Glamour of the Gods night at the National Portrait Gallery of London - the report

On Friday night I went to the free special evening organized by the National Portrait Gallery Late Shift Extra: The Glamour Factory around their Photo Exhibition Glamour of The Gods. 

The stakes were high: you could have a retro hairdo & make up and then be photographed in a star pose, hear talks about Beauty, watch Top Hat, a Black & White movie with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, etc. 

Being in love with all things retro, my main draw for coming was the 30's hairdo & make-up which I wasn't able to do at the last Vintage Festival held in August at SouthBank Centre due to the never ending queue of like-minded women dying to look like a cinema star. So there I was, starting to queue for my long awaited retro make up and hair-do at the National Portrait Gallery when the staff told us there was no point queuing, because all the "free" tickets had been sold out. 

Right. I wasn't going to let that ruin the evening so I decided instead to go for a talk entitled "What is Beauty?". 

Danny Rees from the Wellcome Library explained how large eyes and high eyebrows helped considerably in perceiving people as beautiful (which I guess also explains why so many women spend fortunes on making them seem bigger with make up AND why actresses at the time always had their eyebrows reshaped with a pencil). He also explained why smiling is so important and important it is to master faking it for stars. Basically a smile on a face is something you see from afar. So if you don't know the person in front of you, and they start smiling, it sends us the message: "I'm no threat to you". You can tell if someone is genuinely smiling if their eyes crease as they smile. If they're forcing a smile, only the mouth smiles and the eyes remain static. Then he went on observing that in movies generally the bad guy is always ugly and the good guy is always good-looking which could be an interpretation of something much older. Greek Philosophers Sapho & Plato thought that if you're beautiful inside, you're beautiful outside. But then I kind of remember Manson was not too bad and still was the serial killer everyone knows. So there goes Plato. 

Then I went to hear a talk by Dr David Gems (Institute of Healthy Aging, UCL) entitled the Immortality tour. He was taking the example of a son who couldn't deal with his mother's death and decided to freeze her. After all f you bury someone you're sure they will decay whereas if you "freeze" them you keep the tiny hope that science will be sufficiently advanced to revive your loved ones while you're still alive... I didn't see the rest as I had to meet a friend of mine. And off we went to watch the movie Top Hat. I had personally never seen a Fred Astaire & Ginger Rodgers movie. Top Hat is one of these intrigues à la Marivaux where someone is mistaken for someone else and everybody finds out at the end their error... I marveled at the dance, the moves, the singing, the incredible decorum of the Italian scenes & also the clothes. Ginger Rogers is wearing magnificent dresses (Gosh, that white feather dress!) all along the movie which made me wonder how she could manage to dance in them. But all seems effortless. And it's a great comedy. 


In the end a nice evening even though I will have to find yet another retro event to have my hair and make up done in a Glamour of the Gods way! 


June Caravel.

Glamour of the Gods at the National Portrait Gallery of London

Glamour of the Gods is a celebration of Hollywood portraiture from the industry's 'Golden Age', the period 1920 to 1960. From Greta Garbo and Clark Gable to Audrey Hepburn, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, these portraits have transformed actors and actresses into international style icons. In many cases these are the career-defining images of Hollywood's greatest names and help to illustrate their enduring appeal.
Featuring over 70 photographs, most of which are exquisite vintage prints displayed for the first time, the exhibition is drawn from the extraordinary archive of the John Kobal Foundation and demonstrate photography's decisive role in creating and marketing the stars central to the Hollywood mystique.

More info on: http://www.npg.org.uk/glamour/exhib.htm

Irving Penn at the National Portrait Gallery in London

Penn photographed an extraordinary range of celebrities from the worlds of literature, music and the visual and performing arts. This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London (on display until 6th June 2010) is brought together from major international collections and includes over 120 silver and platinum prints, many vintage, ranging from his portraits for Vogue magazine in the 1940s to some of his last work.  

