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