1930s Vintage Large Format C.S. Bull Art Deco Helen Hayes Glamour Photograph

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1930s Vintage Large Format C.S. Bull Art Deco Helen Hayes Glamour Photograph:
$21.75

Thanks to all our buyers! We are honored to be your one-stop, 5-star source for vintage pin-up, pulp magazines, original illustration art, decorative collectibles and ephemera with a wide and always changed assortment of antique and vintage items from the Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Mid-Century Modern eras. All items are 100% guaranteed to be original, vintage, and as described. Please feel free to contact us with any and all questions about the items and our policies and please take a moment to peruse our other great items. All sell !ITEM: This is a 1930s vintage and original, large format, silver gelatin photograph from the expert Hollywood glamour photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull. This beautiful glamour portrait is a casual and stylish view of “The First Lady of American Theatre,” Helen Hayes. Dating to the early years of Hayes’s career on the silver screen.Measures 10\" x 13\" on a glossy double weight paper stock.
M-G-M ink stamps on verso.CONDITION: Fine condition with creases at the corners and light storage wear along the margins. Please use the included images as a conditional guide.Guaranteed to be 100% vintage and original from Grapefruit Moon Gallery.********************Known as \"The First lady of the American Theater\", Helen Hayes had a legendary career on stage and in films and television that spanned over eighty years. Hayes was born in Washington, D.C., to Catherine Estelle \"Essie\" Hayes, an actress who worked in touring companies, and Francis van Arnum Brown, a clerk and salesman. Her maternal grandparents were Irish. A child actress in the first decade of the 20th century, by the time she turned twenty in 1920 she was well on her way to a landmark career on the American stage, becoming perhaps the greatest female star of the theatre during the 1930s and 1940s. She made a handful of scattered films during the silent era and in 1931 was signed to MGM with great fanfare to begin a career starring in films. Her first three films, \'Arrowsmith\', \'The Sin of Madelon Claudet\', and \'A Farewell to Arms (1932)\', were great hits and she would win the 1932 Oscar for Best Actress for her work in Madelon Claudet. Alas, her lack of screen glamour worked against her becoming a box office star during the golden era of Hollywood, and her subsequent films were often not well received by critics. Within four years she had abandoned the screen and returned to the stage for the greatest success of her career, \"Victoria Regina\", which ran for three years starting in 1935. Helen Hayes returned to motion pictures with a few featured roles in 1950s films and frequently appeared on television. In 1970, she made a screen comeback in \'Airport\' (1970), a role originally offered to Claudette Colbert, who declined it, earning Hayes her second Oscar, this time for Best Supporting Actress. Helen Hayes retired from the stage in 1971 but enjoyed enormous fame and popularity over the next fifteen years with many roles in motion pictures and television productions, retiring in 1985 after starring in the TV film \'Murder With Mirrors’.- IMDb Mini Biography By: HarlowMGM********************What is there to say about the legendary Hollywood photographer Clarence Sinclair Bull that has not already been said?One of the most well known and--along with George Hurrell--one said to have helped invent the modern idea of Hollywood Glamour in photography. Bull was born in Sun River, Montana (some sources say he was born in Michigan) in 1896. For a time he studied with the great Western painter Charles Marion Russell. But his real interest lie in photography.He went to Hollywood in 1918 and became an assistant cameraman for Metro Pictures. During breaks from film production, he began taking photographs of the various stars of the time. In 1924, when Metro Pictures became Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Bull became head of MGM stills department. He remained with the studio until the end of his career.Bull was very well accomplished in everything to do with his specialty from lighting to printing and retouching. He photographed many of the first-rate stars of the day including Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Leslie Howard, Katherine Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Hedy Lamarr, Vivian Leigh, Spencer Tracy, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Jean Harlow, John Gilbert, among many others. Of course, he is extremely well known for his numerous photographs of Greta Garbo.Katherine Hepburn said of