Herman Rosse
Encyclopedia
Hermann Rosse was a Dutch-born American art director
Art director
The art director is a person who supervise the creative process of a design.The term 'art director' is a blanket title for a variety of similar job functions in advertising, publishing, film and television, the Internet, and video games....

. He won an Academy Award for Best Art Direction
Academy Award for Best Art Direction
The Academy Awards are the oldest awards ceremony for achievements in motion pictures. The Academy Award for Best Art Direction recognizes achievement in art direction on a film. The films below are listed with their production year, so the Oscar 2000 for best art direction went to a film from 1999...

 for the film King of Jazz
King of Jazz
King of Jazz is a 1930 motion picture starring Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. The film's title was taken from Whiteman's controversial, self-conferred appellation...

.

He was born in The Hague
The Hague
The Hague is the capital city of the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. With a population of 500,000 inhabitants , it is the third largest city of the Netherlands, after Amsterdam and Rotterdam...

, Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 and died in Nyack, New York
Nyack, New York
Nyack is a village in the towns of Orangetown and Clarkstown in Rockland County, New York, United States, located north of South Nyack; east of Central Nyack; south of Upper Nyack and west of the Hudson River, approximately 19 miles north of the Manhattan boundary, it is an inner suburb of New...

. Herman was the second child of Carel Rosse (8 March 1857 at Kassevitz - ?) and Jacoba, Susanna de Haan. The elder sister of Herman, Bertha, Suzanna (SUZE) Rosse (The Hague, 1 September 1884 - 17 April 1968) became a well known Dutch painter.

Hermann Rosse studied architecture and design at the Royal College of Art, London, and after a period of travel in Asia also attended Stanford University, where he earned his B.A. From 1911 to 1913 he produced most of the decorative interior
designs – including paintings, stained glass, tiles, and marquetry – for the Peace Palace at The Hague; and while working there he met his future wife, Sophia Helena Luyt (1891–1982), a landscape architect who was responsible for the design of the formal gardens. Together they moved to California, where Rosse was commissioned to design decorations for the Netherlands pavilion at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. There he also made his first set and costume designs for theatre. In 1918 he moved to Illinois, where he had accepted an appointment to head the Design Department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to teaching, he took private commissions for interiors, fabric design, and book illustrations, and made further designs for the stage in conjunction with Ben Hecht, Kenneth Macgowan, the Goodman Theater, and Mary Garden’s Chicago Grand Opera.

In 1923 Rosse moved with his family to New City in Rockland County, New York. He was already familiar with the New York theatre world, and now became more closely involved with drama, vaudeville, and musicals. In 1929 he went to Hollywood as Art
Director of John Murray Anderson’s film King of Jazz, starring Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, for which Rosse’s imaginative and technically innovative designs earned him the Academy Award for Art Direction (now in the Chapin Library). For the next several years he continued to design for films, including the classics Frankenstein and The Emperor Jones, but also worked in theatre in
London and the Netherlands, taught as the Professor of Decorative Art at the Technische Hoogeschool in Delft, and designed Dutch pavilions at world’s fairs in Brussels, Paris, and New York. In 1948 Rosse was appointed Resident Stage designer at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey. He worked there for a dozen years, while also editing Chapter One, the newsletter of the
Greater New York chapter of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA). In 1949 he won a competition to design the Tony Award, the silver prototype of which is in the Chapin Library. Rosse died in Nyack, New York in April 1965. Since 1988 members of the Rosse family have donated books, manuscripts, paintings, drawings, prints, plans, photographs, documents, and memorabilia
concerning the work of Herman and Helena Rosse to Chapin Library, Williams College Williamstown, Massachusetts (USA).

Filmography

  • The Emperor Jones
    The Emperor Jones (1933 film)
    The Emperor Jones is a 1933 film adaptation of the Eugene O'Neill play of the same title, directed by Dudley Murphy, featuring Paul Robeson, Dudley Digges, Frank H. Wilson, and Fredi Washington. The screenplay was written by DuBose Heyward and filmed at Kaufman Astoria Studios with the beach scene...

    (1933)
  • Strictly Dishonorable
    Strictly Dishonorable (1931 film)
    Strictly Dishonorable is a 1931 romantic comedy film directed by John M. Stahl, starring Paul Lukas, Sidney Fox and Lewis Stone, and featuring George Meeker and Sidney Toler. It was written by Gladys Lehman and based on Preston Sturges' 1929 hit Broadway play of the same name...

    (1931)
  • Resurrection
    Resurrection (1931 English-language film)
    Resurrection is a 1931 English-language adaptation of the Leo Tolstoy novel Resurrection produced by Universal Studios. It was an all-talking version starring John Boles and Lupe Vélez. It was directed by Edwin Carewe, who had also directed the previous 1927 silent adaptation. A Spanish language...

    (1931)
  • East Is West (1930)
  • King of Jazz
    King of Jazz
    King of Jazz is a 1930 motion picture starring Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. The film's title was taken from Whiteman's controversial, self-conferred appellation...

    (1930)
  • Oriente y occidente (1930)

External links

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