When I heard that LACMA had opened “Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008,” as a photographer and artist, I was excited. Viewing the 130 celebrity photographs was informative and disturbing in various ways, even more so when I read Christopher Knight’s review of the show.
The exhibit is a collaboration between London’s National Portrait Gallery and Vanity Fair. Knight finds the mission statement of the gallery “of biographical inquisitiveness and artistic apathy grammatically odd,” but enduring.
Knight dismisses the exhibit:
“Vanity Fair Portraits” is a vanity exhibition, plain and simple. And that’s precisely what our historic moment needs least right now, especially from a major civic art museum.
Tyler Green in his art blog generally questions having the exhibit before it even opened. In an aside, he notes,
The show opened at London’s National Portrait Gallery and will travel to other portrait galleries. LACMA is the only encyclopedic art museum on the tour.
And yet, what about the exhibit? The exhibit opens with two impressive black and white photos: one of Maggie Thatcher and the other of Princess Diana, post-divorce.
The Thatcher portrait engulf this formidable political figure in black. Her neck rises from the white of her clothing and this draws us up to her face–wrinkles and all. She knows she is sitting for a portrait and the detail would be, for the average starlet or glamor-hungry woman, too much reality.
Diana’s portrait is grainy and mostly printed with a wide range of gray values. The photos seems casual, as if anything such a publicity savvy woman could really be so uncalculating–and to a photographer, they seem underdeveloped. By this I mean a photographer’s trick to make older women seem younger is to either blow out the defining shadows with lighting and not printing for a full range of blacks, grays and white. (Other tricks include airbrushing or using soft focus filters.)
Thatcher is photographed with graphic, photojournalistic honesty; Diana with a portrait artist’s eye to flatter. We see two possibilities for portraiture: truth and flattery. For the British, that’s very much a historical conundrum. Who can forget the debacle when Henry VIII was shown a portrait of Anne of Cleves and the marriage that was amicably annulled.
Of course, not all of the photographs were in black and white. “Vanity Fair,” like any other modern magazine, has plenty of color photographs, including some exceptional and even culturally notable ones used on its cover. Take the one of the nude and very pregnant Demi Moore. This, but not the equally nude though coyly painted Moore is there. Did the painted clothes nude of Moore lead or follow “Sports Illustrated”? I don’t know, It might be an interesting though minor point–the greater point would be the polarity between how women are presented, the minor shifts and the comparison with how men are presented.
One can still admire the masterful use of color to move the eye such as (how does one balance the pale Nicole Kidman against other more tanned women), but there’s something disquieting about how women are portrayed still. Thatcher is photographed almost as one traditionally photographed men. Yet there are a bevy of beautiful women nude–including “serious” actors, but men, even movie stars, aren’t expected to pose nude.
The question of how matter-of-fact female nudes are taken raises questions about both “Vanity Fair” and portraiture, questions raised a few decades ago about women, art and nudity. At least now we have major women photographers and they do have their work shown in major art museums.
In color, the flattery of portraiture takes the form of endless retouching, creating a painterly effect and yet it all seems a bit smarmy. Many of these are the color group photographs, some done by Annie Leibovitz. Leibovitz’s portraits of Arnold Schwarzennegger, Kate Winslet, Lance Armstrong and George Clooney are on display.
More strikingly beautiful are the black and white images. Edward Steichen’s portrait of Gloria Swanson. His photos of Anna May Wong, Louise Brooks and Paul Robeson are included.
Other celebrity portraits on display include Picasso, Albert Einstein, Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Noel Coward and Fred and Adele Astaire. Cecil Beaton, Baron de Meyer, Man Ray. O.E. Hopper and George Hurrell are among the photographers whose work is represented here.
As Knight notes:
An exhibition of 130 celebrity images by numerous photographers, it pays special attention to two: Edward Steichen from the magazine’s original incarnation (1913-1936) and Annie Leibovitz from its reincarnation (1983-present). Why “Vanity Fair Portraits” is taking up valuable art museum space is anyone’s guess. Steichen and Leibovitz are major celebrity photographers, but they are minor artists.
Quite a harsh judgment of two recent photographers. Steichen (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) was not only a photographer, but also a painter and a museum curator (Museum of Modern Art in New York). In 1945, he won an Academy Award for Best documentary (“The Fighting Lady”). In 2006, one of his early photographs sold for $2.9 million at auction (“The Pond-Moonlight”).
Leibovitz, whose work has previously been displayed at LACMA, is a working and highly successful photographer. For “Vanity Fair,” she is photographing people who love the camera and whom the camera loves in the case of movie stars. That would seem a natural match. Yet there are also photographers of politicians, public servants, athletes and scientists. For photographers, it is instructive to see what is considered top quality portrait photography because to a certain extent I am sure they want their work to be seen and valued and they want to be successful.
What I am unclear about is just where the line is drawn between a photographer as a craftsman and a photographer as an artist. This, of course, is one of the continuing controversies, not only in art criticism, but also in art galleries and art schools and departments. Is this why Knight considers both Leibovitz and Steichen minor artists?
It seems too early to determine the artistic merit of these two people. After all, Charles and Henry Greene who worked in Pasadena weren’t appreciated during their lifetime, nor was Vincent Van Gogh. Of course, one wanted to know what a person looked like, perhaps Van Gogh or Picasso would not be the person to commission.
Portraits of famous people satisfy our curiousity: How did that historical person look? My companion found knowing what some famous scientists looked like of interest. Collections like the National Portrait Gallery also tell us who was and is considered important and which artists were, at that time, considered important enough to be commissioned or employed to paint or photograph the person in question. Time may change whom we consider important. Time may change whom we considered great artists.
I wouldn’t even fault a museum for another exhibit: The collection of a currently living celebrity.
Where would museums be without collectors? The Pacific Asia Museum owes its very space to a collector. A small college in East Los Angeles owes a lot to one celebrity collector. Yet this is a separate issue.
A piece of art is underappreciated if not seen and an art gallery or museum, even one not-for-profit, is not fulfilling its mission if few people get out to see it.
LACMA’s “Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008″ was curated by David Friend, editor of creative development of “Vanity Fair,” and Terrence Pepper, curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, and the concept was conceived by Graydon Carter, “Vanity Fair” editor. The exhibit was already displayed in London and Edinburgh and will later travel to Australia after it closes in Los Angeles on 1 March 2009.
The related public film and panel discussions enlarge the exhibit. The films (“Grey Gardens,” “Thin” and “Model”) lined up are documentaries that do not necessarily celebrate celebrity.
For any photographer, this is an exhibit worth seeing, and for commercial and portrait photographers and artists, this is a must-see.
