Hollywood

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.

Bequest of the artist