Can Hollywood’s Gods and Goddesses Beautify the Swamp?

The Smithsonian’s Star Power glamour photo show can only help.

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the Swamp. Whenever I’m in Washington, D.C., I row my figurative canoe, proofed to repel slime and preening nincompoops, past rows of think tanks, government buildings, and influence-peddling parlors, to the Old Patent Office, now the home of the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, both favorites. The building soars like Parnassus, on a promontory about 80 feet above sea level.

This explains — alas, only in part — why Pennsylvania Avenue, K Street, and the land around the Capitol, tens of feet lower, nurture so many rats, skunk apes, and humanoid lizards. At least that’s this art historian’s take on the marine biology of Washington. It’s a lovely city. Too bad so many high paid creeps-in-suits slither in the halls of power.

Seriously, and with apologies to the Everglades, Star Power: Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Age by George Hurrell is a very good, small exhibition drawn from the NPG’s permanent collection. Hurrell (1904–1992) was the preeminent photographer of movie stars in Hollywood during the 1930s. His innovative lighting and his retouching and processing magic are, by now, well known. What’s clear from this show of photographs acquired by the NPG only in 2022 is his studio partnerships with subjects, including Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Jean Harlow.

These women were more than just super photogenic, and they knew it. Each was a ham in her own way. Each knew more than a thing or two about what a camera could do. Hurrell was an artist working with artists, and he was a master at elevating them from a face on the screen and a name in a marquee to the realm of gods and goddesses. Glamour is easier to define than obscenity — à la Justice Potter Stewart’s phrase “I know it when I see it” — but there’s always a soupçon of porn in all glamour recipes.

Glamour is allure, a beauty that arouses, a magic spell that affects the eye, a sexy beauty fired by distance. Glamour sparks that frisson drawn from “I wish I looked like that,” “I want,” and “I can’t have,” the object being the movie star. Whatever glamour is, Hurrell caught it on still film. His thousands of photographs, many appearing in movie magazines and posters, often living under pillows or pinned by bunks, caressed or tear-stained, projected Hollywood glamour as no other photographer could. He was a wizard.

Star Power is a good combination of the over-the-top and the matter-of-fact. The portrait of Harlow arrayed on a polar-bear rug, shot in 1934, is well known, but it always rivets. It introduces the show. A single boom light endows Harlow with a glow as if she’s got a divine inner fire. Hurrell and Harlow had art chemistry, and both were expansive, experimental, and confident, and Harlow had, though only 23, starred in multiple films. She was already called the Blonde Bombshell, and earlier Hurrell photographs are about as suggestive as a gusher.

This photograph, shot for Vanity Fair, is far more subdued. Vanity Fair might have encouraged smutty thoughts, but it was a high-class publication. Harlow tops the dead though warm and cozy bear and caresses his head, establishing her man-killer bona fides, but she also gives us a hearty, friendly, down-home smile. She and Hurrell were happy collaborators.

Garbo was another kettle of cold fish. Hurrell photographed her for promotional images for Romance, a 1930 movie about an affair between a young WASP grandee and an Italian opera singer. “She just sat there like a stone statue,” Hurrell said. “I couldn’t get her to do anything.” That said, the stone statue knew she was perfect, and so did Hurrell, who never forgot her perfect proportions. Her poses changed in degrees best known to glaciers. A diverted glance, a gloved finger to her lips, and that’s a Garbo camera still performance. Hurrell didn’t need much more than even lighting, and Garbo wouldn’t have tolerated anything else.

A resplendent portrait, it was among his first for MGM. Hurrell, born in Cincinnati, moved to Laguna Beach in the ’20s to be a landscape and seascape painter. He fell into the circle of William Wendt, the dean of California Impressionists, then of Laguna socialites, and, before long, of movie people. In 1929, he got a job as a promotional photographer at Granada Studios, intending to make enough money to paint full time.

Hurrell photographed Ramón Novarro in a painterly style inspired by Edward Steichen, gauzy and moody and right at that point where pensive becomes very sexy. Hurrell’s big break came when he transformed actress Norma Shearer, who looked regal and aloof, into a human fireworks show by massaging his lens, experimenting with lighting, and proposing she frizz her hair, wear a gold negligé, and, yes, work that come-hither look to the max.

