Hollywood Comes to New Hampshire, with Dartmouth’s Art Acquisition

The school’s Hood Museum buys the definitive collection of golden-age movie-star photographs.

G reetings from Rome. I’m here to see the Superbarocco exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale. It’s a look at Genoese art from Rubens to Alessandro Magnasco, with a nice dose of Van Dyke. You’ll never go wrong with Rubens and Van Dyke, and, I hope and believe, with the weird and wonderful Magnasco, either. As splendid as the art of Genoa is, there’s never been a focused look at Genoese art and culture from, say, 1600 to 1700 outside of Genoa. The city is about much more than Columbus. I’ll write about this exhibition next week.

First, though, lights . . . camera . . . action! Not what you’d expect to hear in Hanover in mud season in New Hampshire. When I was at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth’s college museum, I learned they’d bought the Kobal collection of Hollywood-movie-star photographs. That’s 6,000 photographs shot on commission from the big studios during Hollywood’s golden age from the silent era to the early 1960s. It’s a superacquisito. So before I write about Superbarocco, I’ll pause for a look at the art of “tomorrow is another day,” “I coulda been a contender,” Fred and Ginger, Marlene, and the incandescent Jean Harlow. “We had faces,” Norma Desmond said, “and there just aren’t any faces like that anymore.”

The Kobal photographs don’t just visualize the movie business. Studio photographs of the stars created the American cult of celebrity. Kobal (1940–91) was the Austrian-born, British film historian. His book on the Hollywood movie musical and his biographies of Rita Hayworth and Cecil B. DeMille are definitive. He started collecting black-and-white movie-star photography in the 1960s, when vintage prints by photographers such as George Hurrell, Clarence Bull, and Ruth Harriet Louise, some produced in the thousands, were the stuff of flea markets. The old stars were old hat. By the time Kobal died, he’d collected tens of thousands of photographs, buying prints, archives, and negatives from companies, actors, and photographers. His foundation sold the photographs to the Hood in 2019.

The Hood has a small exhibition on view — Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Era — and it’s just the amuse-bouche. It’s about 20 photographs introducing the Kobal acquisition, the photographers, the subjects, the themes, and the aesthetic. For Dartmouth students, and for most everyone else under, say, 75, Carole Lombard, Dolores del Rio, and Louise Brooks are entirely new.

First, what was the purpose of these photographs? Most of them were done for the publicity and sales departments of the big studios. The publicity departments marketed the stars to the public, certainly, but specifically to the movie magazines, which everyone read. The sales department sent hoofers, along with the photographs, to sell movies to exhibitors. If they didn’t like the photographs, mostly headshots but also stills from the movie itself, they’d tend not to slot the film.

Some of the photographs, such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for Swing Time, RKO, from 1936, or Marlon Brando for Streetcar Named Desire, from 1950, are well known. They’re icons of the movie industry generally, and they summarize the actors. So does Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan for The Kid, from 1921. Stanley Kowalski might have been crude, rude, and socially unacceptable as an individual, and a rapist besides, but John Engstead’s image set the standard for the sulky bad-boy type. The subjects in these three photographs had to convey a narrative through a pose, condensing the story into a single shot.

To market a film, the studio would often send its salesmen with a portfolio. Gone with the Wind’s portfolio featured photographs of Vivien Leigh portraying Scarlett O’Hara in hoop skirts and in Miss Ellen’s repurposed portieres. It also included an image of an exhausted, vexed Scarlett, looking at the sacked Tara by moonlight, having just vomited from eating a raw beet, about to say “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” And Leigh still looks gorgeous.

The silent star Louise Brooks isn’t so much depicted as abstracted, a face in profile, a long strand of white pearls, and her hands set against inky darkness. The light seems to come from inside these elements, not from outside lighting.

Russell Ball’s Dolores del Rio for the Trial of ’98 was shot in 1928. Del Rio was the first Latin-American actress to cross over to Hollywood. Ball used a soft, even light to give del Rio’s skin a satin look. It’s a nice Art Deco photograph, with alternating passages of black and white like a checkerboard. Fur adds texture.

It’s not in the Hood show, but George Hurrell’s photograph of Jean Harlow from 1934 sets the template for Hollywood studio photographs. Hurrell often tilted his women subjects as if their heads were on a pillow. He sought sultry and sexy with a minimum of skin, given the Hays Code’s teeth after around 1932.

Hurrell and his peers used precision lighting to design a face. Pools of shadow made for mystery. Harlow’s platinum-blonde hair was lustrous enough and, spread out, was emphasized as much as her face. Hurrell retouched his negatives not only to excise distractions such as Joan Crawford’s freckles but to massage skin tone. His subjects wore very little makeup. Hurrell pioneered the use of artificially long eyelashes to cast shadows, but he banished cake-like makeup.

A Kobal photograph delivers society’s gender differences, too. Women are often dreamily acquiescent while men like Gary Cooper project decisive thought and self-awareness. The Hood’s haul also includes work-in-progress retouching, as arm hair, flabby chins, and misaligned eyes, among other flaws, are marked for removal. Plastic surgery can’t do all the heavy lifting.

