AAF 22/07/2015 AAF 22/07/2015

Audrey Hepburn: ‘Portraits of an Icon’ or Portraits of an Age?

The current exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery aims to display the portraits that capture the iconic within the icon, Audrey Hepburn. Whilst doing so, it also captures the image of an age where cultural fluctuation was rife.

When considering the name ‘Audrey Hepburn’ it is difficult to severe the ties and associations one carries with such a prolific name. To some extent, the name ‘Audrey Hepburn’ has come to define the term ‘pop culture icon’ whether you know as little about her as her name or not. The name is synonymous in our culture with class, elegance and beauty, only furthered by the constant cultural repetition on an image. We see Breakfast at Tiffany’s or chocolate advertisements in our mind as soon as the name is proclaimed.

Audrey Hepburn photographed by Norman Parkinson for Glamour Magazine, 1955 © Norman Parkinson Ltd/Courtesy Norman Parkinson Archive

What is interesting, then, is that the current exhibition at the NPG displays a steady and diverse chronology of still image and portraiture, which maps the changing landscape of culture that was seen during Hepburn’s lifetime. From the black and white, American Vogue photography by Irving Penn for some of the theatre projects that Hepburn undertook to the un-posed photography by Mark Shaw during the filming of Sabrina and the bold changes in fashion displayed in images by William Klein and Douglas Kirkland. For someone that knows only the iconic images of Hepburn, this exhibition portrays a landscape of change that Audrey Hepburn witnessed and, in some regards, pioneered.

The exhibition describes how at the height of her fame, and to some extent still today, Hepburn can be seen as holding the opposite traits you may imagine an ‘icon’ to posses. With the term ‘icon’, one may wrongly assume that Hepburn’s image and portrayal in media was a constant and unchanged personality. Conversely, she was ‘iconic’ for different reasons – she was the modern ‘everywoman’ that stood out amongst the aging portrayal of ‘women as sex symbols’. We learn she that she constantly agreed to film roles that challenged the culture she was surrounded by, some of which could have broken her career – both Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Children’s Hour were controversial in their content at the time. Even her charity work in her later life, which still carries on today, is an inherent element of her ‘iconic’ status.

What this exhibition seems to reveal is the real ‘icon’ of Audrey Hepburn that is otherwise occasionally obscured behind the repeated ‘iconic’ imagery. The different photographers opting for alternate methods of photographing Hepburn each bring out the elements of her personality that existed when working together. The writing surrounding the photographs reveals this eclectic image of Hepburn as an actress, artist and generally in her everyday demeanour.

The exhibition highlights, without explicitly stating so, how she stood out amongst her contemporaries – all the reasons she’s remembered today. The photographs displayed from personal collections, in turn, contain unique purpose, each distinct and detached from the last. The fashion portraiture marks notable differences to the casual photographs – and yet the similarities bring a more cohesive view of the woman in question. More than anything, the exhibition displays Hepburn’s collaborative efforts as an artist, maintaining a strong, unique voice in a challenging industry – a voice that she kept complete control over, cementing her status as an ‘icon’.

NPG

AAF 05/06/2015 AAF 05/06/2015

Portrait Artists: from Threads to Acid Heads

With new technologies the art of portraiture has been completely redefined. I look at four interesting portrait artists of this new generation who have bent this change to their will.

With new technologies the art of portraiture has been completely redefined. I look at four interesting portrait artists of this new generation who have bent this change to their will.

Bryan Lewis Saunders

“There’s a lot of truth in media,” says Bryan Lewis Saunders in an interview with the Guardian while discussing a self-portrait of him inhaling lighter fluid. As evident in the interview and from his works, Saunders is quite the avant-gardist. He gained notoriety for Under The Influence, an experiment he devised where he intoxicated himself with a variety of different drugs, and then composed a self-portrait for each one.

Whether it is acrylic paints or metallic crayons, the media he uses are always symbolic of the drug he had taken. From the pleasantly colourful Xanax to the frighteningly abstract bath salts, we get a sense of his emotions under the influence – all of them hermetic, isolated within his modest apartment in Tennessee. To Saunders, portraiture is more of an internal experience rather than a representation of the external.

Nikki Rosato

Over the years, we’ve seen portrait artist’s progress from using oil paints to all kinds of media in their work. Albrecht Dürer himself would be turning in his grave, scoffing with incredulity if he found out that artists of the future could compose a portrait from hand-cut road maps.

Well the emerging talent that is Nikki Rosato manages just that. She encapsulates the fragility of being human through these irregular sequences of road maps, formed on the shape of a body. She creates her pieces by using a Stanley knife to cut away all the landmasses between the roads – leaving behind an intricate system of blood vessels, pumping transport links and points of interests that lead to nowhere.

Kehinde Wiley

In the past, the idea of subverting artistic tradition is a bold notion. And to repaint artistic history is an even bolder one. But Kehinde Wiley successfully attempts to do both. When not travelling the world looking for artistic subjects, he’ll be spending his time in his New York studio, acutely detailing monumental paintings.

His subjects? Almost always African Americans. Where does he find them? On the streets of New York, with a camera crew and an attractive woman so as not to incite suspicion. He usually looks for alpha male characters, and paints them in a heroic way – akin to the style of the Old Masters. With the end result, we can discern an intense smorgasbord of different qualities and themes, leaving no surprise as to why he is one of the most prolific portrait artists of this century.

Kumi Yamashita

Kumi Yamashita maintains a virtuosic control of light and dark values in all of her pieces. But one particular body of work, Constellation, is like no other. These are constructed by hammering thousands of small nails across a white wooden panel and running one single black sewing thread across all these nails to form an image.

On her site, she describes these portraits as consisting of ‘three simple materials that, when combined, produce the portraits.’ And yet despite such simple ingredients – the portraits look exceedingly meticulous and you are left marveling at how one single thread can represent not only expression but emotion too.