Yevonde: Life and Colour

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O'Callaghan, Declan (1 October 2019). "Madame Yevonde". University College London, The Equiano Centre ("Blog for Drawing over the Colour Line project") . Retrieved 25 August 2023.

But who was she? And why is she so important? Join exhibition curator Clare Freestone as she offers a beginner’s guide to this brilliant innovator. From her teens, Yevonde was an advocate of women’s suffrage and was active in the Women’s Social and Political Union, the militant wing of the suffrage movement, from 1909. Goddesses and Others: Photographs by Madame Yevonde in 2005 at the National Portrait Gallery, London displayed 15 of her colour photographs from the 1930s. [15] Neeta Madahar is a photographer and traditional Indian Miniature painter. Her art is informed by her meditation practice, embracing time in silence and solitude and spiritual insights from Buddhism and Taoism. She depicts constructions of the natural world, engaging with ideas about beauty, truth, perceptions of reality versus illusion, and the malleability of space and time. She takes pleasure in craft and acute detail. Yevonde believed in the contemporary supremacy of colour and the need for innovation in the heavily populated field of portrait photography. She described royal patronage as ‘the peak in a photographer’s career’ and photographed George VI’s royal coronation guests in 1937 – bringing a new vision to glorified tradition.Be original or die would be a good motto for photographers to adopt … let them put life and colour into their work’ (Yevonde, 1936) Independent photographer At the same time, Yevonde was excited to discover that a few studios were beginning to explore the new process, despite feeling that their preoccupation with achieving naturalistic colour rendered everything “astonishingly unattractive”. The first comprehensive monograph on the forgotten radical innovator of color photography and mythic, surreal portraiture This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. The exhibition is cleverly laid out, mapping Yevonde’s life chronologically, but also thematically. The range of themes which interested her, including feminism, Modernism, Surrealism and mythology, and the ways in which these intersected within her works, are wonderful to discover, appearing throughout her portraits, still life and commercial pieces.

Portraiture comes in every medium at the NPG, from toby jug to daguerreotype, church sampler to public statue, marble bust to digital print. A barely used rotunda has now become an eerie gallery of death masks – the London trees outside cast their fluttering reflections on the bronze face of Oliver Cromwell, strangely outsize even in death. The life mask of Marc Quinn, cast in 10 pints of his own blood, has so deteriorated with the decades as to stand as its own presage of death. The exhibition will undoubtedly serve as an introduction to Madame Yevonde’s work for most visitors, but she wasn’t unknown during her time. In 1932, she had her first solo exhibition at the Albany Gallery in Mayfair, London, which was met with warm reception. Five years later, MoMA included two of her images in a photography survey: color pictures documenting the construction and interior decoration of the ocean liner RMS Queen Mary. The composition of one of these works, RMS Queen Mary, Funnel (1936), is strikingly modernist, with geometric lines and forms reminiscent of Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage (1907)—if The Steerage were richly saturated with shades of red. Madamde Yevonde, RMS Queen Mary, Funnel, 1936 Madame Yevonde, Mask (Rosemary Chance), 1938 Yevonde’s most famous project – the Goddesses Series of 1935 – was inspired by a charity ball. Soon after she photographed several society women in the guise of a mythological goddess. Each woman was furnished with props derived from Yevonde’s, sometimes whimsical, interpretation of their attributes. Goddesses and Others announced Yevonde’s move to Mayfair in 1935. Guests from a fancy dress ball and other female acquaintances were made-up, dressed-up, propped and preened, dramatically lit, cropped and composed to reimagine powerful female deities. We must see one another’s work and criticise, and, more important still, receive criticism,” she wrote in her autobiography, “or we shall never improve”.Yevonde: Life and Colourtells the story of a woman who gained freedom through photography – as she experimented with her medium and blazed a new trail for portrait photographers. The exhibition features portraits and still-life works produced by Yevonde over a colourful sixty-year career, and draws on the archive of her work acquired by the Gallery in 2021, as well as extensive new research by our teams.

At the end of the 1930s Yevonde’s husband of nineteen years died and the opportunity for colour work ceased with the onset of war. Yevonde adapted and throughout the 1940s experimented with montage and on-location portraits. Her 1960s foray into Solarisation resulted in strikingly immediate portraits. Yevonde’s series of Distinguished Women made at the end of the decade celebrated the talents of her gender once more.

Reframing Narratives

Our reopening exhibition Yevonde: Life and Colour will explore the life and career of Yevonde – a pioneering London photographer who spearheaded the use of colour photography in the 1930s. Yevonde: Life and Colour, a third National Portrait Gallery exhibition, opened in London on 22 June 2023, [16] [17] with an accompanying catalogue edited by Clare Freestone. [18] Yevonde: Life in Colour, will feature 150 portraits by the artist, who became an innovator in new techniques, experimenting with solarisation and the Vivex colour process. It is the first exhibition dedicated to her since 1998 and will open in June. There was a sharp transition in the exhibition from her early work to her work following the war. Yevonde became interested in colour photography in the aftermath of World War I; despite it being an expensive and complex undertaking, she remained undeterred. Her work reflected a renewed optimism in the wake of destruction and devastation with its bright colours, quirky costumes and creative settings.

In her photograph of actress Joan Maude, a vibrant palette of reds is brought together in a single image. This shows an industrious photographer thrilling to the possibilities offered by the new colour technology. Signing her work simply, Yevonde (though she also worked under “Madame Yevonde”), she was a celebrated portraitist, innovative colourist and advocate for women in the profession. In short, she was a pioneer. Yet Yevonde is not widely known outside photography circles. I started experimenting madly”, she remembered in her autobiography, “oblivious of the fact that people did not want such things.”Narrative art, modernism, mythology and surrealism pervade Yevonde’s portraiture, still-life, commercial work and most obviously her fantastical Goddesses. Dorothy Gisborne as Psyche, by Yevonde (1935). A recent discovery which is testament to the National Portrait Gallery’s ongoing research. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery The brilliance of Yevonde’s colours stands out memorably in her portraits of actresses Vivien Leigh and Joan Maude: Leigh’s portrait makes use of bright contrasts of blue and red, whilst Maude’s portrait is a stunning showcase of flaming reds, complimenting the actress’ bright red hair. Visual Arts - Artists - Madame Yevonde (1883 -1975)". British Council. 1998. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014 . Retrieved 16 October 2012. A vibrant colour portrait of one of the most photographed women in the 1930s, socialite Margaret Sweeny, who in 1951 became the Duchess of Argyll, will be shown for the first time.