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Silver Screen History


Mural for the Santa Monica Library: Moving Picture Industry (with Gloria Stuart) United Artists, one of America's oldest and most successful film companies, was established on this day in 1919 by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith.

Motion Picture Industry by Stanton MacDonald-Wright pays tribute to Hollywood's film industry. The work is part of a large mural executed for the Santa Monica Public Library in 1935 on the theme of invention and imagination.

The motion picture as an art form is represented in the last panel showing the marriage of technology and artistic creativity. MacDonald-Wright, who was raised in Santa Monica, was a key figure in the development of Synchromism, a theory of color abstraction.

Pictured: Stanton MacDonald-Wright, 1890–1973, Mural for the Santa Monica Library: Moving Picture Industry (with Gloria Stuart), 1934–1935, oil on wood, 119 1/8 x 114 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the City of Santa Monica, California.