George Gibson: The Man Behind the Curtain.
The double-career of one of America's most invisible painters.
George Gibson (1904-2001) Near Piru, 1971. Signed twice at lower right: George Gibson / George Gibson. Watercolor on paper 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art and the Estate of George Gibson.
Edward Hopper was at the movies in 1939 — watching and learning. He haunted New York movie theaters, both on sketching trips and to indulge in “movie binges”1 when he was feeling un-creative. It was a good year to binge — with The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind on the silver screen, Hopper’s sketching that year produced the masterpiece New York Movie2 — a view of the interior of a movie theater. The painting includes an usher in the center of the canvas and a little fragment of the movie screen, but Hopper was careful in what he left out:
“Carrying the main horizontal lines of the design with little interruption to the edges of the picture, is to enforce this idea and to make one conscious of the spaces and elements beyond the limits of the scene itself.”3
He wanted to emphasize what was missing from the scene, and that year he settled on a device to do this — mimicking the shape of the movie screen itself. While New York Movie is a squarish canvas, he soon adopted a letterbox format for almost all of his the major pictures for the rest of his career. He wrote to a museum curator4 in October of that year:
“I spend . . . a long time on the proportions of the canvas. The very long horizontal shape . . . is an effort to give a sensation of great lateral extent . . . The consciousness of these spaces is always carried by the artist to the very limited space of the subject that he intends to paint, though I believe all painters are not aware of this.”5
But one of the painters most intensely aware of this was George Gibson — the landscape and scenic painter whose work Hopper had been studying.
II. The Artist Who Wasn’t There.
The first rule of scenic painting is to be entirely invisible. George Gibson designed the backdrops for countless movies, wrote the book on how to paint them, and trained generations of painters in his craft, and this was his biggest lesson: the goal of a backdrop is not to be credible, but to not even be thought of at all. In this manner, Gibson saw himself in the long tradition of realist painters, but advancing the craft in the opposite direction from trends in fine art painting in the middle of the century. While New York galleries were beginning to trumpet the work of individual expression, scenic backdrop realism was developing a totally ego-less objectivity:
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” — the refrain from the Wizard of Oz, and from the Hollywood studios as well, as a recent reviewer observes.6 For decades, no one did: the art directors for The Wizard of Oz and many other films received no credit at all. The backdrops themselves — called “backings” in the field — were often re-used over and over again as needed, touched-up and added to over the decades by whatever uncredited painters were working on the lot that day.
A new exhibition, curated by Karen Maness7 is redressing that invisibility. Art of the Hollywood Backdrop at the Boca Raton Museum of Art is moving these massive paintings to the foreground. Behind the monumental canvases is the monumental effort to figure out exactly who painted them — ultimately a project doomed to incompletion. To that end, Gibson would have been satisfied — invisibility was always the goal. But as one reviewer observes, the artistry of the backings has become uncoupled from their original intent.
“Yet the backings’ raw power is so palpable that it is hard to imagine them seeming inconsequential. Many now seem far more imposing than their movies.”8
III. Elements Beyond the Limits of the Scene Itself.
Gibson had a second career — much of it running concurrently with his expanding role as architect of the scenic backing industry. He was also an accomplished watercolor painter, earning credentials as a National Academician and serving as president of the American Watercolor Society. And looking at Gibson’s watercolors is especially telling given the backdrop of the show at Boca Raton. The hand that produced them is the same as the hand that designed the Land of Oz — the brushwork isn’t as concealed, but they evince the same artist at work.
But what feels entirely different about his small-scale watercolors — most are 30 inches wide — is that they have a focal point, a subject. A sagging red barn or a sun-drenched knoll take on rich, sympathetic inner lives in Gibson’s watercolors. They might even be the same object in both arenas, but in a backing they would never be allowed to have so much personality — leave the acting to Cary Grant. As a watercolorist, Gibson enjoyed engaging the story-telling, the metaphor and mood, of other masters of the craft like Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper.
Gibson was an invisible wizard in Hollywood, but his greatest gift as an artist was the profound ability to place the subject of the painting — within the frame of the picture, or far, far away from it.9
IV. If You Meet Your Doppelgänger in a Cornfield…
Gibson and Hopper met again, through their spheres of work, on the set of North By Northwest. Robert Boyle, the production designer on the film, described how he had Edward Hopper in mind as he scouted locations for the Hitchcock thriller:
“He was mostly important to me in the things he did not tell you. The Hopper look is the look of a moment in time before something has happened or very often after it’s happened, but never at the moment of the happening . . . We’re used to the quick delivery, and we’re not always intrigued by the development. With a Hitchcock film, the development is the interesting part.”10
In 1939, Hopper was looking at films that Gibson worked on as his own painting became more “cinematic.”11 Twenty years later, Hopper’s cinematic wide-format canvas was feeding inspiration back to Hollywood.12 Meanwhile, Hitchcock was spitballing his way out of writer’s block and proposed a thriller with a chase across Mount Rushmore and the Wizard-of-Oz-ian idea of a tornado being the murder weapon. Death by twister was left on the drawing board, but the scramble across Lincoln’s granite nose became one of the most famous scenes in film.
North By Northwest was Hitch’s only movie with MGM, and so it fell to MGM’s scenic designer to deliver the impossible. George Gibson rose to the challenge: a 40-foot painting that disappears. You can see it for the first time in the exhibition at Boca Raton.
Thanks for reading, and special thanks to Gary Fry, lecturer in Scenic Art at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and Karen Maness, lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin Department of Theatre and Dance, The School of Design and Creative Technologies and Scenic Art Supervisor for Texas Performing Arts, for their insights into Gibson and the history of scenic painting. Photograph of the Mount Rushmore backing courtesy the Boca Raton Museum of Art; George Gibson’s Near Piru courtesy the estate of the artist. The estate of George Gibson is represented by Jonathan Miller Spies Fine Art.
Thanks,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
As quoted by Alex Nemerov, “Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939,” American Art, vol. 22, no. 3, fall, 2008, p. 68.
Charles H. Sawyer of the Addison Gallery of American Art.
As quoted by Nemerov, 2008.
Edward Rothstein, “Art of the Hollywood Backdrop: Cinema’s Creative Legacy,” Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2022.
Maness is the author of the indispensable Art of the Hollywood Backdrop and herself an impressive scenic and landscape painter.
Rothstein, Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2022.
James Dennis, in a monograph on Grant Wood, put it another way: “The release from a waning reality to a transcending unreality is thus accomplished through a sophisticated trick . . . perhaps naive in transfiguration but altogether calculated as an attempt to regain an easily lost realm of the human mind. The set designers for the movie version of The Wizard of Oz appreciated this in fabricating the film’s two landscapes.” (James Dennis, Grant Wood, 1975, p. 105).
More on the “penultimate moment” in this insightful Criterion Collection interview with Boyle.
A blurb on MoMA’s website muses that the movie in Hopper’s New York Movie could be The Wizard of Oz, which came out the same year as the painting, but it’s just an interesting thought: Hopper began work on the painting in 1938, and wouldn’t have seen The Wizard until after the painting was completed. But it’s an interesting thought!
There’s tons of literature on Hopper’s influence on cinema, but this review of the 1995 Whitney film series hints at the vastness of that body of thought if nothing else.