Queen Exhibit: Edinburgh Belfast Cardiff London 2011-2012 exhibition organised by the National Portrait Gallery, London

The Queen's Diamond Jubilee's Travelling Exhibition 

The Queen: Art and Image 

A touring exhibition organised by the National Portrait Gallery, London, curated by Paul Moorhouse. From Beaton and Leibovitz to Annigoni and Warhol, THE QUEEN: ART AND IMAGE is the most wide-ranging exhibition of images in different media devoted to a single royal sitter. Formal painted portraits, official photographs, media pictures, and powerful responses by contemporary artists are showing in an exhibition which explores both traditional representations and works which extend the visual language of royal portraiture. 

THE QUEEN: ART AND IMAGE – THE 2011-2012 EXHIBITION TOUR

National Gallery Complex Edinburgh 

25 June - 18 September 2011

Ulster Museum Belfast 

14 October 2011 - 15 January 2012

National Museum Cardiff 

4 February - 29 April 2012

National Portrait Gallery London 

17 May - 21 October 2012

To mark The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012, the National Portrait Gallery will stage an innovative touring exhibition bringing together 60 of the most remarkable and resonant images of Elizabeth II spanning the 60 years of her reign and some on public display for the first time. The Queen: Art and Image will tour to British venues before being shown in London, opening in Edinburgh in June, Belfast in October and Cardiff and London in 2012.  

Documenting the changing nature of representations of the Monarch, the exhibition will show how images serve as a lens through which to view shifting perceptions of royalty. This perspective reflects changes in the social scene and historical context and the exhibition highlights important developments and events: from The Queen’s relationship with the press and the miner’s strike, to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and the advent of new technology. This textured view of the period is supplemented by archival material  – from newspapers to film footage, from postage stamps to consumer ephemera. 

Among the highlights  from the  works from life are Annigoni’s hugely popular  life-size 1969  commission for the National Portrait Gallery, Lucian Freud’s 2000-01 portrait from the Royal Collection and Justin Mortimer’s painting where The Queen’s head floats away from her body against a huge background of flat vibrant yellow.  Among the exhibited photographers for whom The Queen sat are Annie Leibovitz, Dorothy Wilding and Cecil Beaton - including his iconic Westminster Abbey Coronation image - and Chris Levine’s highly unusual photograph from a 2004 sitting of The Queen with her eyes closed. 

The Queen: Art and Image will show a significant selection of unofficial portraits of the British monarch from major 20th century artists including those of Gilbert and George, Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter as well as less formal portraits by such photographers as Eve Arnold, Patrick Lichfield and Lord Snowdon.

Collectively, the exhibition celebrates and explores the startling range of artistic creativity and media-derived imagery that The Queen has inspired. It also probes the relation of this imagery to a world of changing values during a reign that has engaged the attention of millions.

Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, says: 'The Queen is the most portrayed person in British history, reflecting her long reign and also the respect and affection which is felt towards her. The Diamond Jubilee is a wonderful celebration and the National Portrait Gallery is very pleased to be sharing this exhibition with our other national partners in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff.’ 

James Holloway, Director of Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, says: ‘I am delighted that Scotland will be able to enjoy this remarkable jubilee exhibition, which will be presented in the heart of the capital city of Her Majesty’s Stewart ancestors.’

Jim McGreevy, Director of Collections & Interpretation, National Museums Northern Ireland, said: ‘We are pleased to participate in this UK wide tour of The Queen: Art and Image. This novel exhibition offers our visitors an opportunity to see the work of world-renowned artists and photographers such as Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Annie Leibovitz and Lord Snowden for the first time at the Ulster Museum. Across six decades the works on display chart the changing portrayal of a Monarch whose image has, of course, had such global and local significance.’

David Anderson, Director General of Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, says: ‘Amgueddfa Cymru is pleased to be working in collaboration with the UK’s other national museums. This is an example of how effective partnerships between museums and galleries can make works by such influential artists such as Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, accessible to visitors across the country.’

About the Curator

The exhibition is curated by Paul Moorhouse, the National Portrait Gallery’s 20th Century Curator. At the National Portrait Gallery he has curated the major retrospectives: Gerhard Richter Portraits and Pop Art Portraits. As part of the Gallery’s on-going Interventions series of displays he has curated John Gibbons: Portraits, Frank Auerbach: Four Portraits of Catherine Lampert, Andy Warhol: 10 Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century and Anthony Caro: Portraits.  

