The Life and Color exhibition opens the National Portrait Gallery again in great style

A protracted-awaited exhibition of the work of photographer Yevonde Middleton (1893-1975) has opened at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London. Yevonde: Life and color is the first major exhibition since the gallery reopened after a three-year renovation.

Throughout her life, Yvonde was a supporter of ladies. In her youth she was a suffragist. Throughout her long and successful profession, she supported women in photography, gaining widespread recognition in her time. She is best often called a social portraitist and early pioneer color photography at a time when business color photography was recent and there was widespread skepticism about its advantages.

However, as with many female artists, Yevonde’s work has been underrepresented in galleries. It was only in 2021 that NPG acquired Yevonde’s collection of color negatives, creating Yevonde Color Archive. The painstaking digitization process has made it possible to re-evaluate the artist’s colourful works – most of which have never been seen by the public.

As part Reframing the narrative: women in portraits project, this exhibition, amongst other initiativessignals the gallery’s intention to enhance the representation of ladies in its collections and exhibitions.

What to expect from the exhibition

The viewer is taken chronologically through Yevonde’s 60-year profession, which began in 1914. Early, introductory black-and-white social portraits quickly give option to confident takes on several famous actresses, comparable to actress Florence Lambert and actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson.

The program details her groundbreaking work since the advent of the first commercially available skilled color printing process, Vivex coloring process, circa 1930. This process used three negatives, one for every base color, which were processed individually and then hand-printed, one on top of the other, to attain an ideal match in the final print. Many of the prints on display have been framed in order that visitors can see the edges – revealing them three color separations and samples.

Eventually, nonetheless, Yevonde returned to black and white, as Vivex ceased trading with the onset of World War II.

Wit and raw energy emanate from her most famous series, Goddesses – inspired by a 1935 charity ball attended by society women dressed as mythical figures from Western antiquity.

Many examples of Yevonde’s business work – for magazines and book jackets – and its characteristic “still life fantasies”, all playfully consult with her knowledge of surrealism.

Always attempting to vary her approach, her innovations include montages of double portraits (normally of couples) and later experiments solarization (a darkroom technique used to reverse tones) is paying homage to much earlier work by Man Ray and Lee Miller. An unusual image of young people Judi Dench is a very good example.

Yvonde’s muses

Yevonde dealt primarily with the lives and interests of rich and successful women, including debutantes, wives and moms, but in addition, importantly, women in their skilled capacities as authors, journalists, artists, dancers, actresses and models, and adventurers. Her portrait of a racing driver and aviator Jill Scott is a notable example.

The power of the exhibition lies in the understanding that art is at all times there a matter of cooperation. Yevonde is the star of the show, but there are other vital contributors as well.

I spoke with curator Clare Freestone and Katayoun Dowlatshahi, the artist accountable for hand-making lots of the colourful prints in the exhibition. Dowlatshahi was hired for her expertise in using the coloured carbon transfer process to mimic the appearance of the Vivex process.

Obtaining the coloration Yevonde desired was demanding. When Yevonde worked in the Nineteen Thirties, color photography was still developing and undergoing constant change. Her process was inconsistent for a lot of reasons. From the very starting, Yevonde experimentally approached color for its creative and compositional potential – often using coloured light, filters and transparencies.

Dowlatshahi’s goal was to seek out color equivalents closest to those used in the Nineteen Thirties. She told me, “It was very important to understand the colors and pigments… used at the time.” Modern colours turned out to be inappropriate. It was “continuous learning – everything had to be checked and checked again.” Four to 6 prints of every image were made to acquire the correct color balance.

The means of creating the 25 finished prints, which included initial research, took seven months and revealed that “everything Yevonde did was deliberate and thoughtful.” She left nothing to probability and gave the printers at Vivex very precise instructions.

However, much of Yvonde’s portraiture may thwart contemporary expectations. Her early photos of famous women, especially those of color, rarely provide insight into the model’s inner world. In the case of one of these studio portraits, it was common to make use of quite a lot of retouching in order to “improve” the appearance of the subject while maintaining the essential similarity. Yevonde describes this in his autobiography On camera (1940).

Nevertheless, Yvonde celebrates the creativity, ingenuity and individuality of ladies, who she felt were often expressed through the color of their chosen clothing style – hairstyle, makeup, nails, fabrics and accessories – and through magazines.

The book Yevonde: Life and Color comprises a portrait by the English portrait photographer Jane Bowen taken with Yvonde during her exhibition in 1968 Some outstanding women. The exhibition commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of some women gaining the right to vote and included 50 portraits, including that of a author Iris Murdoch and artist Laura Rycerz.

In Bown’s portrait of Yevonde, she is smiling and appears relaxed. This is a rare opportunity to see a beautiful study of a girl who has followed so many others during her long and distinguished profession.