Studio Glamour in Early Hollywood

Art historians have a tough job. To find work in an increasingly competitive market, they have two options: Come up with an original interpretation of art their peers are familiar with, or discover someone who has been overlooked by the art-history industry.

The latter is easier, but it’s still fraught with difficulty. More often than not, historians who focus on the work of an unknown artist exaggerate its significance.

At the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, a fine but far from groundbreaking exhibition presents 80 of the 100,000 photographs Ruth Harriet Louise made between 1925 and 1929, when she ran the portrait division of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s publicity department. Organized by art historian and curator Bruce Robertson and private dealer Robert Dance (whose specialty is Old Master paintings and drawings), “Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography” fleshes out the historical record by inviting viewers to travel back to a time when silent movies gave way to talkies, and a handful of powerful studios squeezed out most of the small companies that had made up the movie industry.

As a body of work, Louise’s 14-inch-by-11-inch silver prints are sensitive, intelligent and warm. Some are silly--almost campy in the way their sitters strike poses and go through the motions of being spontaneous. In one, the young photographer’s cousin, Carmel Myers, preens like a peacock in a jewel-encrusted costume designed by Erte for her role in “Ben-Hur.” A family friend of studio chief Louis B. Mayer, she probably helped Louise get her job at MGM.

Four pictures of Patricia Avery (whose career never took off) depict her as a coquettish Easter bunny, a nun lost in prayer, a breast-clutching heartthrob and an elegant sophisticate. Two shots of Dorothy Sebastian (a contract player who made six movies a year between 1925 and 1932), shows her wearing only the bottom half of a French maid’s outfit but still looking like nobody’s fool.

Other prints are touching, especially Louise’s portraits of 17-year-old Nina Mae McKinney and 15-year-old Loretta Young, whose fresh-faced earnestness she captures with seemingly effortless directness. In contrast, Mary Doran, who played small roles for three years, looks like she’s trying too hard to succeed. A pair of half-length portraits of Mae Murray suggests that she’s got so much going on in her head that no picture could reveal more than a fleeting facet of her tightly wound complexity.

Louise’s best photographs are riveting in their capacity to capture that intangible magic that makes a star shine. Her 12 portraits of Greta Garbo steal the show. Although it’s hard to imagine a picture of the Swedish star you wouldn’t want to look at, Louise excelled at getting extraneous props and poses out of the way so that her aura could glow.

The 12 prints date from September 1925, when Garbo arrived in Hollywood as a 19-year-old uncomfortable with her English, to November 1928, when she was filming “Wild Orchids” and refused to do more than one short photo session. The sequence chronicles both Garbo’s transformation into a mythical screen presence and Louise’s development into a photographer able to keep her works simple, forthright and potent.

A second highlight of the exhibition is a group of 14 portraits of Joan Crawford. They show the down-to-earth girl from Texas prancing like a cheerleader, dressed as Mrs. Santa Claus and paired with such leading men as Johnny Mack Brown and Robert Montgomery. She also models fur coats, dons a shiny hood and, as if posing for the cover of a harlequin romance, holds a handkerchief to her lips as tears well up in her eyes.

Louise photographed Crawford more than any other actor, even taking her equipment to the star’s home in Brentwood, where she posed in the garden with her husband, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Unlike Garbo, who brings a sense of inexhaustible mystery to even the simplest picture, Crawford pours everything she’s got into every photograph. She embodies the same hard-working ethos Louise brought to the job.

Similarly revealing portraits of Marion Davies, Norma Shearer, Lillian Gish and Marie Dressler round out the firmament, in terms of women. Louise’s photographs of men, which account for less than 20% of the works in the show, include Ramon Navarro, John Gilbert, Ralph Forbes, William Haines, Buster Keaton and Lon Chaney. They lack the intimacy of her pictures of women.

By today’s standards, Louise’s black-and-white portraits seem almost quaint. Although she was paid handsomely to make images that greased the wheels of the studio machinery, her pictures are surprisingly humane--not quite up-close-and-personal, but a lot more approachable than the slick, over-processed counterparts that have taken their place.

Many of Louise’s prints manage to convey a feeling of vulnerability, which probably had as much to do with her position at the newly formed studio as it did with the movie industry’s uncertainty about its own power to shape the taste of a rapidly expanding audience. By December 1929, such tentativeness was gone.

MGM did not renew Louise’s contract, hiring George Hurrell instead. His brazenly seductive photographs, which required loads of retouching and long hours in the darkroom, replaced the smoldering sensuality of her portraits with a sort of go-for-the-throat sex appeal that is commonplace today.

If not for the care and consideration Louise brought to her job, her photographs would not document as much as they do. Nor would they possess the sense of journeyman integrity and comfortable, one-on-one intimacy that marks them as her own. Still, she was neither a great talent nor a particularly inspired innovator.

It’s disingenuous for the curators to claim, as they do in the informative catalog, that Louise was one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. She was in the right place at the right time. And she did the right thing: create an impressive inventory of images. Her oeuvre is nothing more, and nothing less, than a time capsule, a terrifically detailed picture of a fascinating era.

“Ruth Harriet Louise and Hollywood Glamour Photography,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara, through Oct. 6. (805) 963-4364. Closed Mondays. Adults $6, students and children $3.