Paint

by Thomas Craven

The novel tells the story of Carlock—modeled on the artist Thomas Hart Benton—and opens in 1911 when, fresh from Paris, he is living in poverty in New York.

229 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1923

Reviews

[David Jacobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel of the starving artist borrows heavily from Emile Zola's The Masterpiece. Whereas Zola's story is of a young artist modeled on Cezanne, doing Impressionism, and living with a woman of society in Paris, Craven's story is of a young artist modeled on Thomas Hart Benton, doing early modern art, and living with a whore in New York. The characters are well rendered and interesting, the plot and dialog not so much.

I first heard about this book through reading Justin Wolff's Thomas Hart Benton. The Benton depicted here (as the character Carlock) is not the one who later went on, along with Grant Wood, to be the famous practitioner of American Realism, but is rather a young man fresh from Paris and aching to make "progress" in art. The author Craven was a friend of Benton at this time, and this youthful passion comes through in some of the more self-important writing:

"The New York galleries disgusted him. The prominent dealers in Fifth Avenue were still exploiting the patient efforts of academic nonentities, and Carlock, who had long ago forgot the very existence of the old stuff, came out of the ghostly corridors with a premonition of defeat heavy in his mind."

A note on finding a copy of this book to read: it appears to have been only printed a single time in 1923, and is only now in a handful of libraries. A scanned version from Stanford's library, fortunately, is available to read on Google Books.