Shearer wanted a look so high-amp that she could get the love-interest star roles she wasn’t getting because she looked too inaccessible. Working with Hurrell, she got the look and started getting the parts. Shearer’s husband, Irving Thalberg, was rising to be MGM’s production czar. He got Hurrell his MGM job.

There are two photographs of Crawford, both from 1936 and one with Clark Gable, with whom she made eight movies — comedies, dramas, and a musical — and had a sizzling, torrid, tear-the-sheets affair. Hurrell photographed her over 16 years in at least three dozen sessions and in thousands of shots. He described her as a master chameleon, able to alter her look but always projecting a classic beauty that was spiritual, dangerous, vital, soldering, stern, and entrancing. She was Athena, Artemis, and Aphrodite made into one unique look.

By 1936, Hurrell had left MGM to set up his own independent space on Sunset Boulevard, but he got lots of contract work from MGM. Crawford, as a big star, had more control over her publicity images, liked Hurrell, and was often photographed in the interior of her William Haines–decorated, ultra-white Georgian Revival home. The sessions at her house were often a day long and frenetic, as the two very type-A personalities started with full-length shots and then got closer and closer to face shots. Crawford might do a dozen changes of clothes, makeup, even hairdo. Hurrell was a spontaneous photographer, and, on set, he liked to move, shooting with no moment’s notice. Crawford loved it. She was voracious for new looks but, like Hurrell, exacting, professional, and passionate about her work. Yes, she was a narcissist, but that goes with the territory.

There’s not a dud in the exhibition. Even by the ’30s, Tarzan movies were old loin cloth in Hollywood, but Johnny Weissmuller’s five Gold Medals in the 1924 and 1928 Olympics made for new magic in his turn as Tarzan. Hurrell’s promotional photographs for Tarzan the Ape Man in 1932 helped make Weissmuller a star. Hurrell also photographed Weissmuller to promote the 1936 film Tarzan Escapes. It took baby oil rubbed on his body to create that lustrous glow likely unseen among jungle dwellers.

Marlene Dietrich’s portrait from 1937 is a showstopper. Like Garbo, she was difficult, but in a different way. She posed more liberally and wanted sultry. She’d worked with Josef von Sternberg as a director, so she knew the intricacies and potential of camera and lighting, since Sternberg pushed the boundaries of both. Dietrich insisted on a full-length mirror as close to the lens as possible so she could see how she looked. That’s a problem for a photographer who likes mobility. She also insisted on one lighting formula — high and on axis with her nose — to make her cheeks look like sculpture. Hurrell had no choice but to comply, more or less.

The NPG’s photograph is complicated. Hurrell got the signature Dietrich face but also lots of cheesecake and a striking, angular pose. Her headdress suggests that flight is on the menu.

The labels are almost entirely biographical, which is good enough, though the show was curated by Ann Shumard, the senior curator of photographs at the NPG. An intern could have written the labels after quick internet research. Why did Hurrell press click at the exact second he saw the image we see on the wall today? How did he and, especially, Crawford, Harlow, and Gable connive? That said, I wonder how familiar the broad swath of humanity the Smithsonian targets is with stars such as Jimmy Durante, Rosalind Russell, and Dorothy Lamour, all once very famous and considered immortal.

The show also includes portraits of the costume designer Adrian and the cinematographer James Wong Howe. Adrian, called Gilbert Adrian, dressed Garbo, Crawford, and Harlow in film after film, but he was MGM’s lead costumer overall. The ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz were his doing. Most of Hurrell’s MGM work promoted a star’s part in a specific movie, so the clothes in the star’s photograph were Adrian’s.

Howe was, like Hurrell, a genius with his camera and the man who made a star’s blue eyes gleam on screen. Until the ’20s, movie film stock — all black-and-white — made blue and light-green eyes look like white holes. By swathing the edge of his camera lens with black velvet, Howe darkened reflections on the actor’s eyes so that they looked like a sparkling gray that audiences would imagine as a sincere blue.

