American epics Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood

Using quality reproductions of paintings and details, film stills, period pictures, advertisements, book illustrations, and covers, Bailly (curator American art, Peabody Essex Museum) and 12 other contributors demonstrate how Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was influenced by, and in turn influenced, Hollywood. After work in silent pictures circa 1915 and later in 1937 as a famous artist, he had a lifelong association with Hollywood. The book shows how his famous stylized, exaggerated forms have many similarities to larger-than-life techniques used by the cinema. The mythic West was a major theme for him and for movies. Benton's visions of the American frontier were similar to director John Ford's visions of the West. He illustrated The Grapes of Wrath and he promoted Ford's film. Benton's approach to African American culture and racism were forward looking. WW II paintings are also explored. A time line including many pictures relates Benton to major cultural events of the 20th century. This engaging study of a little-known, long-standing relationship is a fascinating addition to American art history and cinema studies. Benton's position in American culture is revitalized. Includes notes with citations to numerous sources and a selected bibliography. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels. --William L. Whitwell, formerly, Hollins College

THOMAS HART BENTON was already 14 in 1903, when "The Great Train Robbery" flickered onto screens, but he was still impressionable enough to become part of the first generation of American artists to let the influence of movies run through their work. In Benton's case, "run" is almost literal; everything in the fluid, vivid murals that made him famous seems to be pulsing or coursing. His pictures were, in a sense, motion pictures, which may be why, in 1937, Life magazine commissioned him to go to Hollywood to create a "movie mural" that would bring its readers closer to the heart of the still-newish mystery of how films were created. Benton found the movie industry "very much American" in its approach to business, "simply pointed up and dramatized." The eye for caught-on-the-fly humanity he brought to that assignment, including the wonderfully swift incidental sketches he made on Life's dime - a chorine applying makeup, a posturally tortured screenwriter working something through, a story conference in a diner booth - forms the heart of this catalogue raisonné of his Hollywood-influenced work. With copious reproductions and essays by a dozen contributors and the editor, Austen Barron Bailly, "American Epics" is an appealing combination of coffee-table art book and dinner-table argument. Its approach is exploratory and reiterative rather than chronological, and you don't have to buy one of its central contentions - that Benton's "painterly ambitions," particularly in his semi-narrative multipanel compositions, "reverberated with the cinematic aims of silent film directors who sought to push the modern medium to new lengths" - to find Hollywood a rewarding prism through which to view his work. (One essay, by Jake Milgram Wien, persuasively relates Benton's compositions to cinematography; he built models to help create a sense of "deep space" in his canvases, and used layering and brush-stroke techniques to reproduce the luminosity of projected film.) Life eventually dropped its commission, but Benton stuck around in what he called "filmland" long enough to meet John Ford, a kindred spirit with whom he shared an abiding interest in the American West. Ford was about to start work on his 1940 adaptation of "The Grapes of Wrath," and Fox's Darryl Zanuck, always eager to purchase respectability for his movies, had Benton create a stark, stunning piece, "Departure of the Joads," that the studio blew up to 24 feet and positioned over the marquee of the Rivoli Theater in New York. That was a high point of Benton's Hollywood-inflected work; the low was his troubling representation of race. Benton's early depictions of African-Americans stand at a fascinating juncture of folklorism, exaggeration, respect and incomprehension. But after Pearl Harbor, he gave vent to an appetite for ugly stereotyping - not just of the Japanese, whom he painted as bucktoothed and gorilla-like, but of black men: His slouching, simian "Negro Soldier" (1942) was quickly and wisely hidden away. His eye also failed him; in one grotesquely pulpy panel, it's hard to discern if he intended a pair of soldiers raping a blond woman to be black or Japanese. Benton's race problem is scrutinized unsparingly in a couple of essays here, and that's appropriate. Any artist so enthralled by mythmaking deserves a study that isn't. MARK HARRIS is the author, most recently, of "Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War."

Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was a patriotic Midwestern painter who depicted the lives of ordinary Americans in colorful narrative tableaux. His elongated, wobbly figures show an El Greco influence, and his politics bent him toward working-class subjects, resulting in distinctly lumpy-looking lumpenproletariat. Hollywood has occasionally looked to the fine arts for aesthetic inspiration; Benton, who labored as a handyman for movie studios Pathé and Fox, was close with the silent-era director Rex -Ingram and, later, with noted auteur John Ford. This extensively illustrated book breaks new ground by delving into -Benton's rocky relationship to mainstream movies. Although he disliked Los Angeles and eventually returned to his beloved Missouri, he devoted considerable energy to depicting filmmaking and actors during an extended sojourn in Hollywood, and was commissioned by Ford to create promotional murals for The Grapes of Wrath. Over a dozen essayists chronicle Benton's Hollywood collaborations, explaining effectively how his narrative approach to static imagery-compared with old masters such as Tintoretto-privileged his appeal to movie moguls, while his grotesque realism was at odds with the "dream factory" ideal. The prestige he carried wore thin, and to the credit of -Peabody Essex Museum editor/curator Bailly, the book doesn't shy away from dealing with the decidedly grim, racist propaganda that infused Benton's painting at the height of World War II. VERDICT A piercing look at a singular American painter, casting light on the odd, flawed symbiosis between showbiz and fine art.-Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.