Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Painting the Song
2 Painting the Sound
3 Anthology
4 Regionalist Radio: Benton on Art for Your Sake
Epilogue: Sound, Touch, and Beyond
Appendixes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Leo G. Mazow is Associate Professor of American Art History at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
“Leo Mazow’s much-anticipated Thomas Hart Benton and the American
Sound contains many delightful surprises. For one, it opens up
Benton to new lines of inquiry: much has been written about this
modern American painter, and authors have long noted his interest
in music—especially American folk songs—but now, at last, we have a
book that considers Benton’s trenchant absorption in American sound
in the context of diverse theories and the rich pageantry of his
era. Moreover, the book is superbly researched and well written.
And in rendering Benton and his interests as fresh and novel, Mazow
performs an enormous favor for anyone interested in modern American
culture. Here’s yet another guise for a controversial and outspoken
artist. A superb book that’s sure to leave a lasting mark.”—Justin
Wolff,University of Maine
“An interesting and compelling project exploring the centrality of
‘sound’ in the work and career of American artist Thomas Hart
Benton.”—A. Joan Saab,University of Rochester
“While the main focus of Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound
is to show the many levels of influence that the idea of not just
music, but also sound, had on his visual work, what really is at
the heart of Mazow's book is the notion that as an American artist
working in the twentieth century what drove Benton's works more
than anything else was the trials, tribulations, lives, passions,
movements and dramas of real American people.”—American Fine
Art
“In this beautifully written and well-illustrated study, Mazow . .
. traces the impact of American vernacular music on the murals and
easel paintings of the celebrated regional artist Thomas Hart
Benton. . . . Mazow goes beyond the mere citation of the presence
of musical instruments and performance in Benton's paintings to
include a provocative thesis that the artist was interested in the
almost ephemeral pursuit of trying to represent sound—the noise and
cacophony of trains, cars, jackhammers, speakeasies—and to discuss
how this abstract idea informed Benton's concept of the American
scene.”—S. Webster Choice
“Leo Mazow’s book offers a new model for examining artworks that
combines formal, archival and social analysis with fascinating
results.”—Elizabeth Broun,Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the
Smithsonian American Art Museum
“Mazow’s Thomas Hart Benton and the American Sound reverberates
with potent ideas about the relationship between the history of
visual art and sound. By contextualizing Benton’s paintings within
a sonic environment—a world of radio, recordings, the whistles of
trains and the scream of machinery—Mazow illuminates our
understanding of the artist’s formal designs and rhythms and
expands the manner in which we perceive his vernacular subjects.
Delightfully written in language that sings and shouts along with
its themes, Mazow’s book offers an entirely new way of relating
Benton’s work to the sounds of his time.”—Jurors for the Charles C.
Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art
“One of the finest contributions of Mazow’s project is that it
seamlessly links Benton’s Regionalist agenda with his aural
endeavors, highlighting the artist’s interest in not only folk
songs, but also . . . numerous modes of civic discourse. The reader
can see that Benton’s life was filled with town hall meetings,
lectures, sermons, and, one can imagine, many “shooting the breeze”
conversations with the citizens of the regions that he visited for
months at a time. With so much imagery and so many overlapping
themes and issues regarding sound in Benton’s oeuvre, imagining
Benton’s own oral history is no small task. In effect, Mazow
dissects the artist’s crowded, hyperbolic narratives to point out
significant sonic moments—their visual language, the biography of
the subjects, and the circumstances of the scene—while building an
overall cohesive framework that organizes these sound bites of
history for the reader.”—Asma Naeem CAA.Reviews
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