THE QUEEN: ART AND IMAGE – TOUR 

National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh, 25 June - 18 Sept 2011

Website: www.nationalgalleries.org

Ulster Museum, Belfast, 14 October 2011 - 15 Jan 2012

Website: www.nmni.com

National Museum Cardiff, 4 February - 29 April 2012

Website: www.museumwales.ac.uk

National Portrait Gallery, London, 17 May - 21 Oct 2012

Website: www.npg.org.uk

PUBLICATION

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue, with essays by historian and writer Sir David Cannadine and curator Paul Moorhouse and featuring over 60 portraits. Published by the National Portrait Gallery, London, priced £30 (hardback). Available June 2011.

London presentation sponsored by KPMG 

John Griffith-Jones, Senior Partner and Chairman of KPMG in the UK, says: ‘KPMG is pleased to support what will be a fascinating visual chronology of The Queen’s reign. With such a wide range of imagery and artistic styles, I am sure the exhibition will be of huge interest to many people, and will form a significant part of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations.’

National Portrait Gallery's Spring Season 2012, sponsored by Herbert Smith LLP

Edinburgh presentation sponsored by Turcan Connell 

Douglas Connell, Joint Senior Partner of Turcan Connell, says:  ‘As we move towards this historic anniversary of Her Majesty's accession, Turcan Connell is delighted that this wonderful exhibition opens at the National Galleries of Scotland and that we in Scotland will have the first chance to view this very special range of images.’

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON

St Martin’s Place 

WC2H 0HE

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 – 2008, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 – 2008 

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 

5 June - 30 August 2009 

This is the first exhibition to bring together rare vintage prints with contemporary classics from Vanity Fair and the legendary Condé Nast Archive. The exhibition is a photographic history of celebrity portraiture, including the works of master photographers such as Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino. The National Portrait Gallery is the sole venue in Australia to host this travelling exhibition. Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 – 2008 is a collaboration between Vanity Fair and National Portrait Gallery, London. 

In Vanity Fair's first period (1913­1936), celebrated subjects such as Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin and Jean Harlow are shown in portraits by legendary photographers, among them Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton, Baron De Meyer, Man Ray and Australian-born Anton Bruehl, a pioneer in colour photography. From the magazine's re-launch in 1983, the works of photographers including Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Bruce Weber and Mario Testino are featured, depicting a wide range of subjects, from Arthur Miller to Madonna. 

Vanity Fair Portraits presents a rare opportunity to see definitive portraits of the 'Jazz Age', including now classic studies of Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker and Noël Coward. The selection of portraits also includes two previously unpublished and unseen 1928 studies: Florence Vandamm’s portrait of actress Alice White and Emil Bieber’s rendering of German artist George Grosz.

Although Vanity Fair suspended publication in 1936, it would be resurrected in another period of decadence and excess, the 1980s. Once again, its purpose was to record modern men and women of culture, stature and talent and as in the early period, portrait photography was the graphic bedrock of the magazine. In the tradition of editor Frank Crowninshield (who ran Vanity Fair from 1914 to 1936), the revived monthly commissioned the world's leading portrait photographers, among them Helmut Newton, Nan Goldin, Herb Ritts, Harry Benson, Mario Testino, Jonathan Becker and Bruce Weber. 

Vanity Fair's iconic photographs continue to make news. Since the magazine's re-launch in 1983, cover images including the Reagans dancing (1985), a very pregnant Demi Moore (1991), a formal portrait of President Bush's Afghan War Cabinet (2002) and most recently actresses Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley photographed naked (2006) have been embedded in the collective cultural consciousness. 

Annie Leibovitz has become the dominant image-maker of Vanity Fair, just as Edward Steichen dominated Vanity Fair's first period. Edward Steichen (1879-1973), who created an unrivalled gallery of portraits of the dominant personalities of the 1920s and 1930s, has a worthy successor in Annie Leibovitz and Vanity Fair Portraits is the first major exhibition to display their works together. 

“We are very pleased to be able to present this exhibition to Australian audiences. It fits perfectly with our interest in celebrity, style, of-the-moment people and, of course, the work of great portrait photographers. A particular feature of the exhibition season at the National Portrait Gallery is the inclusion of a number of Australians who have made it on the world’s stage. Like all of the subjects in the exhibition  these Australians have been captured with that mixture of flair, originality and incisiveness that is a unique quality of Vanity Fair”, said Andrew Sayers, Director, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

King Edward Terrace, Parkes, Canberra, ACT 2600

www.portrait.gov.au

Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape 

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra 

4 December 2008 - 1 March 2009 

Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape,  the first exhibition in the temporary exhibition spaces of the new National Portrait Gallery, is about people and place. Australian art is full of rich expressions of ideas and feeling about the landscape. This exhibition, with its evocative works drawn from public and private collections across Australia, invites visitors to reflect on what places mean to people, and on how our views of ourselves are shaped by place. Open Air: Portraits in the Landscape has been organised by the National Portrait Gallery and curated by Andrew Sayers with Dr Sarah Engledow and Wally Caruana.