Howe also was one of the pioneers in the deep shadows that mark a movie as film noir. Not that shadows always mean film noir — Howe shot Yankee Doodle Dandy. Closer to film noir is another Howe film, King’s Row, in which Ronald Reagan, his legs amputated by his girlfriend’s crazy surgeon father, cries, “Where’s the rest of me?” Adrian’s and Howe’s photographs weren’t promoting glamour. Adrian thought Reagan looked like a moose and challenged Hurrell to make him look handsome, which he did. Rather, they’re both tributes to the subjects’ behind-the-scenes work.

The NPG’s labels, handsomely designed with a crisp, clean font, are in English and Spanish side by side, in Spanish. The time is now to ditch bilingual labels. I don’t think it’s high heresy to make this suggestion, but hug that therapy puppy if you must. Nixing the translation would have freed the NPG’s Star Power labels to tell a two-part story for each object. Half would be the subject’s biography. Half would describe Hurrell’s — and the subject’s — technique in getting the shot.

I’ve wondered for years how many art-museum visitors are — and I’m thinking reality-based thoughts — Spanish-only speakers. Big museums do endless visitor surveys and may know this. I’ve always suspected that it’s a tiny number. In D.C., an international city, people knowing only a foreign language are more likely to speak Chinese. Rather than use space for a Spanish translation that virtually no one needs, I would propose adding intellectual heft that everyone would welcome. Of course, some need to poke us in the eye with their diversity virtue. It’s been old for 30 years.

The NPG has a spotty, tiny collection of Hollywood glamour photography, which is too bad, since stars from the major-studio era were so influential, so defining, and Hurrell was so good an artist. The NPG got the Hurrell photographs in 2022 “in part through the generosity of an anonymous donor,” which means a partial gift and a partial purchase of objects. Good for that whomever. They’re important things. May he or she give more, or the NPG beat the bushes for more.

I would have displayed all 30 photographs rather than only 22 and done some very selective borrowing. For a Hurrell show, the photograph of Shearer from 1929 is essential. It launched him and established his basic style. A suite of, say, Crawford or Harlow photographs would display his variousness. Hurrell was an inspired retoucher, but that bit on magic is untouched in the show.

Is Hurrell a woman’s photographer, much as George Cukor was a woman’s director? Possibly. We’re not going to get much glamour from Spencer Tracy, Durante, or Jim “Bojangles” Robinson, but from Gable? Call the fire department. A suite of his Hurrell photographs would have been nice, too. Star Power, I know, is a small show in a long hallway by the NPG’s entrance, so it’s a transitional space. When its collection of Hollywood glamour photographs grows, as it should, it should plan a bigger exhibition a few years down the road.

Hurrell is, in my humble opinion, the John Singer Sargent of American portrait photography. He wasn’t depicting aristocrats — America doesn’t have a titled aristocracy — but he made of American glamour what Sargent made of Gilded Age glamour. Hurrell used the technology and aesthetic of his time. Among art historians and critics, Hurrell’s photography wasn’t considered art until the past 20 or so years. It was considered commercial. Produced as they were in the many hundreds for distribution to movie magazines and movie theaters, his work was thought to be ephemera. For a time, Hurrell’s photographs bore the curse of the collectible. All of this has changed as more first-rate institutions like the NPG have acquired and displayed his work.

Good for the NPG in helping to lead the charge.

Star Power has a good, basic brochure and doesn’t have a catalogue, but it doesn’t need one. The NPG suggests George Hurrell’s Hollywood, by Mark Vieira, published in 2013 and reprinted in 2023. It’s a great read and better than most museum catalogues. It’s readable, first of all. It’s sound art history, an engaging biography of Hurrell — who worked basically until he died at age 88 — a close look at the thicket that’s Hurrell connoisseurship, and a history of the critical evolution of Hollywood photography into art, which it’s always been despite the snobs. Vieira’s part of that history since he’s among the early explorers. He’s not stuck-up about it, which makes the book even better. And he’s a photographer, not an academic, so he knows the technology. It’s a good Christmas gift for film buffs and for lovers of photography.