Hurrell (1904–92) is the best known of the artists working for the big studios. He was the head of the portrait photography department at MGM in the early ’30s, later going to Warner Bros. and establishing his own independent practice through the ’80s. Still in his mid-20s, he was hired by silent star Ramon Novarro to photograph him. Novarro, though the quintessential Latin lover after the death of Rudolph Valentino, feared that he wouldn’t make the transition to talkies. He toyed with leaving the movies for an opera career in Europe but needed a portfolio and didn’t want the studio to know anything about it. Hurrell admired Edward Steichen, so it’s no surprise his photographs of Novarro have a gauzy look. It’s very sexy.

Novarro showed the photographs to Norma Shearer. Shearer wanted to transition from good-girl parts to the glamour-puss part in The Divorcée, an MGM project tentatively slotted for Joan Crawford. She hired Hurrell to develop her inner seductress, and that he did. He sharpened his focus from his work for Novarro, which made his pools of shadow more scrutable to movie producers and directors who were thinking of the big screen. Sfumato à la Steichen might do the trick for opera impresarios in Milan, but Americans liked more straightforward lighting.

I look at Hurrell as Hollywood’s John Singer Sargent. He excelled at the come-hither look augmented by lighting, drapery, and good hair. Shearer showed his photographs to Irving Thalberg, MGM’s head of production and Shearer’s husband. Now, putting aside the question of why a man needs outside evidence to be persuaded his wife is a sex kitten, he loved Shearer’s look and cast her in The Divorcée, for which she won an Oscar. Hurrell got his job at MGM.

The Kobal Foundation has developed traveling exhibitions for its photographs. I’ve seen at least three of them — two, if I remember correctly, at the Hood and one at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Though these photographs defined glamour in their day, they do more as works of art. The tones and half tones of these photographs are astonishingly fine, considering that they’re meant to be mass-produced goods. Lenses, lighting, gesture, composition, and props figure in these as much as they do in a Sargent painting or, for that matter, in a swagger portrait by Van Dyke.

These photographs, coming from Hollywood and defining celebrity culture, are more distinctly American, too. The Hood will find a hundred different ways to use them in classes. Photography, as a medium, is best suited to convey our country. The Kobal photographs aren’t true to life, since retouching was extensive, but they’re straightforward in this respect. Their subjects look like gods from Olympus, descending to our moral, mundane world.

Not all the photographs from the Kobal Foundation are formal portraits. Many are stills shot on the set, such as Milton Brown’s photograph of Lillian Gish braving the elements in the classic silent The Wind, from 1928. Brown’s photograph isn’t gleaned from the film the cinematographer shot. He was there, on the set, working independently from the cinematographer, selecting the moment and look he felt would be most useful to the publicity department in marketing the film.

The wall color in the Hood show is a pale lavender called Enchanted, an inspired choice. The photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Brando, del Rio, Louise Brooks, all in the small Hood show, are only an overview. The Hood will do many more. Dartmouth has a good film-studies program, which is using them already.

English, history, drama, art, and psychology faculty and students will make a feast of these, too. I can’t think of any organization that has done more than the Kobal Foundation in advancing film studies. It’s a case of a foundation assiduously pursuing and honoring the vision of its dead patron. I wish more American foundations would, 30 years after a founding funder has slipped the surly bonds of earth, do the same.

Why were these photographs ever hiding in plain sight? Today, and this is mostly thanks to the Kobal Foundation, this work is part of American art history. By the 1960s, the old movie stars from the ’30s and ’40s receded from our awareness, much as the silent-era stars had a generation earlier. Yes, there were new, young stars, but glamour wasn’t in vogue, and neither was the formal look or, for that matter, a look that seemed contrived.

American acting has always been on a naturalist trajectory in any event. An aesthetic the icons of which were Al Pacino, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, Barbra Streisand, and Sylvester Stallone wasn’t a good climate for William Powell or Clark Gable. I can’t imagine what amount of retouching, embalming, and bicep enhancement Woody Allen would have needed. Marketing of movies changed, too. The magazines thriving on studio photography disappeared. People had its own photographers, and buyers wanted spontaneity. The paparazzi had come to our shores. And while I think it’s wrong to say today that there are no movie stars anymore, the dynamic is certainly different.

All of this, though, is fodder for Dartmouth students. I think the Kobal acquisition is the most significant and various I’ve seen in years. Good for the Hood, and good for the foundation, in making the match.

While I was at the Hood, I looked at its other exhibitions. Earlier this week, I wrote about Unbroken, a show of the museum’s nice and growing collection of work by living Native American artists. A Dream Deferred: Undocumented Immigrants and the American Dream is a student-curated exhibition. It’s weepy, but that’s predictable. I wish it included a work of art showing a young person, knowing nothing but life in America, taking his parents to task for having crossed the border illegally and making him an outlaw. And wasn’t there something more, well, spellbinding than this?

This Land: American Engagement with the Natural World is the first exhibition the Hood’s done that presents its fine American permanent collection thematically rather than chronologically. I enjoyed it. It adds Native American art in the mix of art by every other configuration of an American. The labels don’t hector, and there’s no rancor in them, either. They usually end with questions. The Hood’s a teaching museum, and I’m glad Dartmouth doesn’t think asking a question, much less giving the wrong answer, is a capital offense.

I loved the Hood’s Louise Hamlin exhibition. She recently retired from Dartmouth’s studio-art department after 29 years. Her fog paintings are ethereal and spooky.

Next week, I’ll write about Superbarocco and the Donatello retrospective in Florence. I’m planning on visiting the Biennale in Venice, too.