Old Hollywood’s Glamour Is Heading to Fort Worth For Arresting New Amon Carter Exhibition — Karl Struss and Moving Pictures Take Centerstage

Fort Worth’s Amon Carter Museum of American Art has a major retrospective planned for next spring. One that is worth teasing now. The exhibition transport a lot of the glam and taste of old Hollywood to Cowtown. The earliest days of moving pictures will be the subject matter when Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood rolls into town in May of 2024. 

Photographer Karl Struss witnessed the transformation firsthand, with a new medium coming to life right before his eyes. Still photographic images began to take on movement. It was a spectacle to be sure, marking the birth of modern cinematography. Alongside films and other Hollywood ephemera, including materials from the Amon Carter’s archival holdings, will be more than 100 images from this Fort Worth museum treasure’s extensive Struss Artist Archive, as well as other supplemental loans.

Moving Pictures: Karl Struss and the Rise of Hollywood charts the career of the photographer-turned-filmmaker who helped define American cinematography ― which is one of the most American art forms of all. It will also highlight Struss’ innovations in image making and his contributions to the movie industry. This highly-anticipated exhibition closely examines Karl Struss’ impact on Hollywood’s golden age and the field of cinematography at large.

Moving Pictures will be on view at the Carter from May 12, 2024 through August 25, 2024.

Struss’ career began in New York, where he was highly esteemed. His fine art photography was featured in publications like Vanity Fair and the Picture-Play Weekly magazine. After his move to Los Angeles in 1919, Straus became one of the earliest cinematographers. It was on the sets of DeMille’s For Better, for Worse (1919) and Male and Female (1919) that Struss was first placed behind a motion picture camera. He adapted to the rise of talkies and the creation of the studio system.

What a career. And, what a vantage point to relive the golden years of a burgeoning art form.

The exhibition closes by examining Struss’s career in the 1930s and 1940s. That is when his work — including iconic Hollywood movies like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and The Great Dictator (1940) — earned him three more Oscar nominations and solidified him as a leading cinematographer of the golden age of Hollywood. Struss even served as a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

This final section of this Amon Carter exhibition will include The Cinematographer, a short film created by the Academy in 1951 featuring Struss as the leader of the craft.

“The story behind this presentation is one that only the Carter can tell, made possible by the breadth and depth of our Struss Artist Archive and continuing the museum’s longstanding tradition of researching, promoting and interpreting significant American artists whose legacies have been entrusted to our care,” Amon Carter associate curator of photographs Kristen Gaylord says.

Echoing the famous line from Sunset Boulevard, “Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup,” the work of Karl Struss surely will be ready for its closeup when it gets the Amon Carter spotlight in one of next year’s most exciting new art happenings.