(piano playing)
(jazz piano playing)
- The opportunity to acquire this incredible mural series
by Thomas Hart Benton for the Met's collection was thrilling.
- Well, this is a little bit behind the scenes.
Looking ahead toward this exciting exhibition,
I'm looking at them closely for the first time as I prepare.
I think we were all blown away by Benton's ambition, his scale.
It's beyond what I ever imagined it would be.
The title of the mural isAmerica Today.
It shows a different side of Benton that many people
either don't know or have forgotten.
- It's a great New York story.
It's almost sort of destiny.
- Benton's originally from Missouri.
He moved to New York and began teaching
at the Art Students League.
At this moment in his career, in the late '20s
into the early '30s,
he was very much immersed in the New York art world.
- When Thomas Hart Benton took this great commission
at the New School,
which was itself a very modern, radical building,
he knew how important it was.
He wasn't really famous at this point.
And he wasn't known as a great muralist at this point.
- This is when he put his stamp on the New York art world.
He saw an opportunity, he took it, and he flourished.
- He manages to capture what he felt was really exciting
about New York City and urban life-- fast-moving subways
and newspapers and signs and neon lights.
You're moving past all of this stimulation very quickly.
It's an extremely creative experience that captures
the excitement of modern life in New York City at this time.
(jazz folk guitar playing)
- Benton formed, through this series,
a quintessential American...
not just style, but also a message
stronger than any other mural message that existed
in the United States.
- I see him as a kind of cultural anthropologist.
He's interested in the integration of life,
how work translates into industrial production.
You get the full expanse from rural to urban.
(lively jazz music playing)
There's lots of dancing and drinking.
It's the era of Prohibition.
So he's showing kind of the seedier side of urban life
in America, all of which looks pretty fun in retrospect.
But he finished it at a point in time
that it was clear that the Depression was real,
and it was going to be long.
So he concludes it very poignantly with hands
reaching for coffee and for bread.
(jazz folk guitar playing)
- The mural depicts the utopian dream of new society.
But he doesn't buy into it entirely,
because what you have here is a small warning
about the effects of overconsumption, overproduction,
some of the things that we're still grappling with nowadays.
- It makes Benton look very contemporary and relevant,
whereas not so long ago he was dismissed as irrelevant.
- I have to admit that as a graduate student,
I was taught not to like Thomas Hart Benton.
- Benton's critics complain that his art has remained
mired in Americana, unaware that a whole new world
of color and symbolism, abstract expressionism,
has moved to center stage and left Tom Benton
a million light-years behind.
- I think that the intellectual world of New York
is even worse than the Congress of the United States
if you're dealing with ideas.
- This mural explodes that myth about Benton.
You see how expansive his vision was.
(blues music playing)
- There are these moments in an artist's career
where they just throw themselves into a project.
And he had taken on clearly his most important student,
Jackson Pollock, who involved himself in the project
by serving as a model for many of the male figures
in the mural.
There was a lot of youthful energy there
that was also providing great inspiration
for this mural project.
The room was intended to be a boardroom initially.
And, you know, it's comical to think of trustees
trying to have serious conversations in this space,
but they obviously did.
And then over time it was turned into a lecture hall,
with desks and chairs.
As time went on, the murals began to discolor.
Students pushed their chairs up against the panels,
evidently, which forced Benton to return three times,
actually, to do repair work.
And after a while, it sort of became forgotten.
I think the New School really hoped, you know,
that it would... the whole mural room might just disappear.
(string music playing)
- I went down to Chelsea, and I saw them in storage.
And I thought, "These are amazing."
They're vibrant, they're dramatic,
and they connect early 20th-century American art
all the way through to the Abstract Expressionists.
And then on top of this, I realized
the Met is a museum of period rooms.
Here is a 20th-century period room.
(blues music playing)
- Benton conceived of this work of art
not as a set of paintings, but as a room, as a space.
It's such a great honor to debut the mural at the Met
as a room to scale of the space in the New School
where they originally hung
for the first time since they were taken from that space.
It's a modern panorama of life.
There's, I think, something for everyone who looks at it.
-America Today is one of those works of art that has been
a victim of the whims of taste.
It spent a period in the wilderness.
But I think now sufficient time has gone by that we see it
with fresh eyes.
There are themes and ideas that are more relevant
to today than ever before.
- It is of the city and about the city simultaneously.
And so we are exceedingly grateful
that this mural is available and will be available
for not just the people of New York,
but the very, very many people from across the world
who visit the museum
who will see this mural on an ongoing basis.
(blues guitar playing)