MGM Style
Cedric Gibbons and the Art of the Golden Age of Hollywood
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- $32.99
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- $32.99
Publisher Description
MGM Style is an overview of the career and achievements of Hollywood’s most famous art director. Cedric Gibbons was the supervisor in charge of the art department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studios from its inception in 1924 until Gibbons chose to retire in 1956. Lavishly illustrated with over 175 pristine duotone photographs, the vast majority of which have never before been published, this is the first volume to trace Gibbons’ trendsetting career. At its height in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Gibbons was regularly acknowledged by his peers as having shaped the craft of art direction in American film; his work was recognized as representing the finest in motion picture sets and settings. Gibbons and his associates constructed the villages, towns, streets, squares and edifices that later appeared in hundreds of films, and whose mixed architecture stood in for army camps and the wild west, Dutch New York and Dickensian London, ancient China and modern Japan. Inspired by the work of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus masters, as well as the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris and Frank Lloyd Wright’s experiments with open planning, Gibbons championed the notion that movie decor should move beyond the commercial framework of the popular cinema
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Film historian Gutner (Gowns by Adrian) takes a visually luxurious, information-rich look at MGM art designer Cedric Gibbons. Gutner reveals that Gibbons (1890 1960), a key figure in creating the studio's opulent aesthetic, had a Dickensian backstory to his glamorous career; after his mother's death and his father's subsequent desertion of the family in 1910, Gibbons had to abandon plans to study architecture and instead enter construction work to support his two much younger siblings and his elderly grandparents. (MGM publicity would later craft Gibbons a more genteel background.) Fortunately for him, the still-nascent film industry needed people with his skills, who could create ingenious sets while also staying within budget. He started in film at Goldwyn Pictures in 1918, and became its supervising art director in 1921, continuing to hold the same role after the company merged with several others to form MGM in 1925. From 1928's Our Dancing Daughters, which made then-innovative use of the Art Deco style for its sets, to the reproduction of Versailles (which Gibbons claimed surpassed the original) for 1938's Marie Antoinette, up until his 1954 retirement, Gibbons helped make set design part of the magic of film. This trip back to Hollywood's golden age will be a treat for any movie buff, and perhaps also inspirational for tomorrow's filmmakers.
