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Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock
Hardcover – November 24, 2009
Henry Adams
(Author)
A groundbreaking portrait of the intense personal and artistic relationship between Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock, revealing how their friendship changed American art.
The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton's highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and highly charged relationship dating from Pollock's days as a student under Benton. Pollock's first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock. In true Oedipal fashion, Pollock even fell in love with Benton's wife.
Pollock later broke away from his mentor artistically, rocketing to superstardom with his stunning drip compositions. But he never lost touch with Benton or his ideas―in fact, his breakthrough abstractions reveal a strong debt to Benton's teachings. I n an epic story that ranges from the cafés and salons of Gertrude Stein's Paris to the highways of the American West, Henry Adams, acclaimed author of
Eakins Revealed
, unfolds a poignant personal drama that provides new insights into two of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
Customers say
Customers find the book insightful, informative, and well-researched. They describe it as well-written, with a novelistic quality. Readers also mention it's a great read and the best book they've ever read on Jackson Pollock. They appreciate the historical character study and rare account of his upbringing.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
11 customers mention "Insight"
11 positive
0 negative
Customers find the book insightful, informative, and well-researched. They describe it as a thoughtful window into history. Readers also mention the author is knowledgeable and writes to enlighten.
"...In this
rich and insightful dual portrait
, Adams first must rehabilitate Benton's reputation as a prolific, dynamic, and socially progressive..."
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"...This book is very well-rounded, well-thought out and
insightful
!..."
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"...I can't thank him enough for this
insightful
and delightful look into the lives of "Tom and Jack.""
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"What a
great tale of art history
. How Thomas Hart Benton influenced the style and art of Jackson Pollock...."
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8 customers mention "Pacing"
8 positive
0 negative
Customers find the pacing of the book very well-written, with a novelistic quality. They say it's well-thought-out and insightful. Readers also mention the book is approachable to non-specialist readers.
"...which has a novelistic quality to it, making it
very approachable to non-specialist readers
. Highly recommended to anybody interested in modern art."
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"...This book is very well-rounded,
well-thought out
and insightful!..."
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"Very well- researched and
written book
- I am looking for more by Henry Adams...."
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"...You won't be able to put this book down-a
great read
!"
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4 customers mention "Readability"
4 positive
0 negative
Customers find the book fascinating and say it's the best they have ever read on Jackson Pollock.
"...bodies and other shapes in his drip paintings, which make them
endlessly fascinating
, as opposed to copies of the Pollock style that tend to be dull..."
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"This book is the
best book I've ever read
on Jackson Pollock and the only book I've read on Thomas Benton...."
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"...Not dry, well researched and
captivating
."
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3 customers mention "Biography"
3 positive
0 negative
Customers find the biography highly readable, integrated, and delightful. They also say it's a rare account of Jackson's upbringing and early influences.
"Henry Adams is a most knowledgable and
delightful biographer
...."
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"...It is a
rare account of Jackson's upbringing
, his early influences including his brother, acclaimed artist Thomas Hart Benton and Benton's wife..."
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"...a very well-written, academic, highly readable, integrated,
historical character study
of two men, the times they lived in and the psychological..."
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I just finished reading this wonderful book about the artists Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock and their close and complicated relationship. Benton was Pollock’s mentor when he was a young starving artist in NYC, and Pollock seems to have fallen in love with Benton’s wife Rita. Benton was famous in the 1930s for his murals e.g. America Today. Pollock went on to become the leading exponent of abstract expressionism in the late 1940s, but as author Henry Adams argues, his paintings owed a great deal to the formal and rigorous training that Benton encouraged, studying the forms and compositions of artists like El Greco, Michelangelo, and Tintoretto. You can see traces of bodies and other shapes in his drip paintings, which make them endlessly fascinating, as opposed to copies of the Pollock style that tend to be dull and repetitive. Adams also speculates that Pollock’s work was deeply influenced by Jungian psychological principles, Native American artworks by the Navajo artists, and “Oriental” artworks. As an Asian Studies specialist, I’d say the use of the term “Oriental” is a bit outdated and the author’s knowledge of Asian art history isn’t as rich as his knowledge of western art history, but it’s a worthy speculation nonetheless. Overall this is a fun and exciting book to read, which has a novelistic quality to it, making it very approachable to non-specialist readers. Highly recommended to anybody interested in modern art.