Ken Burns' America: Thomas Hart Benton
by Ken Burns
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DVD details
Actor: Jr. Jason RobardsDirector: Ken Burns
Brand: Paramount
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 86 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-09-28
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: PBS
DVD Reviews of Ken Burns' America: Thomas Hart Benton
DVD Review: A wonderful documentary about one of America's great public painters
Summary: 5 Stars
This documentary clarified some things for me. My father told me about all of the Thomas Hart Benton paintings in the town he grew up in, Neosha, Missouri. In fact, one of his closest childhood friends was painted playing baseball in one of the Neosha paintings. What my father failed to tell me was that Benton was from Neosha, which certainly explains why he favored the town with his art. Not that it was unusual for Benton to place his work in small Midwestern towns (though Neosha really is more of a Southern town).
So, because of my father's stories of his childhood, I was always attuned to his art, even though for some reason I never learned much about his life. I knew that he was related to the famous senator Thomas Hart Benton, possibly the most famous senator of his time not to be one of the Great Triumvirate, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. Had there been a quartet of great senators instead of the trio, Benton would have been included. I had my interest in Benton's art, if not his life, intensified when I was a student at Yale and took a drive one day to the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain. My then-wife and I went through the first part of the museum, thought that that was all, turned a corner, and discovered a new and huge wing. the portion that most impressed me was a display of a series of huge Benton paintings in a series called "The Arts of Life in America." The size and scope of the paintings were just overwhelming. I loved the energy and personality that radiated from the paintings and I instantly became a bigger fan of his work than I had previously been. What I liked was that his was a unique and entirely personal vision. He was not beholding to particular schools or movements. He reminds me of Walt Whitman in that he is determined to present American life in all its diversity and complexity, both good and bad. So just as Whitman tried to depict every kind of person in American society -- at one point putting himself both in the shoes of an escaped slave and the slave hunter -- so Benton put images of a KKK rally in his Indiana painting for the Chicago World's Fair.
The documentary shows the range of Benton's work and the highlights of his life, as well as the public reaction to his work. You certainly will come away from it with a good sense of what Benton was able to achieve in his work. It is also a great example of Ken Burns work just before becoming a household name with his landmark THE CIVIL WAR. I love that in total Burns's documentaries tell the story of America. There are still some areas that he needs to cover. First and foremost, Burns should do a history of religion in America. If he were to do that, he would have pretty much summed up everything that the country was about. This documentary might be one of the smaller pieces of the great puzzle depicting American life and history. But he has perhaps twenty-five or thirty years of work left in him. When he is done we'll have the single best body of work depicting what American was all about.
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