Greta Garbo was not in the mood. Instead of her usual photographer, Ruth Harriet Louise, she had reluctantly agreed to sit for George Hurrell (1904–92). By this time—1930—Hurrell’s star in Hollywood was rising almost as fast as Garbo’s. But when the Swedish actress showed up, she was stone-faced, and she remained so during the sitting. Increasingly desperate, Hurrell attempted to loosen her up—crawling on the floor and walking backward while shooting, as Mark A. Vieira tells it in the book George Hurrell’s Hollywood. On the way out, Garbo said to a photographer’s assistant, “There’s a crazy man in there.”
The exhibition “Star Power: Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Era by George Hurrell”—opening next Friday at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C.—features a shot that shows Garbo, in spite of everything, drawn into the photographer’s signature mixture of style, sex, dream, and art. Her white-gloved index finger plays on her lips, but because she’s looking to the side, our eyes automatically go to the gown’s plunging neckline. A seduction. According to the exhibition’s curator, Ann Shumard, Hurrell “loved the dance” between photographer and subject. In the 1930s and early 1940s—Hurrell’s heyday—he made lasting portraits of Claudette Colbert, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, and many more. This exhibition stems from a 2022 acquisition of 70 Hurrell photographs.
The extroverted Hurrell, whose father owned a shoe factory in Chicago, found quick success in Hollywood while still in his 20s. Shumard, whose mother lived in remote Wisconsin during those Depression years, understood why. At the end of every month, the beauty parlors in town would throw out their fan magazines, pages stocked with glamour shots such as Hurrell’s. Women and girls who couldn’t afford to buy the magazines, including Shumard’s mother and friends, would take the discarded issues, sometimes cutting them up and “making paper dolls out of the pictures.” In an era bursting with magazines and newspapers, a continuous and exhausting demand existed for these photos. Perfection was expected, which meant inventive poses and elaborate retouching.
Hurrell’s great influence, Shumard points out, was Edward Steichen, a pioneer of American art photography. Hurrell paid homage to Steichen’s photograph of Fred Astaire in the middle of a dance by doing something similarly kinetic with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, capturing the Black entertainer in his famous “stair dance,” in 1935, the year Robinson performed with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel.
The big challenges, it would seem, came from a handful of divas—including Marlene Dietrich. Very savvy about image, she refused to be photographed without a full-length mirror, Vieira reports, placed so that she could see herself while posing. When Hurrell tried to sneak the mirror away, Dietrich demanded it back. The results were fine, though. In a white gown of diaphanous draping, a huge crest of white feathers on her head, Dietrich preens in a 1937 print, a bird of paradise glowing against a shadowed background. In a surprising move, Hurrell photographed Gypsy Rose Lee morphing from stripper to actress—almost all covered up.
With the end of World War II, Hurrell found the glamour business utterly changed. There were still fan magazines, but as realistic dramas and flawed film noir characters found audiences, many actors wanted to project a more complicated persona. The Myrna Loy of the Thin Man series, so stylish in a Hurrell photograph from 1936, was 10 years later playing the unstylish troubles of the wife of Fredric March, a returning serviceman, in The Best Years of Our Lives. It would take Hurrell decades to make a comeback—but he did, in the 1970s, as the glamour shot fascinated anew.
“Star Power: Photographs from Hollywood’s Golden Age by George Hurrell” goes on show at the National Portrait Gallery, in Washington, D.C., on March 1
Peter Saenger has written and edited for The Wall Street Journal on such topics as art, art books, museums, and travel. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker
