Behind the Cameras is a lithograph created about 1935 by American artist, Mildred Marion Coughlin. It is pencil signed, titled and editioned 6/20. Behind the Cameras was printed by Paul Roeher in Los Angeles on cream Rives wove paper and the image measures 9 x 11-5/8 inches.
Behind the Cameras shows Coughlin’s mastery of lithography and design, as well as her delightful sense of humor. Her image is a dark vortex surrounding three figures illuminated by a single light bulb. The cameras and hot lights are facing away from six women all coifed and wrapped identically apparently awaiting to be called to action. The entire scene suggests the tedium of waiting to be in front of the cameras: one woman is reapplying her lipstick, the bowed heads of the others imply they are studying of their scripts or taking beauty naps, a seated man in the right corner reads the newspaper, while another man is causally standing with his left hand in the pocket of his overalls as a cigarette dangles from his lips.
Mildred Marion Coughlin, painter, printmaker, illustrator, and scenic designer, was born 16 July 1892 to James M. and Mary Welter Coughlin in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Her father was the superintendent of the public schools in Wilkes-Barre and she graduated from the Wilkes-Barre High School in 1910. She received her B.A. degree from Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and then furthered her studies at the Art Students League in New York and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Coughlin married Patterson McNutt, author, actor, playwright, producer, and screenwriter, on 12 January 1924 in Luzerne, Pennsylvania. The couple lived in New York before moving to Los Angeles in 1930.
As a printmaker, Coughlin made etchings while in France and New York but during the 1930s she created a number of lithographs depicting and gently poking fun at the Hollywood movie industry. She captured the hot lights and crowded set in Hollywood Close Shot and Behind the Cameras, the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood starlets in The Great Ziegfeld, and haute boredom of the coifed patrons in Trocadero. In her distinctive drawing style, she rendered daily life at the Los Angeles Farmers Market and race day at Santa Anita racetrack. The Los Angeles-based printer Paul Roeher is known to have printed some of her lithographs. Coughlin also made a series of etching depicting the game of golf, also in her deftly humorous style.
Coughlin was a member of and exhibited with the Society of American Etchers, the Chicago Society of Etchers, the Southern Printmakers, and the California Society of Etchers. Her work is represented in the collections of the Print Collection of the New York Public Library, New York; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Mildred Marion Coughlin McNutt died in Sonoma, California on 3 December 1984.