We all have relationships with specific places and in many ways these relationships define us. Open Air explores many dimensions of these relationships as they have been expressed in art. Including paintings, photographs, bark paintings and sculpture, the exhibition brings together the works of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists whose work incorporates deep personal responses to the land. It reveals the importance of land in Indigenous self-definition; the engagement of landscape and historical figures (such as Daisy Bates and Burke and Wills); landscapes of alienation; landscapes with significant family associations and art in which the idea of ‘presence’ is fundamental. 

The exhibition includes conventional portraits as well as opening up a new and distinctly Australian way of looking at portraiture; it goes beyond a definition of a portrait simply as ‘a picture of a face’, to embrace representations of the order of nature and of ancestral stories within the landscape. The exhibition includes the work of some of the major Australian artists of the twentieth century and the present: Mawalan, Wandjuk and Banduk Marika, Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri, Tim Johnson, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, Bea Maddock and Russell Drysdale.

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

King Edward Terrace, Parkes, Canberra, ACT 2600

www.portrait.gov.au

Angus McBean at National Portrait Gallery, London

Angus McBean: Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, London
5 July - 22 October 2006

Angus McBean: Portraits is the first museum retrospective devoted to Angus McBean (1904-90), one of the most significant British photographers of the twentieth century. It brings together over 100 photographs in black and white and colour, including a large number of vintage prints from museum collections and important loans from private collections. The exhibition offers an unprecedented opportunity to see the astonishing range of McBean's work. From the striking surrealist portraits of the 1930s to his period as indisputably the most important photographer of theatre and dance personalities of the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition also showcases his cult re-emergence as a chronicler of pop music and includes his famous Beatles covers.

Highlights of the exhibition include the iconic 1951 photograph of the then unknown Audrey Hepburn, her head and shoulders emerging from sand - and posed amidst classical pillars. The forty-year spread of the exhibition includes more recent photographs of Derek Jarman and Tilda Swinton, while other significant portraits include Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Katharine Hepburn. The exhibition also features several defining portraits of Vivien Leigh, whom McBean photographed many times over the course of their thirty-year association.

On show for the first time is the complete series of his self-portrait Christmas cards which McBean produced between 1934 and 1985. These inventive and innovative portraits are displayed alongside theatrical props used in their composition, including a Mae West puppet, a marble 'Greek God' bust, bisque 'bathing beauties' and two 1930s papier mâché masks of Greta Garbo and Ivor Novello.

Born near Newport in South Wales in 1904, Angus McBean bought his first camera at the age of fifteen. He used his friends and family as models, and also began to make masks and theatrical props for local amateur dramatic productions. After the death of his father in 1924, McBean moved to London and found work in the antiques department of Liberty's on Regent Street, spending his spare time photographing his friends and making masks. After leaving Liberty's in 1931 he decided to try and live by his art, growing a distinctive beard that he claimed was symbolic of the fact that he no longer wished to be a wage earner. McBean was briefly apprenticed to society photographer Hugh Cecil, who taught him photographic techniques, and after a year he set up his own studio in Victoria.

McBean's big break came in 1936 when Ivor Novello asked him to create masks for Clemence Dane's adaptation of a Max Beerbohm short story, The Happy Hypocrite. Novello was delighted with the masks and immediately commissioned McBean to take portrait photographs for the production. In 1937 The Sketch commissioned him to photograph the actress Beatrix Lehmann playing Lavinia in Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. The dramatic composition of this photograph was inspired by the surrealist art of the era, and working with the artist Roy Hobdell, McBean went on to produce a number of 'surrealist' portraits of leading actresses in a weekly series, which ran until the early months of the war. Among those on display are portraits of Flora Robson, René Ray and Peggy Ashcroft as Portia.

After the war, McBean set up a new studio in Endell Street, London and was commissioned to photograph the American actress Clare Luce in a new production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. He then produced a series of portraits that incorporated significant objects from the lives of his sitters into their photographs: Cecil Beaton is shown surrounded by pages from his scrapbooks, while Ivor Novello leans over bound editions of his musicals. Other portraits show 'Play Personalities' such as Noel Coward, Ralph Richardson and Hugh 'Binkie' Beaumont (Binkie Pulls the Strings). Also on display are portraits of ballet dancers Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann.

