DATE: Saturday, November 1, 1997            TAG: 9711010077

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: Larry Maddry 

                                            LENGTH:  102 lines

HIS DAYS IN NORFOLK FOREVER COLORED ARTIST'S WORK MURALIST THOMAS HART BENTON FOUND A NEW PERSPECTIVE WHILE SERVING IN NAVY

DEE ARDREY is an art doctor.

If a painting, sculpture or furnishing at the the Chrysler Museum can be rolled into her studio, she is ready and willing to treat the patient. She's the museum's conservator.

When I dropped by her studio last week, she had a mural by Thomas Hart Benton set up on her operating table.

Benton (1889-1975) is an American original who did about as much to celebrate the uniqueness of our country - particularly its heartland - as any artist to grasp a brush.

He came from a distinguished Missouri family - his great-uncle, for whom he was named, was a U.S. senator whose opposition to slavery earned him a place in John F. Kennedy's book ``Profiles in Courage.'' The artist gained the admiration of another president - Harry Truman - who called Benton his favorite painter.

The Benton mural - about 3 by 15 feet - is far from his best work. But it is not bad, either. It was done in 1932, commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art and was hung near the ceiling of the museum library's reading room.

Anyone in the reading room who looked up would have thought that hell was popping above. From the roof of a clothing boutique soldiers are gunning down protesting strikers. A wounded striker is falling from a platform and seems to be falling off the painting into the laps of whomever is below. A railroad train - trains appear frequently in Benton's works - is speeding past with its headlight sweeping ahead and smoke billowing from the stack. There's a plane droning across the dark sky, and a woman in a farm vehicle appears - somewhat incongruously - to observe the mayhem.

``It has a tabloid look,'' Ardrey said. And it does. There's none of the dreamy loveliness of a Benton landscape with rolling hills covered with grain and sympathetic portrayals of black men loading cotton on a Mississippi paddle wheeler. But the mural is interesting, partly because the woman driving the farm vehicle onto the scene is Rita, the artist's wife. She posed frequently for her husband and sometimes for his pupil Jackson Pollock, the abstractionist who had gone to school on Benton's abstract works.

The mural in Ardrey's workshop - titled ``Unemployment, Radical Protest, Speed'' - has been in storage for years at the Chrysler. In December, it will be hung above the doors of the museum's theater. It needs some restoration in places where there are cracks and the paint has begun to flake off. ``It needs a cleaning, too,'' Ardrey said.

She mentioned that Thomas Hart Benton was once in Norfolk. I hadn't known that. So there was a lot of catching up to do.

Benton joined in the Navy during World War I and was sent to Norfolk in 1918. He was immediately shipped over to Cherrystone Island at Cape Charles, where he was to study naval signaling at a quartermaster's school.

The young sailor liked the duty at Cherrystone Island because the uniform of the day was usually bathing trunks. And he wrote his sister that he had been accepted by locals on the Eastern Shore because he participated in boxing matches.

``I am getting to be somewhat of a privileged character on the island,'' he wrote. ``I escape all the daily jobs and am able to do whatever I please to get a rowboat or canoe for exploring trips. . . . The popular idea of an artist is summed up by a consumptive appearance coupled with feminine habits. The fact that I do not fit that idea has given the boneheads a better opinion of the profession and consequently singled me out as a person worthwhile.''

Early in September 1918, Benton was transferred back to Norfolk, where he was assigned to make descriptive drawings of the naval base. While in town, he stayed with a landlady who was ``Norfolk Irish and friendly.''

A week or so later, he was ordered to make drawings of the camouflaged vessels arriving in the port.

He wrote about it to a friend:

``Twice a week I leave the office at Norfolk with the fellow who takes the photographs. We go on board a 40-foot motor boat (motor sailor) and cruise around the bay making sketches and photographs of newly arrived camouflaged ships. . . . The other days of the week I am supposed to spend finishing up my sketches!! But I can finish them perfectly in from half to three-quarters of an hour. I shall have plenty of time to paint, and with my new pass I can work anywhere I please.''

While in Norfolk, he did a number of paintings for himself, including a watercolor on paper entitled ``Norfolk Harbor'' and another titled ``Impressions, Camouflage.''

Benton's biographer, Henry Adams - author of ``Thomas Hart Benton - An American Original'' - reports that the artist's brief stay in Norfolk (he got out of the Navy in November) was a turning point in his development. Or so Benton thought.

The artist wrote:

``This was the most important thing that, so far, I had ever done for myself as artist. My interests became, in a flash, of an objective nature. The mechanical contrivances of building, the new airplanes, the blimps, the dredges, the ships of the base, because they were so interesting in themselves, tore me away from all my grooved habits, from my play with colored cubes and classic attenuations, from my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns. I left for good the art-for-art's sake world in which I had hitherto lived.''

Well, it's about time that mural was viewable again. ILLUSTRATION: Color Chrysler Museum of Art photo

"Unemployment, Radical Protest, Speed"...

Photo

ALFRED A. KNOPF

Artist Thomas Hart Benton in his Navy uniform when he was stationed

in Norfolk in 1918.

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