Benton, Pollock and the Politics of Modernism or Saving Hart and Putting Jackson in the Box by Erika Doss (review)

BookReviews 235 flu. Wagner appears in James's "The Velvet Glove," The Bostonians, and the unfinished The Ivory Tower, Gounod and Goethe in The Portrait of a Lady, and so on. Tintner shows with sometimes ovetpowering detail the extent of James's knowledge and indebtedness to the whole of European cosmopolitan culture. Of course, much of what she writes is speculative by its vety nature, and a little of it is fantastical as well, but she has started so many hares running that some are bound to be pursued by other scholars. The reader comes away impressed by the depth and breadth of her scholarship and the inventiveness which she has brought to the study of a writer whose curiosity was never satiated and whose ability to convert what he found to his own uses is almost unparalleled in modern literature. PeterBuitenhuis Simon Fraser University •••••• Erika Doss. Benton, Pollock and the Politics of Modernism or SavingHart and Putting Jackson in the Box. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1991. This is a timely and very well designed book, with many black-and-white photographs , giving a good sense of the visual struggle Erika Doss is trying to unravel. The topic is an important and a complex one, a topic which necessitates a series of qualities which professor Doss seems to have. The book is a dissertation written in the department of American studies at the University of Minnesota, already well known for the important cultural studies done around Lany and Elaine Tyler May's circle. It shows. The book is lively, covers large areas of American culture, from paintings to movies through popular culture magazines and cartoons. It has breadth and vitality. Professor Doss is interested in works and issueswhich have too long been marginalized in traditional art history. She is able to discuss with acuity the social content and discourse of public art works, and, in so doing, she has been able to rekindle interest in the study of aspects of American art that for many years-like Thomas Hart Benton's work, that have been embarrassingly pushed aside. This book is·a resuscitation of sorts, going farther in the analysisof Benton's work in relation to American politics and history, than other known studies so far. This book also represents the fairly traditional hybrid product of cultural histoty with all its strengths (historical data, critical attitude) and its problems (inability to deal adequately with artistic and critical concepts such as modernist paradigms). Despite this built-in 236 CanadianReviewof American Studies weakness, the firstpart of the book dealing with Benton and its grappling with artistic roles during one of the most important moments of American culture is illuminating . We learn many things about why Hart Benton's work and cultural values fizzleout of American culture. We learn much about Benton's problems dealing with the coming of the Second World War. Professor Doss is able, in a veiy complex and convincing way to place Benton's work within the different fields of cultural and political possibilities in the 1930s.In so doing, she manages to open the field and convincingly discusspainting in relation to Hollywood cinema. We learn much about Benton's political transformation over the years, about his disillusionment and his progressive loss of faith in the power of his populist images to shape political consciousness. Its all there in an engaged and engaging type of writing. Having said this, it is all the more surprising to read the last two chapters, where all the complexities are evacuated in favour of a collage of already well known and wellpublicized analyseswithout dealing with the profound differences embedded in the projects of Benton and Pollock. Doss pushes the similarities that she found in their pasts, in their biographies, without a deep understanding of the artistic and political possibilities available to the two artists at the time. (This habit of tiying to explain some art practices through the "life of the artist" is one of the worst tics of "veiy old" art histoiy indeed-the text is cut by sections giving us some quick slices of lifewhich read like a Life Magazineobituaiy.) There is no real discussion of their antithetical viewsof the...