Before he became known as America’s most famous artist in the 1930s, Thomas Hart Benton was painting backdrops for film makers.

In Fort Lee, N.J., known now as the first Hollywood.

That’s right: Between 1913 and 1917, Benton was watching and assisting film directors as they told their stories on a huge scale. And he took copious notes.

“He saw how captivating it was when they were projecting light onto a screen,” says Austen Bailly, the George Putnam Curator of American Art at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Mass.

PEM is pulling together the first major exhibition of Benton’s work in more than 25 years, including 100 paintings, drawings, murals, engravings, sketches, prints, and illustrated books.

Of particular interest is his American Historical Epic, a self-commissioned mural painted between 1920 and 1928 interpret the narrative of the nation in a new way. A series of 14 large easel paintings, when it’s completely assembled it stretches out for 60 feet.

“It’s a revisionist history of America, a view that reverses the approach of telling the history of American Indians and slaves,” she says. “There’s a lot of tension and energy.”

Benton was contemplating the kinds of stories that Hollywood was telling the nation, and interpreting it his own way.

By August 1937, his stature as an artist assured, LIFE magazine sent him to Hollywood on the West Coast. He would spend a month there, soaking up the film industry myth-makers, their lifestyle and their industry.

“He had total VIP access,” she says. “He did hundreds of sketches, 40 ink-and-wash drawings, and a major canvas called Hollywood 1937-38.”

“It was all part of Benton’s relentless questions about the American identity and how he could represent the people, landscape and character. And those questions are still relevant today.

“Hollywood is still dealing with them,” she says. “They’re still very much a part of our story.”

The exhibition opens on June 6.

For more information, go to http://pem.org

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Credits:

Fig. 1 Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood, 1937-38. Tempera with oil on canvas, mounted on board, 56 x 84 in. The Nelson-Atkins    Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Bequest of the artist. Photo by Jamison Miller. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB    Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Fig. 2 Thomas Hart Benton, Shipping Out, 1942. Oil on canvas, 40 x 28 1/2 in. Property of the Westervelt Collection and displayed    in the Tuscaloosa Museum of Art in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Photo by Chip Cooper. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank    Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Fig. 3 Thomas Hart Benton, Self Portrait With Rita, about 1924. Oil on canvas, 49 x 39 3/8 in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian   Institution/Art Resource, NY. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Fig. 4 Thomas Hart Benton, Portrait of a Musician, 1949. Casein, egg tempera, and oil varnish on canvas, mounted on wood panel,   48 1/2 x 32 in. Museum of Art and Archeology, University of Missouri-Columbia, Anonymous gift. © Benton Testamentary    Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Fig. 5 Thomas Hart Benton, The Kentuckian, 1954. Oil on canvas, 76 1/8 x 60 3/8 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of    Burt Lancaster. Photo courtesy f LACMA. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Fig. 6 Thomas Hart Benton, Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek, 1967. Polymer and tempera on Masonite panel, 30 1/2 x 38 in.    Courtesy of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, Indiana. © Benton Testamentary    Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Fig. 7 Thomas Hart Benton, Thursday Night at the Cock-and-Bull. It’s the Maid’s Night Out, 1937. Ink, watercolor, gouache, and    graphite on paper, 12 5/8 x 16 3/4 in. Private collection. Photo by Larry Ferguson Studio. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/   UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Fig. 8 Thomas Hart Benton, Bootleggers, 1927. Egg tempera and oil on linen, mounted on Masonite panel, 68 3/4 x 74 3/4 in.    Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Museum purchase with funds provided by   Barbara B. Millhouse. Courtesy of Reynolda House Museum of American Art. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank    Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Fig. 9 Thomas Hart Benton, New England Editor, 1946. Oil and tempera on gessoed panel, 30 x 37 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,   The Hayden Collection, Charles Henry Hayden Fund. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA,    New York, NY.

Fig. 10 Thomas Hart Benton, People of Chilmark (Figure Composition), 1920. Oil on canvas, 65 5/8 x 77 5/8 in. Hirshhorn Museum    and Scuplture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation. Photo by Cathy    Carver. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Fig. 11 Thomas Hart Benton, The Lost Hunting Ground, 1927-28. From the mural series American Historical Epic, 1920-28. Oil on   canvas, 60 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Bequest of the artist. Photo by Jamison    Miller. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.