Hollywood

Artist Thomas Hart Benton (American, 1889 - 1975)

Date1937-1938

MediumTempera with oil on canvas; mounted on panel

DimensionsUnframed: 56 × 84 inches (142.24 × 213.36 cm)
Framed: 61 5/8 × 89 3/8 inches (156.53 × 227.01 cm)

Credit LineBequest of the artist

Object numberF75-21/12

SignedSigned lower left: Benton

On View

On view

Gallery Location

Collections

American Art

Terms

Exhibition History

The 1938 International Exhibition of Paintings, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, October 13–December 4, 1938, no. 93.

Thomas Hart Benton: Retrospective Exhibition, Associated American Artists, New York, April 18–May 12, 1939, no. 7.

Thomas Hart Benton, University of Kansas Museum of Art, Lawrence, April 12–May 18, 1958, no. 25.

[“Thomas Hart Benton Retrospective”], Neosho Municipal Auditorium, MO, May 1962, unnumbered.

Thomas Hart Benton: A Giant in American Art, University Art Gallery, University of Arizona, Tucson, October 15, 1962–October 23, 1963 (traveled), no. 17.

Thomas Hart Benton: A Personal Commemorative, Spiva Art Center, Missouri Southern State College, Joplin, March 24–April 27, 1973, unnumbered.

Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, April 6, 1989–July 22, 1990 (traveled), no. 38.

Bingham to Benton: The Midwest as Muse, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, February 5–July 31, 2005, no cat.

American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, June 6–September 7, 2015; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, October 10, 2015–January 3, 2016; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, February 6–May 1, 2016; Milwaukee Art Museum, June 10–September 5, 2016.

Gallery Label

Hollywood resulted from Thomas Hart Benton's Life magazine-sponsored excursion to Tinseltown in the summer of 1937. The composition unites various aspects of movie-making, revealing Benton's fascination with what he called "the machinery of the industry" responsible for cinematic effects. A centrally positioned and scantily clad female figure presides over this chaotic universe, symbolizing the quintessential blonde starlet of the period and possibly evoking Kansas City-born Jean Harlow, who had recently died. The background references the musical In Old Chicago about the Great Fire of 1871.

Life rejected Hollywood as too risqué for publication in a family magazine. Ironically, the painting appeared in Life anyway, after it won a prize in a significant juried exhibition in 1938.

Provenance

Thomas Hart Benton;

His gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1975.

Published References

“Thomas Hart Benton, Muralist, Visits City,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, November 11, 1937, 11A.

“Calm Waters of Loch Carnegie Disturbed as Politics Rears Its Head,” Art Digest 13 (November 1, 1938), 28.

James Johnston Sweeney, “Carnegie International 1938,” Parnassus 10 (November 1938), 18.

Forbes Watson, “The Thirty-sixth International,” Magazine of Art 31 (November 1938), 650.

“Carnegie Institute International Art Exhibition,” LIFE, December 12, 1938, 74–75.

The 1938 International Exhibition of Paintings, exh. cat. (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute, 1938), unpaginated.

Edward Alden Jewell, “Benton Canvases Open New Gallery,” New York Times, April 18, 1939, 24.

Thomas Craven, A Descriptive Catalog of the Works of Thomas Hart Benton: Spotlighting the Important Periods during the Artist’s Thirty-two Years of Painting, exh. cat. (New York: Associated American Artists, 1939), 31.

Harry Salpeter, “A Tour of Hollywood: Drawings by Thomas Benton,” Coronet 7 (February 1, 1940), 34–38.

Review of Leo Rosten, “Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers,” in New York Times Book Review, December 7, 1941, sec. 6, 1.

Thomas H. Benton (New York: American Artists Group, 1945), unpaginated.

Thomas Hart Benton, exh. cat. (Lawrence: University of Kansas Museum of Art, 1958), unpaginated.

Robert K. Sanford, “Neosho Makes Big Plans for Tom Benton’s Homecoming,” Kansas City Star, April 15, 1962, 2D.

Thomas Hart Benton: A Giant in American Art, exh. cat. (Tucson: University Art Gallery, University of Arizona, 1962), unpaginated.

Thomas Hart Benton: Artist of America (Neosho: Neosho Missouri Press, 1962), 18.

Robert K. Sanford, “Tom Benton’s Art Show Recalls Stormy Career,” Kansas City Star, June 23, 1963, 2D.

Thomas Hart Benton Exhibition: A Giant in American Art, exh. cat. (Birmingham, Mich.: Bloomfield Art Association, 1963), unpaginated.

Robert K. Sanford, “Benton Art Displayed at Springfield, Mo., Show,” Kansas City Star, [1964?], clipping, NAMA curatorial files.

Thomas Hart Benton, An American in Art: A Professional and Technical Autobiography (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1969), 107.

Thomas Hart Benton: A Personal Commemorative, exh. cat. (Joplin: Spiva Art Center, Missouri Southern State College, 1973), 76.

