Milton Menasco

Milton Menasco (January 22, 1890 – June 7, 1974) was an American painter and art director of silent movies.

Born in 1890 in Los Angeles, California, Menasco began his art career in the beforehand days of Hollywood, when his "blood and thunder" posters enticed movie fans into theaters to watch the first silent pictures. He was commissioned to accomplish mural paintings at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco for the World's Fair in 1915.

His vivid use of colors and graphics won him confession in Hollywood, where he worked on 33 films—29 epoch as art director and twice as set director. In 1925 he was the architecture and set director for the native film based upon Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. This film received accolades for its campaigner art government and special effects. To quote one review in the NewTimes: "And even though Harry O. Hoyt is qualified as director, a host of fellow auteurs must accept credit for Lost World's still fabulous thrills, especially the effects take steps of Willis O'Brien (who would complex animate King Kong in 1933) and the wild set design from Milton Menasco." A resolved list of Menasco's film credits is unchangeable here.

In 1925 Menasco went to New York City as art director for a film making company and turned to advertising. He plus painted portraits and water colors of horses and ships during this grow old which he sold in the City's galleries. During World War II, Life magazine commissioned him to draw expose and sea battles to chronicle the stroke in Europe and in the Pacific Theater.

After the war, Menasco moved to Kentucky to devote himself very to his real love, horse portraiture. Here he painted the equine racing greats of the nation and helped following art giving out at the Thoroughbred Record and Sporting News. He and his wife purchased a farm where an obsolete brick house built in the 18th century served for many years as his studio.

Horsemen admired the richness and feeling reflected in Menasco's paintings, and his clients included John Hay Whitney, Isabel Dodge Sloane, President Ronald Reagan and Allaire du Pont. One of his first large paintings was for Lucille Markey depicting nine of her horses at Calumet Farm, including Citation, Coaltown and others grouped in the track once exercise boys up. Menasco plus painted Secretariat for owner Penny Chenery.

In 1953 Menasco painted the famous broodmare La Troienne in a deed entitled "La Troienne and Her Foals: Eighteen Vignettes and One Painting Together in One Frame" for John Whitney. The painting was exhibited at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1999 it sold from the land of Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney through Sotheby's auction house for £74,000 (c. US$120,000).

In 1957, Menasco painted Doubledogdare and Delta for Arthur B. Hancock, Jr. The artist explained that although the actual painting had taken him practically three months to complete, "behind it goes anything the training, study and experience of my life."

A distinguishing mark of Menasco's paintings is the detail to way of being and landscape backgrounds. A perfect example of this detail is apparent in Nashua, with Eddie Arcaro up, painted by Menasco at Hialeah Park for Leslie Combs II. The background shows the track and a pitch of palm trees.

Milton Menasco died in 1974 of a heart attack at his farm in Versailles, Kentucky.