In the 1950s and '60s McBean's career took a new direction as he began taking colour photographs for LP covers. The exhibition shows his photographs of Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Shirley Bassey and The Beverley Sisters and Spike Milligan's head encased in a glass jar for his album Milligan Preserved. McBean was responsible for the front cover of The Beatles album Please, Please Me, taking a spontaneous shot of the group leaning over the balcony at the EMI Offices in London. Six years later he was asked to recreate the 1963 photograph for the proposed Get Back album. It later appeared on the retrospective LP The Beatles 1967-1970, and these will be displayed alongside one another. Angus McBean retired in 1966 to focus on decorating and restoring his house, Flemings Hall in Suffolk, but he returned to photography in 1982 and the exhibition includes late work such as his portraits of Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier.

A lavishly illustrated catalogue accompanies this exhibition by curator Terence Pepper, and includes excerpts from McBean's unpublished autobiography, Look Back in Angus. Price £25 hardback. 280 x 230mm, 172 pages. 100 images

The exhibition will tour to Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (2 December 2006-10 March 2007) and Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales (31 March-3 June 2007).

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
www.npg.org.uk

Cecil Beaton, National Portrait Gallery, London - Portraits - Retrospective Exhibition

Cecil Beaton: Portraits

National Portrait Gallery, London

5 February - 31 May 2004

Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) is one of the most celebrated of British portrait photographers and is renowned for his images of elegance, glamour and style. His influence on portrait photography was profound and lives on today in the work of many contemporary photographers including David Bailey and Mario Testino. Cecil Beaton: Portraits marks the centenary of Beaton's birth and coincides with a revival of interest in his work occasioned in part by the publication of his unexpurgated diaries and the recent release of Stephen Fry's film Bright Young Things. This is the first major overview of Beaton's portraits since Sir Roy Strong's ground-breaking exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1968.

This major retrospective exhibition brings together over 100 portraits from the five remarkable decades of Cecil Beaton's career, including iconic images as well as those never seen before. Beaton captures 50 years of fashion, art and celebrity, from the Sitwells in the 1920s to the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s. Definitive portraits of 20th century celebrities are shown alongside more sombre works from his time as a war photographer.

Highlights of the exhibition include Cecil Beaton`s 1956 portrait of Marilyn Monroe, from her own collection, which is accompanied by his handwritten eulogy about her. Pages from Cecil Beaton's snapshot album of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding, showing idyllically situated portraits of Wallis Simpson in the grounds of the Château de Candé, France, are on public display for the first time.

Cecil Beaton acquired his first camera aged 11 and the exhibition opens with a portrait of his sister Baba, taken a few years later, in 1922. A number of vintage prints from Beaton's first exhibition (1927), notable for their striking red Beaton signature, have been reunited, including a celebrated portrait of Edith Sitwell posed as a gothic tomb sculpture. Edith Sitwell and her family's patronage confirmed Beaton's position as the most fashionable young photographer of the day and led to a number of exciting commissions, including a contract with Vogue, with whom Beaton was associated for over 50 years.

Other significant portraits from this early period include Nancy Cunard in front of a polka dot backdrop, the writers and poets Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stephen Tennant and Siegfried Sassoon, and bright young things including the Jungman twins, Tallulah Bankhead, and three young debutantes posing as "Soapsuds".

The exhibition features work taken from Cecil Beaton's first four Hollywood visits including images of Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, Marlene Dietrich and Johnny Weissmuler, preparing for his first Tarzan film. Other works from the 1930s include French subjects taken in Paris, such as the fashion designers Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, and the artists Beaton befriended such as Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso.

Cecil Beaton received the ultimate establishment seal of approval when he was commissioned by the Royal Family in 1939. The exhibition includes two studies of HM Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, at Buckingham Palace, taken in dappled light and offering fairytale romance.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, Beaton devoted himself to his work as an official war photographer. The Home Front is represented by pictures of land girls and Cecil Beaton's unforgettable portrait of the 3 year-old blitz victim Eileen Dunne (1940) in a hospital bed in the north of England. During this period Beaton also captured wartime artists such as the poet Cecil Day Lewis, composer Benjamin Britten and the memorable study of the elderly Walter Sickert and his wife Therese Lessore in their garden near Bath in 1940.

