Van Nest Polglase

Van Nest Polglase was born in Brooklyn in 1898 and trained as an architect, a discipline that shows in the confident geometry of everything he built for the screen. He designed at Paramount and briefly at MGM before landing, in 1932, as supervising art director at RKO Pictures, where for a decade he ran one of Hollywood's most stylish design departments and, alongside Cedric Gibbons at MGM, ranked among the most influential visual overseers in the business.

RKO in the 1930s meant, above all, the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Polglase's department gave them a look as memorable as their dancing. He championed a sleek, moderne fantasy of vast, lacquered spaces—shimmering black floors, sweeping white staircases, streamlined Art Deco nightclubs—that came to be nicknamed the 'Big White Set.' In pictures like The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat and Swing Time, this luminous never-never land of elegance was the perfect stage for weightless romance, an idealized dream of luxury that helped audiences forget the Depression outside the theater. Polglase earned Academy Award nominations for several of these films.

His reach extended well beyond musicals. As RKO's supervising art director he shaped the studio's overall visual identity, and in 1941 his department—with Perry Ferguson executing much of the hands-on design—created the deep, cavernous, shadow-laden world of Citizen Kane, from the echoing halls of Xanadu to the vaulting ceilings that let Orson Welles and Gregg Toland frame their characters as prisoners of their own grandeur. It remains one of the most studied achievements in the history of film design.

Like several of his gifted contemporaries, Polglase battled alcoholism, and it eroded his standing; he left RKO in the early 1940s, worked for a time at Columbia, and drifted into lesser assignments as the decade wore on. He died in 1968, his name largely unknown to the audiences who still delight in the worlds he made. Yet the very image of 1930s screen glamour—that polished, gleaming, impossibly white elegance—is in large part his creation.