| This dissertation surveys the achievements of motion picture art director Cedric Gibbons (1890-1960), whose work represents an essential aspect of the history of design. After training at New York's Art Students League and working at Goldwyn Pictures, Gibbons rose to prominence as the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Art Department, where he gained unparalleled recognition as one of the screen's most important designers. Gibbons set the film industry's artistic standards through his elegant settings and sophisticated sense of style. Films including the Greta Garbo vehicles The Temptress (1926) and Ninotchka (1939), period pieces for Norma Shearer such as Romeo and Juliet (1936) and Marie Antoinette (1938), and ensemble dramas with Joan Crawford including Grand Hotel (1932) and The Women (1939) all owed their physical form to Gibbons. His sets gave MGM films the distinctive look that attracted audiences, garnered critical acclaim, and popularized ideas about architecture and interior decoration. Working for MGM brought him other commissions, including private residences for the studio's executives and the Oscar statuette, a design that secured his status as Hollywood's arbiter of taste. Gibbons's own home in Santa Monica, with its crisp white walls and broad expanses of glass, reflects his interests in the modernistic design trends of the 1920s. By featuring modern architecture in his movie sets, Gibbons introduced it to a mass audience and helped to popularize it. His settings from the 1930s accommodated the added dimension of dialogue by conveying the spatial dynamics of real architecture. Whether designing vast settings for the silent screen or intimate drawing rooms for sound films, Gibbons's work paralleled the development of the cinema itself, and his designs contributed significantly to the evolution of motion picture artistry. |