In the post-war period Beaton photographed existentialist writers Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre in Paris, and emerging actors in America, the 21 year old Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner, and the reclusive Greta Garbo, the subject of Cecil Beaton`s long-term romance.

In 1956 Beaton started work on the costume designs for the first version of My Fair Lady for the American stage with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison and was to continue with the production in its various forms until his own Oscar-winning work for the film version starring Audrey Hepburn in 1964. In the midst of this he also won an Oscar for his work on another great film musical Gigi (1957) with Leslie Caron.

In the 1950s Beaton produced many of his most famous portraits of women including Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman. Male subjects included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Betjeman, Sugar Ray Robinson, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin.

It is testament to Cecil Beaton's flexibility and skill that he reinvented his photographic style for a new decade. In the 1960s he was revitalised by working with some of the era`s brightest cult figures such as David Hockney, Jean Shrimpton, Rudolf Nureyev and most importantly Mick Jagger. Up until a paralysing stroke in 1974, Beaton continued a punishing work schedule, whether working on the Barbra Streisand's film On a Clear Day You Can See Forever or photographing Warhol and his entourage in New York.

The exhibition concludes with Cecil Beaton's late poignant portraits of Ralph Richardson and Louise Nevelson, and a recumbent Bianca Jagger photographed in the conservatory of Cecil Beaton's home at Reddish.

Cecil Beaton: Portraits is curated by Terence Pepper, Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. Pepper first met Cecil Beaton in 1978 and was subsequently assistant curator on the 1984 Barbican Art Gallery Cecil Beaton exhibition. He has organised a wide range of exhibitions on individual photographers including Norman Parkinson (1981), Lewis Morley (1989), Dorothy Wilding (1991), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1998) and Horst (2001).

Tour: The exhibition will tour to the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, from 11 March - 6 June 2005.

Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue entitled Beaton: Portraits with a foreword by Sir Roy Strong and essay by Peter Conrad. 240 pages, over 200 illustrations, published February 2004, price £35 hardback.

Exhibition at Sotheby's: To coincide with Cecil Beaton: Portraits there is a complementary exhibition at Sotheby's New Bond Street from 10th­-20th February 2004. Beaton at Large presents a selection of Beaton's most celebrated images, printed on a grand scale.

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

St Martin's Place, London WC2H OHE

www.npg.org.uk

Polly Borland: Australians, National Portrait Gallery, London

Polly Borland: Australians

National Portrait Gallery, London

25 May - 17 September 2000

Polly Borland: Australians, is an exhibition of 56 new portraits of significant Australians who have made a contribution to British life and who have largely made their home or based their professional life in the UK. Born in Melbourne in 1959, Polly Borland has lived in the UK for eight years and established an international reputation for both her portraiture and off-beat reportage, with work appearing regularly in the national and international press. Polly Borland: Australians, has been jointly organised by the National Portrait Gallery, London and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

The portraits in the exhibition reflect the many fields in which Australians have excelled, including art, business, literature, science, music, media, architecture and fashion. The subjects include the singer Kylie Minogue, Leanne Benjamin, Principal Ballerina, The Royal Ballet Company, Sir Robert May,Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government, musician Nick Cave, actress Cate Blanchett, author Germaine Greer and comedian Barry Humphries. They represent a cross section of diverse, established and emerging talents, and reflect that particular streak of radicalism which has helped establish Australia on the world map, as a nation of can-doers, daredevil entrepreneurs, successful artists and competitive sportsmen and women.

Polly Borland says of her work, "I'm fascinated by people - I love meeting them, I love photographing them, I love finding out about them. The best portraiture is when you get beneath the skin of someone, it's psychologically revealing. You penetrate below the surface."

Polly Borland won the 1994 John Kobal Photography Portrait Award and is married to the Australian film-maker John Hillcoat (Ghosts of the Civil Dead and To Have and To Hold). A selection of her photographs from a forthcoming photographic book on Adult Babies or Infantilists, was exhibited as part of last summer's South Bank's Meltdown Festival, of which Nick Cave was artistic director.

Publication: A paperback book accompanies the exhibition, with a preface by Nick Cave, introduction by Peter Conrad and individual interviews with the sitters by Virginia Ginnane.

This exhibition marks a wider centenary celebration in London, of the passing of the Act of Federation, when the Commonwealth of Australia was established by the British House of Commons, uniting six former colonies into a federal state.

Australia Week (2-9 July 2000) is organised by the Australian High Commission and features a wide programme of cultural events including music art and theatre. Further details at www.australia.org.uk

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON

Photography Gallery

www.npg.org.uk