Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521244
1 2 8 P E R S P E C T I V E | M AY / J U N E 2 0 2 4 This charcoal sketch of the exterior of a train station is from Yellow Dust, a 1936 RKO film designed under the supervision of Van Nest Polglase. Polglase started off designing films for Gloria Swanson in the Paramount Studios in Astoria during the 1920s. He moved to Hollywood and worked for a brief time at MGM under Cedric Gibbons before moving to RKO in 1933 and setting himself up as the head of the Art Department, based on Gibbons' model, where he received design credit for all the films done by the studio. In 1936, the year of Yellow Dust, he is credited as the designer of thirty-four films. RKO in the '30s made numerous Westerns, but it was identified with the extravagant Art Deco musicals of Astaire and Rodgers. Polglase would go on to oversee the designs of classics like Orson Welle's Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion, and continued as an Art Director into the late 1950s. The "Mother Lode" charcoal sketch has a barely discernible signature by Al Pyke in the lower right. Although not credited on the film, Pyke is known to have contributed sketches for Citizen Kane, and Art Directed many TV Westerns in the early days of television. with a career that stretched into the 1960s. RESHOOTS B Y D AV I D M O R O N G , E D I T O R S E L E C T I O N S F R O M T H E A D G A R C H I V E S COURTESY OF THE ADG COLLECTIONS AT THE MARGARET HERRICK LIBRARY, A.M.P.A.S. A A. KEYFRAME ILLUSTRATION FOR THE FILM YELLOW DUST. ART DIRECTOR VAN NEST POLGLASE. CHARCOAL ON ILLUSTRATION BOARD, 13 X 20 INCHES.