Yevonde: Life and Colour

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Yevonde: Life and Colourtells the story of a woman who gained freedom through photography – as she experimented with her medium and blazed a new trail for portrait photographers. The exhibition features portraits and still-life works produced by Yevonde over a colourful sixty-year career, and draws on the archive of her work acquired by the Gallery in 2021, as well as extensive new research by our teams. Yevonde: Life and Colour , the National Portrait Gallery‘s new exhibition, offers viewers a chance to explore the life and career of a pioneering artist, who gained freedom through photography. ”I took up photography with the definite purpose of making myself independent” reads one of the decals, as you make your way through the maze of faces staring at you from the walls of the gallery. As an innovator committed to colour photography when it was not considered a serious medium, Yevonde’s work is significant in the history of British portrait photography. Her most renowned body of work is a series of women dressed as goddesses posed in surreal tableaux exhibited in 1935. Throughout her career, Yevonde sought to promote and motivate other women photographers, encouraging them to “come out and meet one another” and to “join the association” of photographers.

A new exhibition showcasing the ground-breaking work of 20 th century British photographer Yevonde will be shown at the Laing Art Gallery. Yevonde: Life and Colour was organised by the National Portrait Gallery, London.Be original or die would be a good motto for photographers to adopt … let them put life and colour into their work’ (Yevonde, 1936) Independent photographer Yevonde herself a modern independent woman embraced the commercial sector. Her intensely hued scenarios provide wry observations of the dual demands on readers of colourful new women’s titles. Yevonde: Life in Colour, will feature 150 portraits by the artist, who became an innovator in new techniques, experimenting with solarisation and the Vivex colour process. It is the first exhibition dedicated to her since 1998 and will open in June.

In 1921, she became the first women to lecture at the Professional Photographers’ Association. In the 1930s – against a tide of resistance – she championed the use of colour photography and was the first person in Britain to exhibit colour portraits. The most striking image which comes to mind is Joan Maude (1932) with her fiery hair posed in red monochrome. However, I would argue her later series, ‘A Galaxy of Goddesses’ (1935), triumphs over everything else. She was inspired by the costumed guests at an Olympian-themed charity ball she attended that same year. Yevonde asked twenty-three women she knew within her social network to pose as mythical characters. ‘Lady Dorothy Warren as Ceres’ and ‘Olga Burnett (née Herard) as Persephone’ stood out to me for their use of composition and colour, but perhaps it was just the ancient history student in me which drew my eye.It was an advertisement in suffrage newspaper Votes for Women, that gave Yevonde the idea that photography could offer economic independence. Signing her work simply, Yevonde (though she also worked under “Madame Yevonde”), she was a celebrated portraitist, innovative colourist and advocate for women in the profession. In short, she was a pioneer. Yet Yevonde is not widely known outside photography circles. The show will explore Yevonde’s life and career through self-portraiture and autobiography, reflecting on the growing independence of women after the First World War and of the freedom that photography afforded her. In 1914, having just turned 21 – and with some funding from her family – she opened her first studio. Colour photography and innovation But who was she? And why is she so important? Join exhibition curator Clare Freestone as she offers a beginner’s guide to this brilliant innovator.