DALLAS, TX.- When the 24-year-old James Dean died in a car crash on September 30, 1955, an up-and-coming director named Robert Altman was in the middle of making a documentary about the young movie star. Altman, along with the documentary's co-director and producer, his friend George W. George, were as stunned as the rest of the world by the tragedy, with the added shock that Dean's death ground their project to halt mid-production. Following Dean's meteoric rise via his starring role in East of Eden (the much-anticipated Rebel Without a Cause and Gianthad yet to be released), the world was hungry for this filmic profile and Altman and George had Dean's full participation. Now their subject was gone.
George's daughter, Jennifer George, explains Altman and George's determination to continue the project. "They regrouped pretty quickly. They had a lot of momentum because in a sense they were just kids themselves. They had that energy." Jennifer describes the ingenious workaround devised by her father and Altman, spelled out in the completed and successful documentary's opening credits, which scroll in its first moments:
"A DIFFERENT KIND OF MOTION PICTURE … The presence of the leading character in this film has been made possible by the use of existing motion picture material, tape recordings of his voice and by means of a new technique – dynamic exploration of the still photograph."
In other words, the resulting 1957 release, The James Dean Story, relied upon as its main source material a treasure trove of gorgeous black-and-white stills of the ever-photogenic Dean at work and play — sourced from the many photographers and Dean family members who had captured the charismatic Dean throughout his short life and most prominently in his recent turn as a bona-fide movie star. The resulting film exists because of what we nowadays refer to as the "Ken Burns Effect"— named after the prolific standard-bearer of award-winning documentaries — of panning and zooming across still imagery to illustrate and illuminate the subject and the overlaying narration.
Jennifer George — who is not only George W. George's daughter but also the granddaughter of George's dad, the historic national treasure Rube Goldberg — inherited this precious archive of Dean photos used in the documentary. She's now sharing them with photography connoisseurs and collectors of Dean's legacy (if not Altman completists) in Heritage's Oct. 17 Photographs Signature® Auction . The archive anchors an event packed with not only indelible and iconic images of Dean, but also fantastic photographs by Ansel Adams, Robert Frank and Robert Mapplethorpe, George Tice, O. Winston Link and many more.
"It's a shame that the collection has been in a closet for the last 20 years," says Jennifer of her father's Dean archive. She recounts growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her prolific writer-producer father (among his later hits is My Dinner With Andre) and her mother Judith Ross, a television and film screenwriter and playwright. Being surrounded by great talent and the by-products of successful film and theater projects has always been the norm for Jennifer (she is a successful designer in her own right and the Director of The Rube Goldberg Institute) but alas, "In my own collecting, I am prone to excess!" she says. "Let's just say that in a bout of Marie Kondo-ing and Swedish Death Cleaning, I realized it was time to share this wonderful archive with others." (And in fact, a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the collection will go to The Rube Goldberg Institute, a non-profit committed to equity and access in STEM and art education.)
Most of the 42 lots in this event from the George archive include an impressive handful of lively and intimate photographs of Dean, with connected themes and places, and feature shots of the James Dean we love to remember: fooling around on and off the sets of Rebel and Giant (Liz Taylor makes an appearance of course); taking in the hustle of New York in his relaxed and ineffable style; reveling in his Porsche Spyder at the race track; hard at work in acting and dance classes (that's Eartha Kitt in the foreground); visiting his uncle's farmhouse. Dozens of photos of Dean shot by Dennis Stock for a Life magazine profile are here and were used in the documentary, including this understated beauty shot in Times Square, along with other stunning photos of the star captured by Roy Schatt, Richard C. Miller, Frank Worth and more. The photographers' visions of this incandescent talent breathed life into Altman and George's film, and is how we understand James Dean to this day – his public day-to-day and, more wrenchingly, his private playfulness, grace, and quietude. A life cut short long before we could begin to grasp his full and fiery potential. Through this surprising collection that gives movement and light to the James Dean the world could not get enough of, the young star shines on. This Heritage event embraces far more than James Dean. It sweeps through the history of photography and boasts spectacular works by the medium's greats.
Says Nigel Russell, Heritage's Director of Photographs: "This auction presents the finest of 20th century photography, from the precision of the large-format photography of Ansel Adams, O. Winston Link, Brett Weston and George Tice, the eye-popping color of dye-transfer prints by Ernst Hass and Eliot Porter, the character-defining portraiture of Yousuf Karsh, and the time-stopping high-speed stroboscopic photography of Dr. Harold Edgerton."
An exceptionally rare hand-colored print by Ansel Adams, which is an unusually large 38 x 29 inches, was commissioned by the Save the Redwoods League in 1938 and features the towering "Avenue of the Giants" near Dyerville, Humboldt County; it was created for State Commissioner A.L. Nelson for his contribution to saving the majestic redwoods. Its stately verticality captures the magic and quiet dignity of the forest. Five other Adams works are featured in the auction, including his iconic image of the moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico taken in 1941. And works from George Tice, who applied the precision and large-format authority of Adams to his subjects, are here, as he turns his camera to surprising New Jersey urban landscapes that vibrate with late 20th-century promise and encroaching social abandonment, as in this moody 1974 night scene of a Mobil gas station overshadowed by a massive and near-sinister water tower. It presupposes David Lynch's earliest dark visions by several years.Speaking of cinematic, O. Winston Link has five works in this event; his semi-rural scenes are punctuated with dramatic lighting that prefigures Gregory Crewdson by decades, as in this otherworldly 1956 gelatin silver print of a train's engine passing behind a small town's main street in the dead of night. This is the power of black and white. Robert Mapplethorpe was a later master of black and white photography and two of his covetable and luxuriously corporeal portraits of calla lilies are here. Richard Avedon's work makes an appearance in this auction with his cheeky portrait of a ready-to-rumble Janis Joplin, snapped in 1969.
A notable portfolio in this event comes from the Yosemite Climbing Association and proceeds from the works' sale goes to the Association, which preserves the history of climbing in Yosemite and promotes stewardship of public lands. These breathtaking images by various photographers capture the precarity and drama of the climb; an unlikely 2010 shot by Jimmy Chin, featuring climber Alex Honnold standing on the thin edge of the Thank God Ledge of Yosimite's Half Dome, made for a memorable cover of National Geographic in May of 2011. Images and information about these works, all lots in the auction, can be found at HA.com/8134.
A preview of highlights from the event takes place Oct. 6-7 and Oct. 9-11 at Heritage's New York headquarters.
