Emil Kosa junior

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Emil Jean Kosa junior (born November 28, 1903 in Paris , France , † November 4, 1968 in Los Angeles , United States ) was a French painter, all-round artist and Oscar winner, who made a name for himself in Hollywood with backdrop background paintings (so-called matte painting ) and optical special effects.

Live and act

Training and first artistic activities

Kosa came to the United States for the first time in 1908 when the father moved the family to Cape Cod . In 1912 the family moved to Bohemia, where Kosa junior received his first artistic training at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts at the end of the First World War. In 1921 Emil Kosa returned to the USA and received further training there. By the end of the same decade, Kosa settled in California, where he enrolled at the California Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1927, the year he became a US citizen. Back in Europe, Emil Kosa junior continued his studies at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris with Pierre Laurens . He also received lessons in the field of modern design and non-representational painting from Frank Kupka . In 1928 Kosa returned home to California and married Mary Odisho. With his father Emil Kosa senior he made wall paintings and ran a business that specialized in decorative arts for churches and auditoriums. At the beginning of the 1930s, Kosa junior made friends with Millard Sheets , who specializes in Californian scene painting , and who emphatically inspired him to paint in watercolor .

With the film

A little later, Kosa also made contact with the film industry and was taken over by Fox Corp. or the resulting, later Twentieth Century Fox as the person responsible for the creation of background paintings for film sets. In this context, Kosa also designed the famous, proprietary searchlight logo ("Fox Searchlight Pictures") in 1933 and made a name for himself in the industry as a designer of special photographic effects. He remained loyal to Centfox for three and a half decades until his death-related career ended in 1968. The world premiere of the last film with his participation, the world hit musical Hello Dolly , was not to see Emile Kosa again.

In 1964 Emil Kosa jr. for his work on the monumental Cleopatra film, which was made by 1962, received an Oscar in the category “ Best Visual Effects ”. Kosa's most famous idea could be seen a few years later in the final scene of the classic science fiction film Planet of the Apes : There the ruins of the New York Statue of Liberty lay on the sandy beach and made it clear to the people who had fled from the monkey rulers that they were not on one alien planets, but on earth - not an idea of ​​a scene, but a Kosa painting. In addition to his intensive work for the film, especially in the last ten years of his life, Emil Kosa jr. until the end of his great love, watercolor and oil painting. But he also won several prizes for pencil drawings and pastel paintings. His works found their way into various galleries on both the American west and east coast. His portrait of the American lawyer and politician Earl Warren has been included in the National Portrait Gallery of Washington, DC.

Filmography

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