Yevonde: Life and Colour

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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 Goddesses and Others - National Portrait Gallery". National Portrait Gallery, London . Retrieved 10 January 2022.

A Galaxy of Goddesses features works that were created during a themed party hosted by some of Yevonde’s high society clients, wherein she photographed women dressed as classical figures including Persephone, Psyche, and Europa. In July 1935, she launched her new Mayfair studio with An Intimate Exhibition! Goddesses and Others. In 1914, having just turned 21 – and with some funding from her family – she opened her first studio. Colour photography and innovation 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.As an innovator committed to colour photography when it was not considered a serious medium, Yevonde’s work is significant in the history of British portrait photography. Her most renowned body of work is a series of women dressed as goddesses posed in surreal tableaux exhibited in 1935. John Gielgud as Richard II in Richard of Bordeaux by Yevonde (1933). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Yevonde celebrated the fact that colour photography had ‘no history, no tradition, no old masters, but only a future!’ She experimented with lighting, depth-of-field, compositional props, reflective materials and patterns. Scholes, Lucy (19 August 2023). "A Riot of Color". The New York Review of Books . Retrieved 25 August 2023. Yevonde: Life and Colour brings the photographer’s works together for the first time in 20 years. With an abundance of reproductions, and featuring previously unpublished works, the book showcases her experimentation with a range of techniques and genres including color photography, portraiture, still lifes, solarization and the Vivex color process, and repositions her as a key modern artist of the 20th century. It also provides in-depth context for Yevonde’s images, considering their aesthetic and mythic references.

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In 1933, Madame Yevonde moved once again, this time to 28 Berkeley Square. She began using colour in her advertising work as well as her portraits, and took on other commissions too. In 1936, she was commissioned by Fortune magazine to photograph the last stages in the fitting out of the new Cunard liner, the Queen Mary. This was very different from Yevonde's usual work, but the shoot was a success. People printed twelve plates, and pictures were exhibited in London and New York City. One of the portraits was of artist Doris Zinkeisen who was commissioned together with her sister Anna to paint several murals for the Queen Mary. [8] [9] Another major coup was being invited to take portraits of leading peers to mark the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. She joined the Royal Photographic Society briefly in 1921 and then again in 1933, and became a Fellow in 1940. [10] The RPS Collection holds examples of her work. Although Yevonde died in 1975, her legacy continues to brightly blaze. As Susanna Brown’s essay in the richly illustrated exhibition catalogue makes clear, Yevonde’s high-key world, so full of prop-filled artifice, has had a lasting influence on the fashion world, from John Galliano’s surreal set design (“She came from Streatham, just like me!” he once enthused), to the luminescent photography of Mario Testino and Miles Aldridge. This is apt. Despite being enamoured with the distant past, Yevonde, ever the optimist, always had her eye on the future: a place, she believed, of infinite possibility. In contrast, the portrait of Margaret Sweeny (later Duchess of Argyll), is framed by softer tones of ivory and white. However, there’s a severity in her expression which offsets the femininity and tenderness of her attire, and the bouquet of roses and lilies in the frame. 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.