In March 1931, by special invitation, Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry exhibited alongside California’s painters in the annual juried show mounted by the Los Angeles Museum. Their entries stood in dramatic contrast to the landscapes of California color and light that by and large made up the productions of the West Coast group, as it spanned both Northern and Southern California. Pasadena’s Paul Sample, for example, was represented by a characteristic Impressionist harbor scene. Grant Wood showed his fantastical recreation of The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931; The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Curry sent an equally cinematic picture, a contemporary scene of rural Americans uprooted and on the move, a composite of vignettes observed at a migrant workers roadside camp near his childhood home in Dunavant, Kansas (Roadmenders’ Camp, 1931; Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska). Benton attracted the most press attention with his painting, one that transcended the mere depiction of a place on the American frontier: his Boomtown (1928; Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester), a picture that surely seemed as applicable to Southern California as it was true to its Texas oil town subject. In Wood, Curry, and Benton, Californians were getting a look at a new American art. And in that moment, in 1931, their influence upon a receptive group of California painters, Sample among them, was direct and immediate. [1]

Boomtown had drawn attention as none of the other paintings in the annual did. Its resonance was amplified by the Los Angeles Times when it singled out the painting in its long encomium to Benton’s newest work, which was unveiled in New York as Boomtown went on view in Los Angeles, that being his ten-panel panorama of America Today, created for the New School for Social Research. [2] The paper chose to run a large illustration of the segment titled “The Changing West,” a lurid, baroque extravaganza encompassing the cowboy and the cattle drive, the ubiquitous false-front saloons, and the technological advancements that defined the modern West: the oil derrick and the pipeline, the industrialized farm, the airplane, and the movies. The Times remarked that Boomtown was clearly a study for the panel, but Benton’s changing West was not specific to the Texas Panhandle oil town of Borger that had inspired it. For Angelinos, it had all played out in

California—was still playing out—in the ranches and farms of Bakersfield, the oil and gold fields of the Mojave Desert,

and the back lots of Hollywood.

By the sudden transformation in his own art, Sample showed how thoroughly he absorbed the new pictures. Little more than a year later, Sample painted Celebration, his own version of Boomtown, a testament to Sample’s acuity in grasping, like Benton, the potent symbolism of his own locale in modern America, the changing West. [3] He abandoned his painterly technique for what would become his signature crisp and elegant draftsmanship, appropriate to clear pictorial storytelling and akin to the Flemish Old Master realist style of Grant Wood. His viewpoint henceforth would be cinematic, too, panoramic and action-packed.

Boom and bust is the essential story line of the western, and Sample, like others, found the setting for his foray into that genre in the environs around modern-day Randsburg, California, the mining camps there in the 1930s standing as living reminders in the twentieth century of America’s oldtime gold rush days. [4] The natural landscape there is of endless barren ridges and of high hills “rising in the midst of a broad expanse of sand, looking not unlike islands rising out of the sea,” the early geological survey reported. [5] Place names were intended to evoke fabled argonauts in exotic places: here was the iconic King Solomon Mine in the Rand Mountains, so named by aspiring prospectors for the legendary gold fields of South Africa and who settled the nearby town they christened Johannesburg, California. [6] Benton wrote of the frontier boomtown:

"Where industry has sunk its steel into the plains country . . . there is a change in the character of the people . . . There was a belief, written in men’s faces, that all would find a share in the gifts of this mushroom town. What if evil and brutal things were being done—people forgot them and laughed in an easy tolerant way as if they were simply unavoidable and natural hazards of life, as inescapable as a dust storm." [7]

Sample’s version of what Benton called the “exploitative whoopee party” shows Randsburg miners as the embodiment of that devil-may-care indulgence and waste. Their inebriation is but an extension of the excesses of punchdrunk investors behind the scenes, those who continued to mine these eternal hills and exploit hapless fortune seekers in an endless pattern of boom and bust. In Celebration, rigs randomly dot the vast expanse of unremitting desert landscape. Sample painted an apt metaphor for the California economy in 1933—prospects seemed few and far between.

Celebration is rich with symbol and metaphor, and even puns, like the towers and trestles that are the ore “tipples.” [8] Sample’s inspiration for this and subsequent story-telling paintings, he readily acknowledged, was Pieter Brueghel the Elder: Celebration is based on the Flemish master’s moralizing The Land of the Cockaigne (1567; Alte Pinakothek, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen), a humorous warning on the dangers of temptation in the mythic land of plenty, a commentary on humankind’s natural impulse toward sloth and gluttony. [9]

Sample shows us a diverse brotherhood of miners, with an African American man prominent among them. In the American West, boom and bust could be shared equally. As Benton put it, in places like Borger, Texas—and Sample’s Randsburg, California—all “whooped it up” together in pursuit of the next big thing. The rich and the poor—the Native Americans and African Americans and migrants from across the Great Plains, American South, and Mexico—all joined hands “in a great democratic dance.” [10]

Sample kept Celebration before the public for two years, submitting it to important juried exhibitions throughout 1933 and 1934—at the Oakland Art Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and Century of Progress exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In December 1934, when Time magazine reported on the surging movement in American art—“Regionalism” they labeled it—the article named Sample as one of its finest exemplars, hailing from a distinctive Southern California outpost. [11] It seems fair to say that Sample established a new national reputation in large part through the popular and critical success of this seminal California “Regionalist” picture.

—Patricia Junker

[1] From the catalogue of the exhibition Twelfth Annual Exhibition by American Painters and Sculptors (Los Angeles Museum, Exposition Park, 1931), Wood’s The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere is reproduced on the catalogue cover.

[2] Now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; see “Benton Paints Our Economocracy,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1931, 36.

[3] In 1935, Sample would paint another boomtown, Gold Rush Town (private collection), which seems directly connected to the composition of Benton’s Boomtown and so offers further testament to the impact that Benton’s 1928 work had on the Californian.

[4] For a discussion of Sample and Randsburg; see Christina L. Larson, “America Seen through the Work of Paul Sample,” PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 2015, 110–13.

[5] R. W. Pack, “Reconnaissance of the Barstow-Kramer Region, California,” U.S. Geological Bulletin 541 (1914): 142; available at pubs.usgs.gov. Pack describes the landscape of the Northern and Central Mojave Desert generally as characteristic of the whole of the Great Basin.

[6] See Kim Stringfellow, “Desert Gold: Part I,” April 18, 2019, pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/desert-gold-part-i.

[7] Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America (New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1937), quoted in Karal Ann Marling, “Thomas Hart Benton’s Boomtown: Regionalism Redefined,” Prospects 6 (October 1981): 82. My reading of Celebration owes much to this richly textured contextual study of Benton’s seminal Regionalist painting.

[8] See Larson’s reading of the painting, 110. I am also indebted to the extensive work of Lisa Peters in her lengthy discussion of the painting for the object record created for Debra Force Fine Art, New York. I am grateful to Debra Force for sharing it with me.

[9] Robert L. McGrath, Paul Sample: Painter of the American Scene (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for the Hood Museum of Art, 1988), 35–36.

[10] Benton, An Artist in America, in Marling, 82.

[11] “Art: U.S. Scene,” Time, December 24, 1934, time.com/archive/6647563/art-u-s-scene.