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.
