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.