Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original by Henry Adams

“The following September, as the movers were packing up his household goods, Benton penned his notorious ‘Farewell to New York,’ which was included in his 1937 autobiography. He declared that ‘The great cities are outworn,” and that New York, when ‘stacked up against the rest of America, is a highly provincial place.’ New Yorkers ‘have a tendency to mistake their interests, wishes, and hopes for those of the whole country.’ In addition, they, more than people of any other place in the country, treasured ‘the attenuated political, artistic, and economic ideas of Europe.’ People of extreme views, both radical and conservative, dominated the city’s intellectual life. For both extremes, ‘borrowed ideas are a mark of distinction.’ He dismissed the followers of Karl Marx as ‘dogmatic, self-righteous, and humorless,’ and accused them of trying to force the art of the young ‘into the stereotypes of propagandist pattern.’ They belonged to ‘the same psychological class’ as those who were ‘intent on ridding art of all meaning in favor of pure abstraction.’ Similarly, he deplored the ‘conservative academicians,’ who touted ‘the negative refinements of conformity’ and advocated ‘outmoded practices and a narrow naturalism.’”

-Henry Adams, 1989