"For All Americans Who Will Look"

The grim allegory, showing a U.S. soldier disemboweling a Japanese Frankenstein monster behind which looms an equally monstrous Nazi ogre, is the largest of seven pictures just completed by Artist Thomas Hart Benton.

On Dec. 7, when the news of Pearl Harbor reached the U.S., Benton was speaking on a California lecture platform. The news, relayed to the platform, so shocked voluble Artist Benton that he found it impossible to go on talking. Leaving the auditorium, he abruptly canceled his future lecture dates, disappeared for nine weeks into his Kansas City studio. When he emerged, harried and exhausted, he had completed seven huge paintings depicting, in ghastly symbols, his own reaction to World War II.

Benton's agents, recognizing the propaganda power of these pictures, started campaigning for their widespread reproduction in the U.S. press. The originals were given to the Library of Congress. Effect on one Government agency (Archibald MacLeish's Office of Facts & Figures) was to split it down the middle, with Chief MacLeish enthusiastically pro, Chief of Operations William B. Lewis fearful lest the paintings horrify rather than inspire.

Says Artist Benton: "Evil and predatory forces are always with us. . . . Humanity must . . . rise up and tear their evil out of them and kill them. For this task, sensual hate, ferocity and brute will are necessary. . . . In these designs there is none of the pollyanna fat that the American people are in the habit of being fed. I have made these pictures for all Americans who will look at them. . . ."

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