Among those featured in the exhibition are Truman Capote, Salvador Dali, Christian Dior, T.S. Eliot, Duke Ellington, Grace Kelly, Rudolf Nureyev, Al Pacino, Edith Piaf, Pablo Picasso and Harold Pinter.

Beautiful !

More info on:  http://www.npg.org.uk/

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008

Dafydd Jones, Mick Jagger, Madonna and Tony Curtis, 1997

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008 at the National Portrait Gallery in London:


This exhibition of about 150 portraits taken for Vanity Fair includes such subjects as Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and Jean Harlow published during the magazine's first incarnation from 1913-36, and Madonna, President Reagan and Scarlett Johansson published since its relaunch in 1983. It includes works by Edward Steichen, Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino. The show is sponsored by Burberry. Above right, Dafydd Jones, Mick Jagger, Madonna and Tony Curtis, 1997.


To learn more: www.npg.org.uk

Pop Art Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London

Self-Portrait Andy Warhol, 1964. Acrylic, silver paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 508 x 406mm Stefan T. Edlis Collection © Licensed by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York and DACS, London 2007

This major international exhibition, held at the National Portrait Gallery in London, from 11 October 2007 to January 20 2008, is the first to explore the role and significance of portraiture within Pop Art, one of the most important and popular artistic movements of the twentieth century. Presenting a visual dialogue between American and British Pop, the exhibition focuses on key portraits by leading artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton.
Pop Art flourished in Britain and the USA during the 1950s and 1960s and was closely connected with the rise of consumer culture. For that reason Pop is usually seen as being concerned with the depiction of objects. Pop Art Portraits takes a different view. It shows how Pop artists reinvigorated and redefined portraiture, creating new kinds of portraits: from those depicting recognizable sitters, to portraits with a hidden or imaginary subject.
The exhibition is divided into six sections, including screenings of Warhol’s influential Screen Tests and a secular ‘chapel’ devoted to portraits of film star Marilyn Monroe:

Origins of Pop Art
Portraits and Style
Fantasy
Pop Art and Film
Marilyn
Innocence
Experience

This exhibition is really well made, and all the pieces are the ones you've seen in every book. I really liked the Andy Warhol portrait used as the official visual of the exhibition, as well as the silver Elvis, both by Warhol. Screen tests are really not to be missed. But the exhibition is not only about Warhol, and most of the famous artists of Pop Art are displayed.
To learn more :
www.npg.org.uk/popart/popart_home.htm

Face of Fashion, National Gallery, London.

"15 February - 28 May 2007 in the Wolfson Gallery

Face of Fashion focuses on the portraits of five outstanding fashion photographers from Europe and America: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott, Corinne Day, Steven Klein, Paolo Roversi and Mario Sorrenti. It is the first exhibition of its kind, celebrating the innovation and diversity of current fashion portraiture. In the contemporary fashion world, models, actors, musicians and designers frequently swap places. The exhibition highlights the relationship between fashion and celebrity and illustrates the extraordinary intimacy that often develops between photographer and subject. The exhibition is curated by Susan Bright and the installation is designed by David Adjaye. "

I recently went to Face of Fashion at the National Gallery, here in London. I must say that it was quite deceiving. More than "Face of Fashion", it should have been called "Kate Moss" and even if I pretty much like Kate Moss, (worship her I should say more than like the people that don't know why she is so big...) I have to say it was a very small exhibition.

Apart from Steven Klein (but it is purely subjective) I was not impressed or touched at all.

Not so many photos, bad museography, not so many photographers...

In a nutshell it could have been so much better. Too bad !

Anyway now the exhibition has ended. The only picture I will remember is the one showing here. This picture fascinates me since it is like the quintessence of good tastes: Black and White Kate Moss wearing an amazing Dior Homme suit, posing like Marlene Dietrich. Itself this picture concentrates the best references ever...

More info on:
http://www.npg.org.uk/fashion/