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Frederic Woodbridge WILSON
Theatrical World of Angus McBean [The]: Photographs from the Harvard Theatre Collection
David R. Godine 03/2009[I] ~Essay by Richard Traubner~ 1st Edition
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Hardback/Cloth ~ 220 x 245 mm. 192pp 120 duotone photographs. ~Imagio Mundi series. Published: March 2009

The photography of Angus McBean (1904-1990) encompasses more than three decades of the history of British theatre. His work includes most of the memorable productions of the Old Vic Company and of what is now the Royal Shakespeare Company; opera productions at Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; ballet and operetta at Sadler's Wells; and West End productions of plays and musicals both old and new - hundreds of productions in all.

He was the favourite photographer of Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, and Edith Evans, and he photographed countless plays starring John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Alec Guinness, not to mention younger stars such as Audrey Hepburn, Richard Burton, and Elizabeth Taylor. In fact, McBean photographed virtually all of the great actors of his era, perhaps the most brilliant years in the annals of British theatre.

His studio was active and eclectic; among his patrons were not only actors, singers, and dancers, but also playwrights, producers, composers, artists, and writers. In his early career, McBean had been a pioneer of surrealist photography, with a highly popular series of 'surrealised' portraits that appeared in The Sketch, and, later, of montage and multiple-exposure photography in a long-running series for The Tatler.

In 1969 McBean approached Harvard University concerning the sale of his collection, and in the following year his archive of glass plate negatives, index prints, and programs, together with the copyrights, became a part of the Harvard Theatre Collection, where it remains the most often-requested collection of visual material.

The illustrations in this book, selected and captioned by the archive's curator, Fredric Woodbridge Wilson, have been carefully reproduced from the original negatives.

For anyone interested in the history of 20th-century theatre or the figures who made the British stage so fascinating, this is a book that rolls back the curtain to reveal a cast of stars.

Fredric Woodbridge Wilson has been Curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection since 1996. He has organised and mounted more than 40 library and museum exhibitions, on subjects as diverse as the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, artist Al Hirschfeld, and choreographer George Balanchine. In 2004, he organised the centenary exhibition on Angus McBean, drawn entirely from the extensive photographic archive at the Harvard Theatre Collection.

ISBN: 9781567923605 [Stock #7499]
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David R. Godine      Photography      Theatre history     

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