Santa Barbara Museum of Art displays some of the best portrait photography from Hollywood's Golden Age.
FROM THE time he was a schoolboy, John Kobal was in love with Hollywood. He longed to become a part of it, and eventually he did -- by befriending faded movie stars and forgotten photographers, enchanting them with his sincerity and his hungry memory, and collecting photographs. By the time he died in 1991, at 51, he had amassed thousands of anecdotes and a million photographic images.
Kobal set up a photo agency to profit from all this material, but he kept the best for himself, including original prints and negatives from such famed studio photographers as Clarence Sinclair Bull, George Hurrell, Ruth Harriet Louise, Eugene Robert Richee and Ernest Bachrach. Their subjects included Garbo, Dietrich, Harlow, Crawford, Gable and Grant -- captured in Olympian beauty and crowned by halos of light. As Kobal once wrote, “Each image reveals a coming together of the flesh and the spirit to create an ideal to which others aspired."
That romantic vision pervades the exhibition “Made in Hollywood: Photographs From the John Kobal Foundation," at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through Oct. 5. Its co-curators -- Karen Sinsheimer, the museum's curator of photography, and film historian Robert Dance -- visited the foundation in London and sifted through thousands of vintage prints and negatives to select just over 90 images by 50 photographers. The result is a virtual tour through four decades of glitz and glamour, starting in the 1920s. “These are the most vivid records we possess of the Golden Age of Hollywood," says Dance.