Bull: \"One of the greats. Clarence Bull! And the National Portrait Gallery! WOW!”From the book, \'Glamour of the Gods’:Clarence Sinclair Bull\'s long association as a photographer with the studio that would become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer began when producer Samuel Goldwyn hired him in 1919. Managing to survive the commotion of the consolidation of Hollywood in the early and mid-1920s, Bull found himself at the helm of MGM\'s stills department when the studio was formed in 1924, and stayed there until retiring in 1961. The enormity of MGM\'s output of films in the 1920s--they advertised a new feature every week--saw Bull\'s domain grow. He was responsible for managing MGM\'s staff of photographers and the large support crew of technicians needed to develop, re-touch, print and collate the hundreds of thousands of prints distributed annually by MGM\'s publicity department. At least one photograph from the 1920s shows Bull with twelve stills-men who juggled the task of shooting photos on as many as a dozen films that might be concurrently in production. At MGM, like the other studios, these men--and it was an almost exclusively male profession--worked six days a week and often long hours each day. Generally one photographer was assigned to a production and, as filming was underway, he would document each scene using an 8 x 10 view camera. These cameras not only had lenses with sharp resolution, but contact prints could be made from the negatives quickly and in enormous quantities. The stills made for each film were numbered sequentially and gathered together for a book. Stills photographers also created the images used for poster art, lobby cards and other forms of advertising conceived by imaginative publicity chiefs and their staffs.In later years, the famous documenter of all things Hollywood, John Kobal inherited the extensive work of Bull after he became good friends with Bull and his wife, Jeanne. So many of what is now known as the Kobal Collection contains Bull\'s work.During the 1920s, Bull continued to take portraits (even though he was a very busy man with administrative duties.) Chances are, if you have seen a portrait of Garbo other than Edward Steichen\'s iconic image, it is the work of Bull. With the exception of one session, Bull and the reclusive actress worked together exclusively in the portrait studio from 1929 to 1941 and their collaboration resulted in a body of imagery unmatched in Hollywood photography. Reminiscing with Kobal, Bull spoke of Garbo\'s extraordinary concentration and described her working methods as \'businesslike.\' She was \'his easiest subject,\' surprising given Garbo\'s status as the studio\'s biggest star. Garbo was one of Kobal\'s favorites, and he took care to understand her sittings with Bull to produce a limited-edition portfolio of five Garbo photographs printed under Bull\'s supervision from his original negatives. Bull died in 1979, just as the first portfolios were prepared.It seems that every star who worked at MGM was photographed by Bull at least once. Paramount\'s biggest male attraction, Gary Cooper, was loaned to MGM in 1934 to co-star with Marion Davies in Operator 32 (1934). Bull and Cooper had a short session together on 17 of April 1934 and the results were splendid. He infused Cooper with a sleek, polished glamour that was as unusual for male subjects as was the cigarette dangling from his lips. Old timers and newcomers all had the chance to work with Bull, including vaudeville alumna Marie Dressler, who for a short time in the early 1930s was Hollywood\'s number one draw, and the ingenue Lana Turner, who at twenty was co-starring with Clark Gable in Honky Tonk. Bull started experimenting with color photography in the late 1930s, making color exposure of Garbo first in 1936 and again in 1941. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s he worked extensively in color recording, among others, Elizabeth Taylor at the moment she was being considered for adult roles.Bull presided over a team of talented stills photographers, some of whom occasionally made portraits, generally on the set including the great Bert Longworth (see his own post). Longworth took stills for Garbo\'s first three pictures and his images of Garbo and John Gilbert in a clinch for \'Flesh and the Devil\' (1926) are the quintessence of old-time movie romance. He left MGM in 1927 to work for Warner Brothers.Bull\'s photographs are highly collectible and can be worth in the thousands of dollars. In addition, Bull\'s photographs are seen in retrospective photography galleries worldwide.— Biography From: VintageMovieStarPhotos (dot) blogspot (dot) com******************** Paypal Buyers Are Invited To grapefruitmoongallery\'s Fresh sale Weekly Newsletter