Schoelkopf Gallery in Tribeca is showing "Thomas Hart Benton: A Picture of America in its Entirety," a small retrospective that runs through October 16 at 390 Broadway, Manhattan. The exhibition, organized by the gallery, asks visitors to reconsider one of America's most famous Regionalist painters — and exposes the limits of his populist vision.

Benton was born in 1889 into a prominent political family in Kansas City, Missouri. He dedicated his practice to depicting poor and working-class Americans and the country they inhabited, developing an accessible style centered on what he saw as the real American experience. Yet the show takes Benton's ambition largely for granted, without properly acknowledging how difficult capturing the United States actually proved to be.

Populism became the double-edged sword that defined his oeuvre. Two paintings from the 1940s reveal the problem with particular clarity. Benton traveled and sketched throughout the South in the first half of the twentieth century, and these works — one depicting sharecroppers picking cotton, another showing laborers cutting sugarcane — demonstrate his appreciation for Black American laborers. But Benton, despite his knowledge of Black American history, sanitizes the racist history of the region and his own witnessing of Southern post-Civil War farming. He presents that world as a timeless agrarian ideal rather than as a legacy of slavery.

His landscapes carry similar evasions. In "The Desert" (1956), Benton foregrounds still-life-like details — dried wood, vibrant desert flowers — against arid, undulating mountains. In "Conversation" (1952), he paints a boy in a red cap walking along a picturesque trail lined with wispy trees. Here and elsewhere, his depictions read as cloyingly idyllic, divorced from the reality of the American experience he claimed to seek.

Still, the exhibition is not a simple dismissal. Many of Benton's compositions at Schoelkopf deliver genuine formal pleasures and elicit a compelling ambivalence toward the United States. Others evoke a grating, kitschy Americana sensibility.

Benton could never capture the country in its "entirety." But his conviction that he could — the audacity of that claim itself — warrants our attention, and it is precisely what this compact show leaves the viewer to weigh.