Few American artists have incited more controversy than Thomas Hart Benton. Argumentative, brilliant, and enormously influential, Benton painted for nearly seventy years, inspiring acclaim and loathing among students, friends, fellow artists, and outraged critics. Now, in a series of provocative essays, premier Benton scholar Henry Adams examines the many facets of the man as artist and the pitched battles of his long career, including the fight that raged over the subject matter of his murals, the real reasons for Benton's feud with the radical left and his fall from grace in the New York art world, and his tumultuous, 36-year-long love-hate relationship with the student with whom he worked most closely, another iconic artist of the 20th century, Jackson Pollock. Adams ends with an account of his own twenty-five-year struggle to expose fakes of Benton's work.

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.

John Steuart Curry: Inventing the Middle West is the first comprehensive study in more than fifty years of this member of the great triumvirate of American Regionalists: Thomas Hart Benton, Curry, and Grant Wood. It revives the reputation of one of the most important and controversial artists of the first half of the twentieth century, whose paintings of farm life in his native Kansas (including baptisms and tornados), of the circus, of American history, and of the American scene in general were dramatically eclipsed by the ascendancy of abstract art and the New York School at midcentury. 68 colour & 114 b/w illustrations

Papers of the First American Artists' Congress, 1936.