Page 69 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 69/146
Hurrell was head of the Portrait Photography Department at MGM c1929-1932. Along with Harriet Louise, MGM’s Head of Publicity (1925-1935), Hurrell is responsible for creating the striking chiara- scura glossies that promoted MGM’s major stars across a range of media. The silkiness and subtle lighting of these portraits (Hurrell was to photograph every one of MGM’s stable of stars), made his portraits famous, and became an abiding motif of Hollywood glamour from the 1930s. His portraits set an American/Hollywood stamp on this art.
Various: Lillian Gish + Mary Pickford: American Sweethearts c1919
One of the first books I bought as an art student was Edgar Morin’s: The Stars (1960) - where the French documentary film-maker/critic Morin analyses the ‘Star system’ and how it emerged during the early silent era, and grew and grew, reaching a peak I suppose in the 1960s. In chapters like Gods and Goddesses and The Stellar Liturgy, Morin illustrates some of the archetypes that emerged in the 1910-1930 period - I’ve borrowed from him to classify the female stars into: America’s Sweethearts, Vamps, Femmes du Monde and Flappers. The importance of these stars is not merely in reflecting the attraction of a particular actress-player in the movies, nor in the star as a commercial attractor, but as the Star in expressing the nuances of the spirit of the age as she emerged in this second decade of the 20th century - on screen and mediated through illustration, photography, magazines, fanzines, the star becomes an embodiment of the zeitgeist - and an expression of the Jungian archetypes of Woman - innocent child, lover, mother, whore, (etc). That female stars appeared in these guises (and more), in a decade when masses of people were separated by War is perhaps not surprising. It was the movies and cheap print/reproduction technologies that created the media for this new ‘stellar liturgy’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Pickford
And it wasn’t just the Movies that were creating the new star-celebrity genre - the other arts were subsumed too - especially the famous Ballets Russes, formed by Sergei Diaghilev in 1909, whose most famous male dancer was Vaslav Njinsky. Diaghilev had gathered around him the foremost artists from Russia and Europe - Picasso, Cocteau, Stravinsky, Debussy, Kandinsky, Picasso, Bakst, Chanel, Michel Fokine, Satie - many more. And of course the attendant publicity for stars Ida Lvovna Rubinstein, Njinsky and Anna Pavlova, was enormous - they too, became stars in the first decades of the 20th century.