularly in the field of creative endeavor do we repudiate it.” Interestingly, Benton’s paintings of African Americans are now avidly collected by wealthy African Americans. Oprah Winfrey, for example, owns two major paintings by Benton, one in a place of honor in her home in Chicago, the other similarly featured in her retreat in Hawaii. It is evident that she looks at Benton’s representations of African Americans on a near daily basis and derives inspiration from them.