Matthew Baigell, Thomas Hart Benton (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1974), 10, 160.

Kathleen Patterson, “Nelson Gallery in Benton Will,” Kansas City Times, February 26, 1975, 1A;

“Paintings from the Thomas Hart Benton Bequest,” Gallery Events (William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts), March 1976, unpaginated.

Polly Burroughs, Thomas Hart Benton: A Portrait (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1981), 158.

Karal Ann Marling, “Thomas Hart Benton’s Boomtown: Regionalism Redefined,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 6 (1981), 108, 134.

Erika Doss, “Borrowing Regionalism: Advertising’s Use of American Art in the 1930s and 40s,” Journal of American Culture 5 (Winter 1982), 12, 18n18.

Karal Ann Marling, Wall-to-Wall America: A Cultural History of Post-Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 255.

Erika Lee Doss, “Regionalists in Hollywood: Painting, Film, and Patronage, 1925–1945,” Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1983, 64, 122–69 passim, 225, 239.

Karal Ann Marling, Tom Benton and His Drawings: A Biographical Essay and a Collection of His Sketches, Studies, and Mural Cartoons (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 34, 34n99, 125, 168–69, 195.

Calvin J. Goodman, “Benton’s Enduring American Art,” American Artist 53 (December 1989), 32–33.

Erika Doss, “The Art of Cultural Politics: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism,” in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 206–7, 209.

Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1989), 284, 286.

Thomas Hart Benton: An American Original (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1989), 13.

William Wilson, “Benton’s Epics from the Soil,” Los Angeles Times, April 29,1990, 92.

“Thomas Hart Benton: The Mood and Character of America,” Art of California 3 (July 1990), 26.

Henry Adams, Thomas Hart Benton: Drawing from Life, exh. cat. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), 175, 177, 180.

Benton’s America: Works on Paper and Selected Paintings, exh. cat. (New York: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, 1991), 58.

Henry Adams, Handbook of American Paintings in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1991), 195.

Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 147–226 passim, 233, 293.

Arnold Skolnick, ed., Paintings of California (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1993), 22, 124.

Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collections. 6^th ed. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 248.

Michael Churchman and Scott Erbes, High Ideals and Aspirations: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art 1933–1993 (Kansas City, Mo.: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 96.

Stefano Casciani, “Progettare il Cinema,” Abitare 329 (May 1994), 235.

Richard Maltby and Ian Craven, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), front cover, back cover.

Nina Allen, “Thomas Hart Benton and John Steinbeck: Populist Realism in the Depression Era,” Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1995, x, 168–73, 278.

Diane Kirkpatrick, “See You at the Movies: The Cinema in Art,” Michigan Quarterly Review 34 (Fall 1995), 560–61.

“The Experience of Moviegoing: A Portfolio,” Michigan Quarterly Review 34 (Fall 1995), 566, 580.

Fred G. See, “Something Reflective: Technology and Visual Pleasure,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 22 (Winter 1995), 162–65, 170, 170n1.

James M. Dennis, Renegade Regionalists: The Modern Independence of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 130–32.

Erika L. Doss, “Images of American Women in the 1930s: Reginald Marsh and Paramount Picture,” in Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings, ed. Mary Ann Calo (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), 297.

Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), x, 153–54.

Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 4, cover.

“An American Original,” Guest Informant (Kansas City) (2000–2001 edition), 41.

Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), front cover, back cover.

Scott Kerr and R. H. Dick, An American Art Colony: The Art and Artists of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, 1930–1940 (St. Louis: McCaughen & Burr Press, 2004), 170–71, 181.

Randall R. Griffey, “Bingham to Benton: The Midwest as Muse,” American Art Review 17 (April 2005), 97, 98, 99.

Margaret C. Conrads, ed. The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (Kansas City, Mo.: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2007), 1: 86–91, 2: 31–33.

Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 180.

Justin Wolff, Thomas Hart Benton: A Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 308 (repro.).

Austen Barron Bailly, ed., American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood (Munich: Del Monico Books Prestel, 2015), 106–08, 111, 113–19, 142, 150–51, 199, 205 (repro.).

Mark Harris, “Cinemascapes,” The New York Times, May 31, 2015, BR41.

Robert Trussel, “Thomas Hart Benton meets the movies,” The Kansas City Star, October 4, 2015, 5D (repro.).

James D. Balestrieri, “The Tragic & the Epic: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood opens at the Peabody Essex Museum,” American Fine Art Magazine, Septeber/October 2015, 51–57.

James Lewis Hoberman, “Studio Practice: J. Hoberman on Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood,” Artforum, October 2015, 95–96 (repro.).

Thomas Doherty, “American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood,” Cineaste, Winter 2015, 34–37 (repro.).

Punch Shaw, “Thomas Hart Benton exhibit brings Hollywood to Amon Carter Museum,” Fort Worth (TX) Star-Telegram, February 7, 2016, unpaginated.

Mary Louise Schumacher, “Painting a picture of Hollywood,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, June 5, 2016, 1E, 4E.

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