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Henry Adams has provided the general reader with an interesting picture of Thomas Hart Benton, the most notable of the American Regionalists, and the major influences on his work. Recent generations of art-lovers need to be reminded of those who established an American art inter-penetrated by the vigorous traditions of Italy, France, Germany and the Low Countries as well as the more recent impact of Asian and African techniques. Particularly welcome is documentation of the influence of Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright on Benton's concept and methods. (Aficionados of the American detective story will be interested in the review of the art historical role of Stanton's brother, Willard, who, under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine, created the first modern American Sherlock Holmes, Philo Vance, in best selling novels and popular films.) In his treatment of Benton, MacDonald-Wright, and Pollock, Adams suggests the important role of writers, critics, patrons, dealers,museum curators and mass media, in the making of art celebrity and success. Willard Wright was very useful to Benton in thsi regard as Greenberg was to Pollock later. In dealing with Benton, Adams is on firm ground, having written books and scholarly articles, and having been involved in a Ken Burns documentary on the subject. With Benton's artistic and personal character established, he turns to the complex figure which is Jackson Pollack. Here I feel the reader must be aware of the degree to which Adams is retailing documented facts as opposed to hypothesized causality and personal interpretation. He is openly opposed to some noted students of Pollock, and often must venture into the always shaky ground underlying the analysis of personality and intimate interrelationships. The story is well-told for the layman until he engages with structural analysis of picture making and psychological analysis of personality. These tend to be at a higher level of abstraction than the story telling and, therefore, for a layman, are more difficult to follow and more in need of the skeptical, "maybe he's right but I don't know enough to say". In so far as Adams discussion of the relationship of Pollock's fundamental "rules" of picture making and those of Benton, one need approach with particular caution (as Adams warns us). In what is considered the best of his pictures, Pollock followed the (unwritten) rule for writing books that admirably suit the demands of a social movement to find guidance in all possible situations, write it long, make it very complex, endow it with a high degree of ambiguity, and spread the net of your canvas of words over as many possibilities as you can. His so-called "great" paintings have the visual components of such an approach and, therefore, lend themselves to an infinity of "interpretations". In addition, as a matter of logic, the greater the abstraction of a verbal or visual stimulus, the greater the number of concrete situations it may refer to. At any rate, Adams concludes that Pollock was never the complete abstractionist, that all his major works contain within them the core of figuration, and that this figuration and the manner in which the whole is ordered, is a direct (and, of course, legitimate by a student with regard to a teacher) extension of what he learned from Benton.
All in all, a book that can be recommended to the general reader, interested in how people live, and the more specialized reader who wants to see what is the latest on the ever-developing mythology of Jackson Pollock.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
In TOM AND JACK, Henry Adams, one of the creative contributors to the documentary
Ken Burns' America: Thomas Hart Benton
, takes a close look at the influence of Thomas Hart Benton on perhaps the greatest American artist of the twentieth century, Jackson Pollock. In this rich and insightful dual portrait, Adams first must rehabilitate Benton's reputation as a prolific, dynamic, and socially progressive realist who rose to fame as a WPA mural painter. Adams looks at Benton's expatriate experiences in Paris, the influence of the now forgotten school of Synchromism on his sense of dynamism, and examines Benton's eventual decline (dismissal really) in the eyes of fellow artists and east coast intellectuals. As a teacher at the Art Students League in New York, Benton enjoyed being an iconoclastic influence on his mostly male students. Pollock and Pollock's brothers, also artists, were part of this group. Although Benton and Pollock were quite different in many ways (Benton was quite learned and well read while Pollock was inarticulate, if not exactly illiterate), they were both highly driven artists who never really felt themselves to be artworld insiders. Adams is at his best when analysing the men's artwork, but he is equally comfortable exploring the psychology of their relationship. Since Pollock spent a good deal of time in psychotherapy, Adams's marshalling of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical theories as practiced in mid-century America is not out of place, and his presentation of Pollock's relatiohip with Benton and Benton's wife Rita as classically Oedipal is convincing.
In the first part of the book, Adams reveals the abstraction within Benton's realistic paintings; in the second part, he exposes the figurative and orderly elements hidden in Pollock's masterpieces. "It's telling," Adams writes, "that Pollock considered Einstein and Freud the two most important figures of modern times: one delved into the structure of the universe, the other into the structure of the unconscious. The power of Pollock's great drip paintings is that they seem to explore both these mysterious realms" (p. 324).
The book contains 16 pages of color reproductions, but I found it helpful to also consult Ellen Landau's
Jackson Pollock
, with its exquisite color plates of all of Pollock's major works. (I couldn't find anything comparable for Benton.) TOM and JACK also helped me to better understand Ed Harris's well-made but often elliptical film
Pollock
. Adams packs a lot into his 400-page dual biography. Its scholarship is well-considered and never bogs down the narrative; TOM AND JACK is a book I'm sure I'll return to again and again as I continue to study and enjoy the work of these two great American artists.
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