George Hurrell (1904–1992) defined the classic 1930s Hollywood portrait. Among his innovations was dramatic sharp-focus combined with high-contrast lighting, using chiaroscuro effect to sculpt the extraordinary faces situated before his camera. It coincided with advances in magazine printing technology and the requisites of black and white film-making. The absence of color required cinematographers to rely on low-key (high-contrast) lighting to convey separation and depth on-screen, a look not in favor by portraitists before Hurrell. The result was that the actors featured in magazines looked as they did on the big screen, aligning perfectly with the studios’ marketing efforts.

Though celebrated and sought after in his day, decades on, Hurrell’s craft would be nearly eclipsed by nostalgia for his subjects. Virginia Postrel, in a 2007 article for The Atlantic Monthly, writes:

“Collectors generally paid more attention to Hurrell’s subjects than to his techniques. “If you had a photograph by Hurrell, it wasn’t because you thought it was great art but because it was the best photograph you’d seen of that star. It was more fan-based collecting,” says the Hurrell collector Louis F. D’Elia, a Pasadena neuropsychologist and an exception to the rule.

“With memories of the era’s stars fading, however, museums and art collectors have begun to recognize the photographs’ aesthetic value. It’s the difference between revering a Madonna and Child as a devotional object and appreciating the artist’s use of perspective or sfumato.

“You concentrate less on ‘That’s Clark Gable’ or ‘That’s Greta Garbo,’ and you focus more on the lighting, the retouching, the extreme detail, the way the eyelashes are drawn in,” says Virginia Heckert, an associate curator of photography at the Getty Museum.

“One result of this new appreciation: much higher prices. In February, a vintage 10-by-13 photo of Norma Shearer sold for $4,094 on eBay, and one of Myrna Loy went for $6,768. Two years earlier, “you could pick some of these up for $500 or $550,” says D’Elia, who bought his first Hurrell—an elegant 1930 portrait of silent-era star Dorothy Jordan—as a teenager in 1967, bargaining the seller down from $8 to $5.”

George Hurrell’s lion-tamer skills at coaxing iconic images from egoistic Hollywood stars have been under-appreciated. His inventiveness with lighting, composition, angle, propping, and set design were peerless. Yet he remains in the shadow of photographers like Edward Weston, who also shot portraits and nudes, but is renowned for his image of a bell pepper. The enduring maxim, perpetuated by the art world’s gatekeepers, holds that commissioned works are intrinsically unworthy against those that spring from an artists’ soul, unsolicited. That, of course, contradicts all Renaissance art, which required wealthy patrons like the Medici family and the Church to underwrite work that would not have been made otherwise. It was true of all art up until the Impressionists, Cubists, and others. Their work was so disruptive they had no choice but to create in the absence of benefactors. That set the tone for the now-familiar distinction between so-called Fine Art and the applied arts. Since Weston’s portrait of a bell pepper was not a commission, it exists on a higher plain than anything from a work-for-hire craftsman could ever be. The same dynamic has been at play for years regarding highly-accomplished magazine illustrators, whose work is diminished compared to hilariously awful painters like John Currin. The master manipulators of the art world continue to immortalize the anointed ones because collectors need validation. It has nothing to do with pure talent. (For more on the topic, read Sarah Thornton’s arch and insightful Seven Days in the Art World.)

Perhaps the tectonic plates are shifting as it gratifies me to witness the master George Hurrell finally begin to receive the recognition he deserves. —J Heroun