EPHEMERAMA: Hollywood
Online Exclusive
Read Charity Coleman’s review of EPHEMERAMA: Hollywood, now in the September issue of Artforum.
EPHEMERAMA: Hollywood presents selections from a trove of drawings made by an anonymous artist depicting women in Hollywood from the 1930s-1940s, each done on a scrap of brown wrapping paper.
Some have burns on their edges, many have a corner cut off. The majority of them are double-sided. The materials used tend to be simple, most include graphite and colored pencil or chalk, and the consistency of palette may imply that the artist did not have a full range of drawing supplies at the ready.
Presenting the work of an unknown artist is never straightforward - there are endless holes and gaps that beg to be filled in. We’ve only started to explore these pieces, and while we work on researching these objects in depth, we want to share the process with you as part of Shelter’s inaugural online project series. Whatever their story may be, we find these drawings an absolute delight to spend time with, and we hope you feel the same.
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All work is available for sale, and each piece is priced at $300 (not inclusive of tax or shipping.) 10% of each sale will be donated to Housing Works, an essential organization that provides support to New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS and to individuals with unstable housing.
Housing Works has opened a hotel-based shelter for individuals without homes who have tested positive for COVID-19, with a second location opening shortly. Please consider making a direct donation to Housing Works to support their needed work.
Key details:
Found in Southern California
Stored together in a single decorative box
Undated and unsigned
Each piece measures roughly 8x11 in.
The easiest way to start looking at these pieces was to consider similarities in formal qualities: namely materials, composition, and details.
Most of the drawings are executed in colored pencil and chalk, but a few also include ink or watercolor, predominantly as a background wash. Given the limited color palette used, it’s more than possible that the artist had sparse access to them.
A fair amount of these drawings are done on both sides of the paper, some including brief sketches, others more finished portraits, like the pair above. These two examples also provide a deeper look at one detail of the works that stood out: the jewelry. As was typical of the period in film, renowned jewelers would design and provide exquisite pieces for everything from blockbusters to smaller movies.
So we thought it could be possible that the artist, given the attention to detail paid to the accessories pictured, worked in some related capacity on set.
We started exploring this option by building a spreadsheet that would allow us to track what cast and crew worked on the same movies, and whether this would provide insight into who the artist may have been. Obviously, nothing is so easy, but we did find a pattern of certain types of crew members that worked on many of the films the women pictured appeared in, mainly: jewelry, dance/choreography, and makeup.
A spreadsheet of the women with names, and the movies that each appeared in, broken down by decade.
A section of the spreadsheet comparing crew members and the different sets they worked on, with positions ranging from director to choreographer.
As exciting as it would be, there has not been any clear connection between cast and crew members, although quite a few do overlap, and the entire sheet is still being built out. However, given that some of the named women had a single acting credit as an extra, it’s probable the artist knew their subjects, or at least had a highly detailed knowledge of film of the era.
Another pattern that emerged is that all of the hundreds of drawings collected are vertical except for this one, which is one of only two full-body drawings. Many, if not most, drawings include just the subject’s head. Others detail more of an implied pose, providing just a glimpse of shoulder or hand. Rarely are these elements as fully realized as the subject’s face.
Only a few of the drawings have names, which mostly identify actresses of the era, although at least one, Gussy Morgan, was a tennis player.
Some of the better-known named actresses include:
Linda Darnell
Yvonne DeCarlo
Sari Gabor
Joan Caulfield
Yvonne DeCarlo followed her dream to Hollywood in the early 1940s, and went on to have a long career in both films (such as The Ten Commandments) and television (The Munsters.) We selected her and a few other famous actresses hoping that a movie still or promotional photo would ground the drawing in a certain time and place.
What does that process look like? Nothing more exciting than endless image searches for “Yvonne DeCarlo flower in hair” or “Linda Darnell headband” and hoping something stands out. To complicate things further, many promotional photos of the era were still taken in black and white, making it even harder to rely on details in each drawing.
Needless to say, we’re still looking.
When looking at a single, unified body of work with such consistency and depth, it becomes easier to start identifying patterns that reappeared in the artwork. Jewelry became one of the most repeated details, but in almost each piece, the subject’s lips are rendered carefully and with color, even in many of the simple pencil sketches.
Once we started noticing the attention paid to mouths, we also noticed that in many cases, the strength of the artist’s hand changed when coloring the lips, as impressions were left on the opposite side.
The following examples of some of the more fully realized double-sided pieces illustrate a few lines of inquiry that we also began to pursue:
Did the drawings appear to be made at the same time? If so, we would likely see a consistent palette and material usage, given the limited supplies used.
Is the subject the same on front and back? In most cases, it doesn’t appear so, but there are several examples where this could be the case, such as the Linda Darnell drawing below, and the full-body vertical drawing shown earlier.
Did the artist ever intend for a “front” or “back,” or were they simply using whatever was available to draw on?
