Drawn Reports for Life – by Thomas Hart Benton, William Sharp, Franklin McMahon, and Ronald Searle

Selected drawn reports for Life, produced between 1937 and 1961: the Cold War, spectacular trials, media hype.

Life, July 26, 1937
: American Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, later known as Jackson Pollock’s teacher, took on the role of reportage artist in Michigan. In brush-and-ink sketches for Life, he depicted what he labeled “menaces to democracy”: communists, strikers, and Nazi sympathizers. The drawings reflect both the Depression-era tensions and Benton’s mix of satire and alarmism.

Life, October 24, 1949
: William Sharp sketched the Smith Act trial of eleven Communist Party leaders in New York. All were sentenced to prison, in a case that marked the beginning of Cold War anticommunist prosecutions and foreshadowed the McCarthy era.
 Sharp, born Leon Schleifer in Vienna, had fled Europe in 1934 after his antifascist caricatures made him a target. In the U.S. he worked as illustrator and courtroom artist for Life, Esquire, and other magazines.

Life, October 3, 1955
: Reportage drawings by Franklin McMahon from the Emmett Till trial in Sumner, Mississippi. The 14-year-old Till had been lynched and murdered; two white defendants were acquitted after a short deliberation. With photography banned, McMahon’s sketches document witnesses, jury, and the courtroom scene. Months later, the acquitted men openly admitted their crime in a magazine interview.

Life, November 7, 1955: 
Ronald Searle drew the Geneva Conference of the Big Four foreign ministers—Dulles, Macmillan, Molotov, Pinay—at the Palais des Nations. The meeting followed the summer summit and raised hopes for détente, but produced little beyond symbolism. Searle’s sketches register the setting and the delegates in session.

Life, October 31, 1960
: Ronald Searle followed the U.S. presidential campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. His drawings reduce the race to sharp caricatures: Kennedy with a towering quiff, Nixon with rigid gestures, the campaign trail as a sequence of rallies, bars, and TV images.

Life, June 30, 1961: 
Ronald Searle reported from Jerusalem as Adolf Eichmann faced trial. His drawings did not aim at sober accuracy; with a nervous, almost grotesque line, Searle caught Eichmann’s bureaucratic gestures and the courtroom ritual. The result is a precarious balance between documentation and caricature.