San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Movie magic unfolds at theMcNay asMGMbackdrops go on exhibit
Divine artwork for 1968 film re-creates the Sistine Chapel
When the production team was preparing for “The Shoes of the Fisherman,” a 1968 religious drama set partially at the Vatican, they sought permission to shoot some scenes in the Sistine Chapel. The answer was no.
So when clergy members invited to the premiere saw characters meeting in the chapel, surrounded by some of the most famous artwork in the world, they were outraged. Their reaction may have been one of the best reviews ever of movie magic, because the cameras never rolled inside the Sistine Chapel. All the frescoes originally painted by such masters as Michelangelo and Botticelli were re-created as backdrops for the film.
“They were so convincingly painted, they fooled the clergy,” said Karen L. Maness, who cowrote the 2016 book “The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop” and worked on the Backdrop Recovery Project, a campaign to preserve 200 pieces from MGM films that seemed destined for destruction.
For her effort, Maness was permitted to select 50 backdrops, which are now stored at Texas Performing Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. Maness teaches at the university and is scenic art supervisor for the performing arts center. Among the 50 backdrops she chose were those from “The Shoes of the Fisherman.”
McNay Art Museum visitors can judge the quality of some of the “Fisherman” backdrops for themselves. Six of them form the spine of “Hollywood’s Sistine Chapel: Sacred Sets for Stage & Screen,” an exhibit in the museum’s Brown and Tobin Theatre Arts galleries.
The exhibit, the first time the backdrops have been shown to the public, is a collaboration between the McNay and Texas Performing Arts.
“They’re part of Hollywood’s hidden history,” Maness said. “They were part of the illusion of transporting the audience into the belief that they are someplace else, part of the magic of Hollywood storytelling.”
Those who take a good look at the backdrops, enormous works that take up a lot of real estate in the galleries, can get a sense of how they were used, said R. Scott Blackshire, curator of the museum’s Tobin Collection of Theatre Arts.
“They’re hardworking pieces of set,” he said. “And you can see on the edges, you can see where they’ve been taped, where they’ve been numbered, you can see
staple marks where they’ve been stapled onto the frame for the set. And you can see the artistry.
“The group of artists who created these were some of the best artists from around the world at the time to come in and make, in a sense, copies of Renaissance masters.”
The murals are hung throughout the galleries alongside maquettes for operas, which give a sense of how backdrops are used in those productions, and some related contemporary art pieces.
“I wanted it to feel theatrical,” said Blackshire, who co-curated the show with Maness and Timothy J. Chagolla Retzloff, co-curator of the Tobin Collection. “I knew that the large scale of these would be something of a spectacle. At the same time, I wanted to relate these backdrops to Renaissanceinspired theater designs that are in the collection, as well as look at some of the Renaissance art from the McNay collection.
“The balance is to be clear that these are not Renaissance murals. So it’s really focusing on the theater art aspect of it — the painting,
the canvases, and the fact that they were used to re-create the Sistine Chapel for a movie set in the exact same way (backdrops) would be used for an opera or for musical theater or for a play.”
Also on display are videos, including scenes from the film, as well as information about the Backdrop Recovery Project, which saved 207 pieces, many of which had been featured in such iconic movies as “North by Northwest,” “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Wizard of Oz.”
The Backdrop Recovery Project and the book Maness co-wrote with Richard M. Isackes were inspired by a desire to preserve an art form and the history behind it, both of which were threatened.
“Prior to that book being published, scenic artists had never been credited for their work,” Maness said. “They never got screen credit. This was an effort by the Art Directors Guild to capture their knowledge and conduct interviews with these artists. So much of that skill and the need for backdrops was being supplanted by digital technology.
“They recognized, especially TomWalsh, the former director of the Art Directors Guild, the need to capture these stories before they were gone.”
The recovery project began when JC Backings, a rental company whose stock included hundreds of backdrops used by MGM, reached out to the guild. Demand for the backdrops had been dropping, and the company no longer needed to keep so many. So it
offered them to the guild, which sought to document and find new homes for them. Some were taken by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; some went to museums and colleges.
In the backdrops Maness chose for UT-Austin, she aimed for a range of painting and design styles to maximize their usefulness for students. She selected two from “National Velvet” and one from “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.” And she couldn’t resist the “Shoes of the Fisherman” pieces: “Honestly, I think it was having the Sistine Chapel at UT that pretty much sealed the deal.”
Richard Aste, director and CEO of the McNay, happens to be an Italian Renaissance scholar who is intimately acquainted with the works in the actual Sistine Chapel. He praised the connections that Blackshire creates between the backdrops and the other artwork in the exhibit, which forge connections across time. And he is impressed by the skill of the backdrop artists.
“Because of the remarkable scale of these works and the impact that they have from a distance, you do feel like you’re looking at an original fresco from 500 years ago,” he said.
“Hollywood’s Sistine Chapel: Sacred Sets for Stage & Screen” can be seen at the McNay Art Museum, 6000 N. New Braunfels, through April 4. Info, tinyurl.com/ yyututmr; 210-824-5368.