House in Cubist Landscape 1920

Thomas Hart Benton conjured this watercolor painting, titled "House in Cubist Landscape," into being. Imagine Benton hunched over a table, carefully applying those blues, greens, and reds to the paper. I see him, brush in hand, wrestling with form and space. What’s so great about watercolors is that they allow you to make marks on the canvas, even if they’re imperfect or not exactly what you intended. It's so transparent and unforgiving, yet capable of capturing the most subtle emotions. He creates the barest bones of a house, a landscape, a sky. It looks like he’s trying to extract the essence of a place by turning it into geometric forms. When I look at this painting, I imagine Benton thinking about Cezanne, about how to build a picture from simple shapes, and maybe even riffing off those early Cubists, like Picasso and Braque. Painting, like all art, is a conversation. It’s call and response. It involves people thinking through stuff in the best way that they can!