The Grolier Club Presents Hollywood Golden Age Glamour Photographs

Written by Isaac Mendez Monday, 12 September 2011 00:22

New York City.- The Grolier Club is pleased to present "Silver Screen/Silver Prints: Hollywood Glamour Portraits from the Robert Dance Collection", on view from September 14th through November 12th. This exhibition of vintage Hollywood photography traces the careers of the leading photographers and many of the great stars of the “Golden Age” of motion pictures. "Silver Screen/Silver Prints" is drawn from the collection of Grolier Club member Robert Dance and curated by Anne H. Hoy. The works on display are shown together for the first time. The photographs in the exhibit demonstrate the centrality of studio portraits to the film industry’s star-making apparatus, especially in the two decades before the Second World War and, most notably at MGM — which boasted “more stars than there are in the heavens.” The exhibition is divided into ten parts, each dedicated to a single photographer, star, or theme.

Cases devoted to studio photographers George Hurrell, Clarence Sinclair Bull, and Ruth Harriet Louise demonstrate their distinctive styles and chart the evolution from soft-focus Pictorialism to sculptured modernist glamour. Luminous portrayals of Garbo, Crawford, and Ramon Novarro give audiences the chance to see how the portrait camera lens shaped their most enduring images. Thematic displays focus on Hollywood fashion as promoted by photography and on the development of the discernible Paramount Studios house style. The final section is devoted to Elizabeth Taylor, the last great star of the Hollywood studio system, who used photography strategically to guide an upward trajectory from her early days as a child actress to her long reign as an international superstar. The photographs exhibited are all original silver prints, mostly 11" x 14", and printed by or under the supervision of the photographer. Examining these first-generation photographs reveals at times subtle, and sometimes quite dramatic, uses of sepia and black and white contrasts. These beautiful rich tonalities are unfamiliar to most viewers, since they are lost in later printings in which many generations separate mass-marketed images from the originals. To further illuminate the creative process, the exhibition includes a selection of original 8 x 10-inch camera negatives and master prints made from these negatives.

The studio portrait was the first step in the evolution of the star. Long before a hopeful actor was given a screen test, portraits were taken to determine the camera appeal of new faces. Once a player had appeared successfully on screen, the portrait photographer set about developing and refining an image that could be translated to the screen for public consumption. In her American screen debut, Garbo triumphed with audiences as no other new actress has done before or since. But it was Ruth Harriet Louise, behind the scenes in the MGM portrait studio, who molded Garbo’s persona. The movies may have made the stars, but still photographs made them icons. Fan magazines, the most widely disseminated periodicals of the Roaring Twenties and the Depression Thirties, competed for the best new pictures of top-grossing stars. Behind full-color covers painted from glamour photographs, these magazines delivered the stars’ images to an eager public and, indeed, into popular culture. Many of the photographs displayed in Silver Screen/Silver Prints were used for reproduction in fan magazines — as evident in selected magazines on view. Early stars range from Albert Witzel’s Theda Bara for Cleopatra, 1917, and Alfred Cheney Johnston’s ex-Ziegfield Girl Flapper-era Mae Murray, to James Abbe’s “candid” of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks as Hollywood royalty on vacation in Paris, c. 1925.  Joan Crawford appears with Robert Montgomery by Ruth Harriet Louise, 1929, and with the Barrymore brothers by Hurrell in Grand Hotel, 1935. In two photographs by Clarence S. Bull, Clark Gable embraces Jean Harlow in Saratoga, 1936, and succumbs to Lana Turner in Honky Tonk, 1940. Portraits of Elizabeth Taylor by Milton Greene and Cecil Beaton climax the survey. As vamp yields to flapper and blonde bombshell and then to the last Cleopatra, Silver Screen/Silver Prints sketches evolving ideas of glamour—revealing that these stars and their gifted photographers were always ready for their close-up.

