American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood ed. by Austen Barron Bailly (review)

In 1937, Thomas Hart Benton went to Hollywood on assignment for Life magazine and ended up taking commissions for movie publicity art for several decades. This book explores his multifaceted relationship with Hollywood: as a bemused but fascinated outsider, as a critic and supporter of Hollywood-endorsed American myths, and as an artist willing to bridge the gap between high and low art.

American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood is a beautiful and critically significant publication that accompanies a traveling exhibition of the same name organized collaboratively by the Peabody Essex Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. With over 230 illustrations, including eighty-two full-color plates, the book could serve as a career retrospective of the artist. In fact, the book includes full-color reproductions of many of Benton’s major and/or famous works, including the American Historical Epic mural series (1920–28), lithographs commissioned by 20th Century Fox for the 1940 film adaptation of Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, and his shockingly violent wwII propaganda paintings, including Exterminate! (1942) and Invasion (1942).

One of the highlights of the book is Sarah N. Chasse’s “Benton, Hollywood, and History: A Timeline,” which is a chronological montage of images relating to Benton’s career as a painter and book illustrator, from photographs of the artist at work, to book covers, to stills from influential films. This photo essay brings together many of the book’s themes and makes a convincing visual connection between Benton and Hollywood. Another highlight is the collection of sixteen graphite and ink drawings that Benton made in 1937 based on his experiences in Hollywood. These drawings, which vary from rough sketches to polished scenes, demonstrate his fascination with the mechanics and intricacies of the Hollywood industry. The fact that most of these drawings are held in private collections also attests to the hard work that went into organizing this project.

Perhaps the most entertaining highlight of the book is a previously unpublished (and unfinished) essay titled “Hollywood Journey” by Benton himself. Based on his 1937 visit to Hollywood, Benton observes unflinchingly, “A moving picture story conference while it deals with emotional charged fictions is not by any means a conference of artists free for a moment from economic pressures and engaged in the simple business of finding a vehicle for the expression of their life experiences. The moving picture Art is predominantly an economically conditioned Art. Its forms are like gambling in the stock market. They are plays for a cash return” (24). His description of the movie “Napoleon,” a businessman who has an “absolutely unapproachable genius” (25) for selecting stories that will make money, would not be out of place in a Mark Twain satire. Considering the number of commissions he received from Hollywood, the critical nature of this essay may be the reason the prolific Benton never finished or published it during his lifetime.

Navigating the book is like navigating a Benton mural, however. One doesn’t know quite where to begin, and the reader is sometimes expected to work harder than anticipated to understand the modernist juxtapositions of text and image. Nine long essays and six mini-essays are organized into small (unnamed) thematic units, with full-color figures and plates interspersed throughout. Some of these units make the link between Benton and Hollywood explicit. Editor Austen Barron Bailly’s long essay “True West: Thomas Hart Benton and American Epics” works well as a unit with John Herron’s mini-essay “John Ford, Thomas Hart Benton, and the American Frontier” and Margaret C. Conrads’ mini-essay “The Grapes of Wrath in Pictures.” Barron Bailly argues that Benton independently produced the fourteen-panel American Historical Epic “to participate in public debates about who and what was authentically American” (32), critiquing Manifest Destiny and the violence behind American colonization. In later western landscapes of the 1950s and 1960s, she argues...