BETSY BROUN: “Achelous and Hercules” by Thomas Hart Benton is a raucous, gaudy, vibrant mural, twenty-two feet long, full of surging shapes and churning rhythms. By the time Benton painted it for a Kansas City department store in 1947, he had already been tagged by the East Coast critics as an uncouth, outspoken, provincial artist– so he may have been playing to his critics with his bright colors and athletic figures. I always imagine this scene with the sounds of Aaron Copland’s “Rodeo” in the background, or maybe it’s closer to “spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountains’ majesty, and the fruited plain.”
In this large post-war mural, the high-flying, allegorical figure offering a laurel wreath and trailing a red drape seems especially out of place. She is there to remind us that this is not a simple Midwestern farm scene. Benton took the story of Achelous and Hercules from Bulfinch’s mythology. The myth of Achelous and Hercules explains how the development of agriculture depended on the taming of rivers that overflow their banks and destroy cropland. At flood season, the river god Achelous assumed the form of an enraged bull. He wrestled with Hercules for the favors of Deianira, who symbolized the fertile river delta. In the struggle, Hercules vanquishes the bull and tears off one of his horns, which is magically transformed into a cornucopia, spilling harvest abundant. Interestingly, this mural was painted in 1947, just as the Marshall Plan was put into place. Under the Marshall Plan, a key program of President Harry Truman, American cash and food was used to help rebuild Europe after the war. So, celebrating American abundance may have been a timely subject. This would have been especially true for Benton, who wanted to revitalize his own career by associating himself with President Truman. Like Truman, Benton was short, feisty, irreverent, and from the state of Missouri.
Twenty years later, in 1966, Benton suffered a serious heart attack. As he began to recover, he painted “Wheat”. An endless army of heavy-headed wheat stalks marches back into infinity. This is Benton’s emblem for the democratic masses of America, rather like Walt Whitman’s use of “Leaves of Grass”. The first two rows have been harvested, but green shoots signal a new generation coming. One stalk is broken but not yet harvested. This may be Benton himself in the year after his heart attack.
It’s interesting to me to see how Benton’s desire to picture America reached a kind of noisy crescendo in the big public commission, “Achelous and Hercules”. But a brush with death concentrated his mind without changing his plan. In a strange way, the underlying purpose of these two pictures is the same: to celebrate nation and nature by linking them inextricably together.
