American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,History & Criticism
American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood Details
Review Everything in the fluid, vivid murals that made [Thomas Hart Benton] 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...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...Mark Harris, New York Times, May 29, 2015 Read more About the Author Austen Barron Bailly is The George Putnam Curator of America Art at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Formerly she was Associate Curator of American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Read more
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