National Portrait Gallery
7 February – 27 May 2013
Le violin d'Ingres. Museum Ludwig Cologne, Photography Collections (Collection Gruber) © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP © Copy Photograph Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln |
Some definitive portraits, but not enough to deserve an entire show, especially given the routine quality of many of the other images.
First
off, as a record of European modernist pioneers, particularly in Paris, this
exhibition is wonderful. The artist seems to have known, and photographed,
everyone. He also has a talent for capturing either the intensity, or
surprising lack of it, in some of his subjects.
Here
is wide-eyed Picasso (over several decades), there is plump stately Matisse. On
one side we are in the brooding presence of Schoenberg, in a timeless expressionist
image reminiscent of his own mask-like painted portraits; on the opposite side
we party with the ravishing Peggy Guggenheim, evoking the high hopes and new
freedoms of her era.
Next,
as expected, some surrealistic images, including portraits of muse and student
Lee Miller and Ray himself, especially one of him sleeping under a female
torso. But these are period pieces.
Then,
we notice the size of the prints. Sometimes familiar images are revealed to be
smaller (or larger) than we expect. It isn’t clear whether these historic
prints reflect Ray’s intentions – there is an example of him producing two
different crops for an image, which suggest he had some interest in this,
though I didn’t notice much difference.
Some
of the later colour portraits are printed so small as to part of the portrait
miniature tradition, and presumably this was Ray’s intention. But hardly an
inspired idea, and the actual portraits are bland fashion images.
And the
fashion portraits are especially dull, and comprise too much of the exhibition,
as if hackwork must be displayed simply to prove he did it.
The
relation between cinema and photography seems particularly striking looking at
these portraits. Perhaps directors and actors were influenced by the poses in
Ray’s photos, but it mostly seems the other way around.
So the
stilted unsmiling images of the silent era give way to disarmingly
self-confident images of the 1960s, with variations recorded between these
periods.
Overall, a curiosity rather than a living body of work.
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