Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1010570
6 2 P E R S P E C T I V E | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 8 Over the span of his forty-two- year career, he contributed to the design of over two thousand motion pictures, starting with Nickelodeons and the silver screen, to the advent of sound and color, and was the great champion for the lavish stylings of art deco and streamline moderne design for the cinema. Cedric was not only a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but he was also the designer of its iconic Oscar statuette, and to this day, he remains the most rewarded Art Director of all time, receiving thirty-nine Academy Award nominations and eleven wins. Without exaggeration, it can be said that he was the single most influential Art Director in the history of the American cinema who would shape and define Art Direction for motion pictures during its Golden Age. Austin Cedric Gibbons was born in 1890 in a small tenement flat opposite the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York. The eldest of three children, his sister Veronica was five years younger and his brother Elliot was the baby at fifteen years younger. A shy child, Cedric was devoted to his Irish mother, Veronica Fitzpatrick Gibbons, who tragically died of kidney disease just after his twentieth birthday. Cedric's father, Austin Gibbons, was a struggling architect and builder who was devastated by the loss of his wife and became emotionally incapable of caring for his family. Austin would soon abandon his three children and disappear completely from their lives, leaving Cedric to provide for his siblings. Prior to the death of his mother, Cedric had attended public school and briefly pursued his dream of becoming a classically trained architect and artist, enrolling part time at the Art Students League. Sadly, with his savings exhausted after three months and a family now to provide for, he abandoned his dream and took a job working as a grocery clerk in Brooklyn. Hugo Ballin, an instructor at the Art Students League, was an artist, muralist, sculptor and stage designer, and he was starting to create sets for motion pictures at Thomas Edison's new studio in the Bronx. Taking an interest in young Cedric, he would become his mentor and lifelong friend. Opened in 1907, Thomas Edison's company was creating stories on film for silent movies. Producing a movie a day, motion pictures were very simple at that time, but rapidly evolving. It was during this period that three-dimensional environments and locations were replacing theatrical sets and painted backdrops and Cedric was at the center and beginning of this new enterprise. At Edison Studios, the delineated roles in the Art Department were not yet clearly defined, Cedric A. ARTIST ALAN VILLANUEVA'S CARICATURE OF CEDRIC GIBBONS HOLDING THE OSCAR STATUETTE THAT HE DESIGNED, WHICH WAS SCULPTED BY ARTIST GEORGE STANLEY IN 1928. B. A 1917 PHOTOGRAPH OF GIBBONS AT AGE 27, THE EARLIEST KNOWN IMAGE OF THE DESIGNER. C. HUGO BALLIN (1879- 1956). A SUCCESSFUL FINE ARTIST AND MURALIST, HE WAS ONE OF THE AMERICAN CINEMA'S FIRST ART AND FILM DIRECTORS. HE WAS A TEACHER, MENTOR AND LIFELONG FRIEND TO CEDRIC GIBBONS. A B C