In the pocket-size percentage of Romance that contains “dem shoes,” Thomas Hart Benton was knowingly prefacing the idea of the “romantic South” with more than the painting’ designated title could ever convey. Whether or not one interprets the unshod man’s shoe-baggage as ill-fitting personal effects, prestige items, Mark Twainisms, lynch fragments, or odd trophies of respectability, their significations offset and treaded heavily over the outward storylines and conceits of an idealized South and its “special way of life.” The moon at dusk (or is it the setting sun?) conspired with Benton, winking and intimating that the romance we assumed was present in the painting could rightly be tapped as such, but one whose “crude facts” and asylum-seeking lovers betrayed an even greater devotion and human trajectory, all under the watchful eye of God.
“’Dem Shoes’: Thomas Hart Benton’s Romance,” in American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood, ed. Austin Barron Bailly (Munich: Delmonico Books – Prestel, 2015), 83-87.
