Cultural Reconstruction

It often astonishes me that there is anything left of southern culture at all after 40 plus years of cultural reconstruction. Yet there is resilience across the American South that defies the media and is confounding to the elites.

Music is a well know bastion of southern culture regardless constant attempts to degrade and dilute it. Religion is also a strong part of sectional identity and its permutations are a regular target of leftist demagogues who would reconstruct it.

The visual arts are likewise a part of the cultural reconstruction picture but have never been given much attention outside the rarified world of galleries which actually specialize in “regional art”. Nonetheless, there are a few artists who consciously or not continue to realize a tradition.

Alabama painter Troy Crisswell  is a well known fixture in art fairs across the South. Like his Yellowhammer counterpart, Brian McGuffy, who we discussed earlier, Crisswell trends towards a contemporary vision of symbolism.

As McGuffy is more overt in this interpretation of the visual space Crisswell has a lighter touch with his allegorical references. He generally dips into internal spaces with a keen eye for story telling while displaying a scholastic interest in technique.

The self-taught McGuffy has an exuberance fantasy life that is richly spelled out on his canvasses. Crisswell relies more on technique and long experience on the road working art fairs to bracket his subject matter into distinct categories while keeping the body of work in the that odd unlabelable space between surrealism, symbolism, and the hyper-real.

I see a direct connection with Crisswell’s work and that of the 20th century southern painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). Partly by design and partly by fate Benton was an extremely controversial artist. He too inhabited a number of artistic provinces and was difficult to pigeonhole. Although quite good at it he rejected modernism in favor of his own form of what might be termed visual allegory. Like other symbolists his work can be interpreted on several levels but unlike the stuffy and cold Andrew Wyeth; Benton is warmer and more accessible.

In J. Richard Gruber’s book Thomas Hart Benton and the American South, we can see that Benton made a conscious decision to use the backdrop of southern culture and the story telling tradition of his region to inform his work. Born in Neosho, Missouri the place where the Missouri Legislature met in 1861 to pass its “Ordinance of Secession” and leave the Union, it is little wonder that Benton sought to exalt his home state and the South that had been so vilified.

I believe Benton knew that his work would infuriate the modernist “art world” but did it any way. His masculine southern style, Biblical references, and overt heterosexuality were in his day a signal to the art establishment that he was not an atheist; being an atheist was a prerequisite for success in the 20th century*. He was a rebel and his strong approach permeates much of the American art world but few art professionals will admit it. Even today in his home state the mere mention of Benton as a “southern artist” drives the professional left into a paroxysm of denial.

Crisswell is not Benton. Yet the gestalt of his work includes the Benton legacy. In one of Crisswell’s best pieces, “Falling Man” (not illustrated) the Benton storytelling, Biblical allusions, and sinewy stylizing come together. It is not the only place this is seen. The figures in his recent works echo Benton and Crisswell's  compositions confound us with a sophisticated symbolist undercurrent.

In 2006 for the online journal The Fireeater I wrote about a budding “southern restoration” in the visual art that resists reconstruction. Support for the arts in the South is relatively strong. The meteoric ascent of abstractionist Michael Banks is evidence of this. It is support of the individual artist that will encourage more work to be done.

To be sure realism, landscape, portraiture, and related technical pursuits are important. But it is the critical support for the symbolist, the outsider, the surrealist, and the abstractionist that will propel the southern art culture into its own.

In the Fireeater I wrote, “Because we are dominated by a materialist culture of scientific secularism any art that emphasizes individualistic struggle, religion, redemption, or tradition will be officially suppressed. Without help only the acts of individual artists and the people who buy their work will preserve the embryo of restoration until such time when we have institutions strong enough to guard the fruits of this cause.” I stand by that statement.
D S Reif

All paintings by Troy Crisswell



*To learn more about the assault on Christian thinking in the mid-20th century through the conversion of Martin Lings to Islam (click here)