Madame Yevonde Pictured Her Time
In a riveting 1936 picture of Vivien Leigh, British portrait photographer Madame Yevonde (1893-1975) surrounded the actress with a sparkling sea of intense orange color that crackles against her emerald green jacket. The portrait is lit so that a thin yellow line traces the border that separates these secondary colors, as if Leigh were literally electrified from within. It's an extraordinarily deft use of color as an expressive element.
It's also technically adept, given that the portrait predates by a year the single biggest leap forward in the long and difficult history of color photography: Kodachrome film, whose three layers of emulsion meant that a single exposure could replace the three separate negatives Yevonde had to use. Like Paul Outerbridge in California, she was chromatically gifted at a time when color photography was not highly regarded.
Also like Outerbridge, she was a commercial photographer--a fact that helps explain both her need to experiment with technique and her relative obscurity today. Variously known as Yevonde Cumber and Edith Plummer, she reinvented herself with a society-style moniker, all the better to fit the society magazines of London that became her steady clients.
At Jan Kesner Gallery, 19 photographs form a debut exhibition (part of the L.A. International Biennial) of recent prints made from Madame Yevonde's original negatives. Most focus on portraits of society ladies costumed as classical goddesses. (The idea was born at a 1935 charity gala.) The outfits tend toward the perverse and ostentatious--Medusa as a pale-skinned, dark-eyed vamp wrapped in snake skins; Flora bedecked with tulips and daisies--and sophisticated camp would be a fitting description of the whole.
Yevonde's way with color is nothing to be sneezed at. She used it like paint to dramatize the theatrical narratives she pictured.
Adorned with enormous pearls, Helen of Troy (the Duchess of Argyll) is an austere vision of icy blues, punctuated with crimson lips and fingernails. Baroness Gagern, swathed in golden robes and bathed in golden light, caresses the snout of a gold-bedecked bull--Europa in the swooning moments before her abduction by Zeus.
Yevonde's self-portrait declares her self-perception. Focused and severe, she is nonetheless elegantly attired and surrounded by a gold Baroque frame. One rubber-gloved hand holds a glass-plate negative, while a still life of darkroom chemicals and camera lenses is laid out on the table before her. Yevonde blends art and science to create remarkable transformations: Dressed in blue, she's juxtaposed herself with a bright blue butterfly.
