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“Sheena Wagstaff, Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum , added: “This extraordinary gift greatly enriches the Museum’s narrative of 20th-century American art. It is a work of immense scale and significance, and represents a uniquely American brand of modernism that condenses the spirit of the Jazz Age, anticipates Regionalism, and holds a fascinating and deeply ambivalent relationship to avant-garde European movements as well as to the Mexican mural movement. In addition to presaging subsequent Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, its full blown presentation of American culture includes remarkable allusions to industrialization, race relations, and social values.”
The comment above applies to a huge mural that filled the four walls of a New York boardroom, painted by American artist Thomas Hart Benton. A mural is a large work of art made to occupy an entire wall or ceiling. Started in 1930, it was completed in 1931. Notably, this was the period of the Great Depression (1928 to 1932), and Prohibition (1920 to 1933). He received no cash for this commissioned piece, but received as many eggs as needed to mix his paint colors. The quote at the beginning indicates that the mural was being donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I looked at the panel called “City Activities With Dancehall”.

This piece challenges me and tells me a story about America in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Sorry if it’s not part of the collection you wanted me to view, but it was near closing so I selected the first piece that caught my attention. The color is vibrant with a dusky blue background. There is red, white, and blues with black and brown woven in. It is like a collection of snapshots. For me this picture could answer the question “It’s Friday, what am I going to today?” The options presented are mostly gay and full of life. The most dour image was that of the stockbroker looking at the ticker tape with two intent, maybe anxious onlookers. It was after all, a time of the Great Depression. Things to do include go to the circus and fly high above all your cares with the trapeze artist, go take in Shakespearian classics of the performing arts, enjoy the bold and brassy big band sound popular at the time, tear up the rug with a sexy young girl in a slinky red dress, or on the more sedate side you could watch a widely popular ‘talkie’ movie at the cinema, or spend time at home with the family. Please don’t be fooled, take a closer look with me.

There is a bit of social commentary going on here on a few different levels. Yes it is a rather large painting, but it has words relating to voting and to smoking hanging above the heads of two ‘snapshots ‘ containing women. In the lower foreground is Benton’s wife and son with the reformist educator, Caroline Pratt. Women had got the vote due to suffragette activity in 1920. The fact ‘snapshot’ in the mid ground shows women at the bar? The sign above says “Your health demands it SMOKE. Women, highly featured in this work, were coming into their own. For many years smoking among women was frowned upon. Times had changed, women were targeted by cigarette companies to smoke so they could keep their weight down. This was a highly successful strategy and smoking among women took off. At the cinema the ‘snapshot’shows only women as the paying patrons. I think I could say that Benton again wanted to show that times had changed to have liberated women. In the dancehall we see the bald headed patron finding support on the dancers’ breast. We know in the late 1920’s you would pay a “John” 10 cents to take a whirl with his girls. She would add your name to her dance card till her card was full.

This was the time of Prohibition. Drinking alcohol was illegal. Yet alcohol is featured in four of the ‘snapshots’. Benton painted himself in the bottom forefront celebrating glass in hand, with the gentleman who had commissioned the mural. I see Benton as wanting to add his opinion that Prohibition was failed social policy.