Benton back in New York

Casting about for places one might venture to on an excursion, I discovered that the New York State Museum in Albany recently opened a small exhibition on Thomas Hart Benton! They're pandemic closed, unfortunately, but the exhibit lives on online. It features two restored murals commissioned by Robert Moses for New York's first hydropower facility, which depict Jacques Cartier's explorations of the St. Lawrence River in 1534. The murals are entitled "Jacques Cartier's Discovery of the St. Lawrence Valley" and the one Benton is painting in the image above is called "Jacques Cartier Discovers the Indians," but it is mirrored by another, "The Seneca Discover Jacques Cartier." In both the scene is from the perspective of the Seneca and their land.

1957 is early days for complicating the narrative of European "discovery" of the Americas, but what Benton includes, based on extensive research, shows how much was known even then for those with eyes to see. The village portrayed is based on a 16th-century illustration of Cartier's observations, writes Scott Manning Stevens, Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Syracuse in the exhibition text. Benton was careful to depict the Iroquoian people as skilled agriculturalists tending their crops of corn, beans, and squash. The background of the mural on the right, where Cartier's men erect a cross on a beach, seems empty, but the scene at left is an already verdant settled world. Even the Cartier mural has as its focal point a basket of farmed vegetables, a generous abundance which contrasts with the skeletal rosary the Seneca chief takes gingerly from Cartier.