In the late 1930s two American artists, one a popular painter and the other a struggling novelist, depicted Hollywood in different yet related projects. Thomas Hart Benton’s mural-sized painting Hollywood (1937-38) was intended, the artist remarked, to show that the movie industry was “pre-dominantly an economically conditioned Art” (Color plate 1). As Benton wrote in “Hollywood Journey,” a short essay describing the month he spent sketching Southern California’s movie studios: The movie Art is not only a business but a busi-ness expression. It speaks in by and through the patterns of the American business mind. It is go-getter, optimistic, sentimental, politically conservative. It sings and clowns in Rotary Club fashion, and romances with a high regard for the status quo in everything. (Benton, “Hollywood Journey”).

Alternately praised as “An American Original” and lampooned as an arbiter of kitsch, the artist Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) has been the subject of myriad monographs and journal articles, remaining almost as contro-versial today as he was in his own time. Although best known, along with artists Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, as a member of the mid-century group of representational artists known as the Regionalists, Benton was also an active performer, collector, and transcriber of folk and classical music. Surviving in Benton’s home in Kansas City are hundreds of record albums and pieces of sheet music, and tens of dozens of scores he transcribed into a harmonica notation tablature system that would eventually be appropri-ated and marketed by Hohner, the musical instrument manufacturer and publisher. The latter sheets span the corpus of European classical music, but include many American popular ballads as well.

By the spring of 1935 the New York art scene was in the midst of a full-scale genre painting revival. In February, art critic Helen Appleton Read explained that the genre tradition had dropped out of the national consciousness because “homely anecdotes of American life … were considered even more provincial and inelegant by those who inherited them than the native school of landscape painting and were therefore lost sight of in their migration from parlor to attic and subsequently to junk shop or antiquarian society” (“George C.” C5). By May, Helen Buchalter could observe that in the works on show at the Corcoran Gallery’s Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art, “The ‘discovery’ of the American scene, the new realistic ideal, the revival of genre painting have had their effect” (368). Painters whose names had barely been mentioned since the Civil War appeared on the walls of prestigious museums and fashionable galleries; artists, critics, and curators explored the implications of and possibilities for contemporary genre painting; and attention turned to the def nition and scope of this slippery addition to the critical vocabulary.

The history of the comic book in the United States has been closely allied with mass culture debates ranging from Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” to Fredric Wertham’s attack on the comic book industry in his now infamous 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent. An alternative history can be constructed, however, by linking the comics to the expatriate Surrealist community in New York in the thirties and early forties with its focus on fantasy, dark humor, the poetics and ethics of evil, transgressive and carnivalesque body images, and restless desire. Surrealist artists are well known for their fascination with black humor, pulp fiction, and crime novels—in particular the popular series Fantômas. Indeed, the image of the scoundrel in elegant attire holding a bloody dagger, featured in the writings of the Surrealist Robert Desnos (Color Plate 10), epitomized this darkling humor (Desnos 377-79).1 Pictures of Fantômas and articles on the pulp market peppered the pages of Surrealist magazines in Europe and America, from Documents in France (1929-1930) to VVV and View in New York in the early forties. By moving the discussion of the comics away from a Greenbergian or Frankfurt school discourse on mass culture to the debates surrounding Surrealism, other issues come to the fore. The comics become a site for the exploration of mystery, the imagination, criminality, and freedom.

Art books have not so far received a great deal of attention from cultural commentators, yet they exemplify what is arguably a peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon. Their rise, and some would argue “fall” (as mono-graphs on painting and sculpture morph into slim volumes on lifestyle, and the economics of the book trade edge out diversity and shelf space in major museums), deserves much closer study. This entails an investigation into who published critical and historical texts on art, and why; what inf uenced the number of books published on certain types of art practice—such as sculpture—at any given time; in photographically-illustrated art books, how art was photographed, by whom, and why that mattered; how a previously uninformed public was reached, captivated, and converted into a body of consumers; and how individual art-lovers could accrete into a mass market for books, and then for modern art itself. What was a specialist subject for a restricted coterie f fty years ago is now part of the common culture: Tate Modern in London is a good gauge of this enormous change for it now receives more than four million visitors a year, a clear demonstration of the current appeal of modern art to a mass public. In Britain, sculpture has played a particularly prominent role in acquainting the public with characteristics of modern art, while publishers between the wars not only introduced able critics who could write vividly and informatively about these developments, but perhaps more importantly, they made big strides in how books on art were produced, and how they might appeal to a mass market. This article will focus on the relationship between sculpture and publishing, and its impact on the growing dominance of modernism in early histories of twentieth century art.

A series of color plates published in the 2011 issue of The Space Between includes works by Thomas Hart Benton, George Caleb Bingham, and Rafael Soyer, as well as the cover of Fantômas (written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain) with artwork by Gino Starace and the October 1939 cover of Marvel Comics with artwork by Carl Burgos.