GEORGE HURRELL'S HOLLYWOOD

Published by Running Press

ISBN-978-0-7624-5039-8

 

George Hurrell was an American artist, the creator of the Hollywood glamour portrait. This lavishly illustrated coffee-table book spans Hurrell’s entire career, from his beginnings as a Laguna Beach painter to his finale as a celebrity photographer who was also a celebrity, a “living legend.”

In Hollywood’s Golden Era, this maverick artist used bold contrast and seductive poses to redefine the movie-star portrait. Blending the ethereal and the erotic, Hurrell created alluring images of Norma Shearer, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford.

 

Hurrell was himself a star—rich, famous, fulfilled—for fifteen years the “Rembrandt of Hollywood.” Then, at the height of his career, he suffered a vertiginous fall from grace. That story is told here.

George Hurrell’s Hollywood is not only a treasure trove of glamour but also a frank biography. Mark A. Vieira draws on exclusive interviews, archival documents, and his own diaries to recount, for the first time anywhere, Hurrell’s return from the ashes—how obsessed collectors and crafty dealers pulled the elderly artist into a half-world of theft and fraud; how his undiminished powers gave him a second career; and how his mercurial nature began to destroy it.



REVIEWS

"Years ago, writer-photographer Mark A. Vieira wrote and compiled a handsome book called Hurrell’s Hollywood Portraits.This enormous and elegant volume supersedes it, not only in the quantity and quality of photographs it presents, but in Vieira’s candid text, which expands on his earlier work and delves into the second part of Hurrell’s life... I think it’s fair to refer to this exquisite tome as definitive." 

- Leonard Maltin
 

 

"This is more than a movie book. It's an experience."  

- Damon Devine