Wiard Ihnen
art director (1897-1979)
Wiard Boppo "Bill" Ihnen (August 5, 1897 – June 22, 1979) was an American art director. He was active from 1919 to 1960 and won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction for Wilson (1944) and Blood on the Sun (1945). He was married to Edith Head.
Early years
Ihnen was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. His age and year of birth are uncertain. While some sources indicate he was born in 1897, his obituary in the Los Angeles Times reported his age as 91, indicating that he was born in approximately 1888.
His father, Henry S. Ihnen, was an architect and painter of German-Frissian origin . Ihnen attended public schools in East Rutherford, New Jersey. He worked for a time as the assistant to a prominent New York architect and studied architecture at Columbia University. He also studied at École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, spent a year at the art centers of Spain and France, and studied color and technique at the University of Mexico.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q261615. VIAF identifies the subject as 40908886. The Library of Congress control number is n87911809. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1897, 1979, 1919 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wiard Ihnen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.