On the evening of January 23rd 1884, New York printing press manufacturer and book collector Robert Hoe invited to his home eight fellow bibliophiles to discuss the formation of a club devoted to the book arts. From that meeting, the Grolier Club was formed with the object (to quote from its Constitution) "to foster the study, collecting, and appreciation of books and works on paper, their art, history, production, and commerce. It shall pursue this mission through the maintenance of a library devoted to all aspects of the book and graphic arts and especially bibliography; through the occasional publication of books designed to illustrate, promote and encourage the book and graphic arts; through exhibitions and educational programs for its members and the general public; and through the maintenance of a Club building for the safekeeping of its property, and otherwise suitable for the purposes of the Club." Its founders intended the Grolier Club to lead by example in promoting the book arts, and in its Constitution explicitly provided for the "occasional publication of books" designed to further that purpose. In 1884 founding member Robert Hoe modestly referred to the Club's first publication effort (an edition of the 1637 Decree of Star Chamber Concerning Printing) as "a pretty nice specimen of printing," and the long list of Grolier Club publications—over 400 to date—contains a good many such: the 1889 edition of Richard de Bury's Philobiblon; Rudolph Ruzicka's 1915 New York, a hymn to the city in color wood-engravings; and Stanley Morison's stunning 1933 edition of Fra Luca de Pacioli, to name just a few. In 1995 a new series of Club-sponsored fine-printing was inaugurated with an edition of Keats' Letters From a Walking Tour, designed by Jerry Kelly and printed by Daniel Keleher on hand-made paper at the Wild Carrot Letterpress. The latest work in that series is For Jean Grolier & His Friends: 125 Years of Grolier Club Exhibitions & Publications 1884-2008, published in 2009. The Club is also proud of its bibliographical works, particularly the so-called "Grolier hundred" catalogues, such as One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine, published in 1994, and A Century for the Century: Fine Printed Books 1900-1999, published in 1999. Information on current Grolier Club publications for sale can be found under "Publications" in the menu at upper left.

The "Grolier hundred" bibliographies were created as exhibition catalogues, and there is a very close relationship between the publication program of the Grolier Club and its century-old series of exhibitions. The Club sponsors four of these a year, all open to the public free of charge, and recent themes have included early photographically illustrated books ("The Truthful Lens," 1980), "Bibliography, Its History and Development" (1984), "The American Livre de Peintre" (1993), outstanding private libraries ("The Book Room: Georgia O'Keeffe's Library in Abiquiu," 1998, modern fine presses ("K. K. Merker: Serving the Muse / Stone Wall Press and Windhover Press, 1956-96, 1997"), printing on vellum ("One Text, Two Results: Printing on Paper and Vellum," 1998), American color plate books ("Stamped With a National Character: Nineteenth-Century American Color Plate Books"), and Victorian publishers' bindings ("The Art of Publishers' Bookbindings, 1815-1915"). The Club's exhibition hall is the vital center of the organization, the place where its mission—the documentation, illustration, promotion and encouragement of the book arts—is communicated to the book-loving public.  Another central focus is the Grolier Club Library. The theme of this 100,000-volume collection is books about books—author and subject bibliographies (including many rare and early examples), histories of printing, publishing and collecting, and exhibition catalogues—coupled with a modest-sized but quite fine teaching collection of examples, from illuminated manuscripts and leaves from the 42-Line Gutenberg Bible to modern private press books. But the research core of the Library, the material that draws scholars, is the 60,000-volume collection of bookseller and book auction catalogues. For over a hundred years the Club has solicited and made available to its members the current catalogues of every major European and American antiquarian book dealer and auction house. When these became outdated they were not discarded, as often happens, but carefully filed away. To this core collection have been added rare English and European catalogues from the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, the result being a uniquely valuable archive of the antiquarian book trade and of book collecting, one which is today widely used by researchers in all aspects of book history. The Grolier has always been more than a private bibliophile society, but in recent years the Club has taken on the responsibilities of a cultural institution of national, even international stature. The Grolier Club sponsors an increasing number of book-related lectures these days, often in partnership with other bibliophilic organizations; its publications reach broader audiences; Grolier exhibits regularly attract notice in the press, and are more heavily attended by the general public than in the past; and the Library has long outgrown its original function as a reference collection for Grolier Club members, and is now gaining a reputation of its own in the scholarly community. Visit the club's website at ... http://www.grolierclub.org/

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