American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood

by Austen Barron Bailly

This generously illustrated book explores the connections between Thomas Hart Benton's art and Hollywood movies from groundbreaking perspectives. Thomas Hart Benton was a thoroughly American artist. His regionally focused paintings and murals depicted everyday American life as well as the country's history. This volume focuses on one of the most American of Benton's associations: Hollywood. Not only did Benton create commissioned murals and portraits of film stars and movies, but he also developed a style that was highly theatrical and narrative. This volume is the first to collect all the works conceived by Benton for the film industry. It includes related ephemera, photographs, and documents of Benton at work, along with a series of thought-provoking essays that explore a diverse array of topics--from Benton's engagement with American identity from the 1920s to the 1960s, to parallels between Benton's use of Old Master methods and film production techniques. Fans of Thomas Hart Benton will find surprising insights into his career, while those fascinated by Hollywood history will discover how one of America's most revered artists shaped and was in turn influenced by the film industry.

Genres: Art

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 12, 2015

Reviews

[Art · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book accompanies an exhibition whose national tour ends in Milwaukee on Sep 5 http://store.mam.org/prod-18-1-2457-1... Also, here we see the cover of the book, which did not make it to Goodreads.

In 1915, at age twenty-five, Thomas Hart Benton painted sets for motion pictures, a fledgling industry based then in New Jersey. This exhibition explores, for the first time, how Benton’s exposure to movie-making influenced his art and career.

In 1937, Benton went to Hollywood to portray the motion-picture industry on a commission for Life magazine. By then, people knew him as a public muralist. Benton considered himself a visual journalist. He made four hundred graphite sketches in Hollywood, forty of them became ink-and-wash drawings.

Benton was a prolific and colorful large-scale muralist. But I especially like his sketches and drawings, which are more intimate and tactile. The Hollywood Notes section of this book documents this period with two essays by experts and sixteen of the works reproduced.

The exhibition opened in Massachusetts, then hung in Kansas City and Ft Worth before coming to the Milwaukee Art Museum for its grand finale this summer. http://mam.org/american-epics/

Thomas Hart Benton, the American Stories production by Ken Burns, aired in 1989 on PBS. The ninety-minute piece pairs well with this book. The video barely mentions Hollywood, while the current exhibition takes that as its starting point. http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/benton/

The Art Institute of Chicago included a couple of Thomas Hart Benton works in a summer exhibition, America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s, hanging through Sep 18. In this collection, the Art Institute includes Benton as a regionalist who glorified America. I saw Benton’s work in Chicago last week before seeing the full-blown American Epics show in Milwaukee. http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/ameri...

[Felice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Benton was an American original and at one time a very famous artist --on the cover of Time magazine. Even if you don't recognize his name, you are familiar with his work from an early age since so much of it is concerned with the various "founding myths" of America and so can be seen in textbooks, in public buildings murals, and all over really. He was one of a group of not quite realist artists who were completely outmoded by the influx of European Abstract painters after World War Two. This book is a collection of essays that looks at various aspects of Benson's life, and his very public work. All of the pieces are good, and they ask many questions about what it means to be an artist on a national scale. Some are about Benson as a storyteller, others about his fascination with, and his connection with Hollywood movies in the late 30's and 1940's, and still other inspect him as a War artist. Benton's work for several John Ford films, including the book and film of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and Burt Lancaster's production of The Kentuckian, had drawings and paintings rather than photography represent the characters and action at the theatres themselves: a first in our time. This rare confluence of two popular arts both sold and yet raised and dignified their products. His representation of African-Americans is the focus of several other essays, and here he is less of a hero, and much more ambiguously effective. Like Frank Lloyd Wright, his contemporary, Benton represented a unique place in American culture, one that seems both idealistic and naive. This lovely art book, filled with his images, is a balanced introduction to the man and his work.