George Hurrell is known as the king of the Hollywood glamour portrait, having photographed the Hollywood legends of the 1930s and 1940s—making movie stars immortal. Several of Hurrell’s portraits are on view in the UW Art Museum exhibition Hollywood Glamour Immortalized: Movie Studio Portraits from the 1930s–1960s through Nov. 14, 2015.
Hurrell captured the quintessential look of each sitter through lighting and posing, the two truly creative aspects of portrait photography. He was an innovator with his 8-by-10 view camera, using sharp-focus and boom lights that were widely imitated by his colleagues. He created iconic images of Hollywood elite and furthered the careers of many, yet Hurrell’s work wasn’t recognized as fine art until the 1960s—with his first museum appearance in the exhibition Glamour Poses at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965.
A shifting of values and standards in the 1960s played a key role in changing the way people looked at art. When Hurrell created his glamor portraits in the 1930s and early 1940s, there were two basic types of art—fine art and commercial—with no gray area between the two. Fine art was created by an “artist” as natural creative expression usually dealing with serious issues related to life. Commercial art was created to please the public and meant to entertain. Commercial art had a short lifespan—only viewed for a few days or weeks in a magazine or movie theater—whereas fine art was placed in museums, galleries and collectors’ homes to be viewed in a hushed, reverent atmosphere in perpetuity.
Without a doubt, Hurrell was cast in the commercial art mold. He became a household name when his portraits regularly appeared in Esquire. However, during the 1960s, the lines between fine art and commercial art became blurred, and photography greatly benefited from this breakdown of traditional boundaries. The newfound influence of artists such as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg may have played an inadvertent role. Photographers like Alfred Stieglitz or William Eggleston, whose work was always meant to be viewed as fine art, were not affected, but this re-evaluation of the arts rescued the work of fashion and Hollywood photographers of the 1930s and 1940s from oblivion.
Viewed during the Great Depression, Hurrell’s portraits were images of beautiful men and women living rich, self-confident lives that did not reflect the everyday realities of those who viewed them. The images were a fantasy, an escape that exuded confidence in the future that people wanted to believe in. Yet, in the 1960s when the commercial culture promoted the idea that attaining the rich, glamorous life was available to everyone, the sudden availability of visual culture through mass advertising in magazines and television led to the reconsideration of images like Hurrell’s and legitimately placed him in the higher ranks of art at that time.
View several of Hurrell’s portraits, along with photographs by Philippe Halsman, in the Hollywood Glamour Immortalized: Movie Studio Portraits from the 1930s–1960s exhibition at the UW Art Museum. The exhibition is presented in conjunction with this year’s theme, Rivera Rendezvous: An Evening at Cannes, for the museum’s annual fundraising gala Oct. 24, 2015.
From left to right: George Hurrel (American, 1904-1992), Heddy Lamarr (Portfolio II), 1938 (1984.238.2); Johnny Weissmuller (Portfolio II), 1933 (1984.238.1); Dorothy Lamour (Portfolio II), 1930\6 (1984.238.3), gelatin silver print, 19 x 15-1/2 inches each, gift of Mr. David M. Kaplan Jr.
