Vogue 100: A Century of Style

This fascinating exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is not just about fashion – it’s a journey through history – a reflection of society over the past ten decades.

It starts in the present, with a huge image of Alexander McQueen with a cigarette and a skull, then winds its way back to the magazine’s beginnings in 1916 – launched because World War I made transatlantic shipments of American Vogue impossible. The first edition – price one shilling – contained a forecast of autumn fashions and promised to tell readers ‘where the waistline ought to be, and whether hats have wings’. Many of the early photographs and issues are scratched and cracked – in fact, it’s a wonder so much has survived, since during World War II, the magazine’s archive was largely pulped to make more paper as part of the war effort. 

There's a magazine from each year on display. All the great names of photography are featured: Baron Adolph de Meyer, Norman Parkinson, Lee Miller, Cecil Beaton, Snowdon, Helmut Newton, David Bailey, Patrick Demarchelier, Mario Testino..... The women featured in the early editions are a mix of society figures (including a young Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the Duchess of Windsor on her wedding day) and relatively unknown models looking haughty, refined and immaculate, even when photographed by Cecil Beaton in 1941 against the bombed-out ruins of  Middle Temple. ‘Fashion is indestructible’, reads the caption.  
The austerity of the war years is followed by a burst of optimism, reflected in less formal images. In the 1950s the ‘Young Ideas’ pages were launched and social equality of a kind reached Vogue, with a series of portraits of people engaged in ‘small trades’: chimney sweeps, dustmen, rag and bone men. 

A timeline (above), showcases covers from across the decades. Highlights of the later rooms include Ronald Traeger’s 1967 photo of Twiggy zooming by on a bike, Peter Lindbergh’s 1990 cover of the ‘Supermodels’ - Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford - and Corinne Day’s controversial Kate Moss underwear shoot from 1993, taken at the height of the ‘grunge’ trend. Rarely seen photographs of the Beatles and a 27-year-old Jude Law are included, along with portraits of people who have shaped the cultural landscape of the 20^th century: from Henri Matisse and Marlene Dietrich to Princess Diana and David Beckham. Prince Charles is captured in his garden at Highgrove (below) while Boris Johnson poses at the Olympic Park.

Editor in Chief of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, describes it as a landmark exhibition. “I am incredibly proud of this collection of exceptional photography and of the whole concept of the exhibition," she says. "It shows the breadth and depth of the work commissioned by the magazine as well as Vogue’s involvement in the creation of that work.”

Vogue 100: A Century of Style, sponsored by Leon Max, runs until May 22. Admission without donation £17; Concessions available.

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/vogue/exhibition.php

By me William Shakespeare: A Life in Writing

The initial display in this exhibition at London's Somerset House of documents relating to the life of William Shakespeare is a record of a court case (below) involving a group of ‘violent’ thieves armed with ‘swords, daggers, bill axes and such’, being sued for pulling down a playhouse in London’s Shoreditch called the Theatre. The Burbage family had built this for their company, but after a series of disagreements about the lease of the land, it was dismantled in a night raid on December 28, 1598 and the timbers removed to Southwark so a new Burbage theatre, the Globe, could be built. Was Shakespeare involved? He must have known what was going on - he was a member of the company and a good friend of fellow actor Richard Burbage. But a witness swore in court he couldn’t remember any names, the Burbages won the case anyhow, and the Globe thrived.

Removal of the Globe from Shoreditch to Bankside, © Crown copyright. Images courtesy of The National Archives, UK

Despite Shakespeare’s fame, actual historical documents providing evidence about his life are few, which is why the six brought together here by The National Archives and King’s College, London, are so important. More court papers deal with the trials of those involved in the failed Essex Rebellion of 1601. The conspirators had used a performance of Shakespeare’s play, Richard II (in which a character, Bolingbroke, leads a rebellion against the king), to fuel insurrection. The Earl of Essex was charged with treason and executed, as was his steward, Sir Gelly Meyrick, who organised the performance. But again there is no mention of the playwright - he escaped being arrested, perhaps a sign of the regard in which he was held by Elizabeth 1.

Evidence of continued royal favour comes from court papers that record how members of Shakespeare’s company were given four and a half yards of red cloth to be worn during King James 1’s coronation procession in 1604. An account listing plays performed at court shows that his troupe appeared in front of the king more than any other company. Also in 1604 Shakespeare provided evidence in a dispute involving his landlord, Christopher Mountjoy over a dowry, and the exhibition includes a transcript of this (below) and his earliest recorded signature. (This episode may have influenced the plot of his play, Measure for Measure, written about that time.)

Shakespeare died on April 23, 1616, and perhaps the most important document on display is his will.  Recent careful conservation has revealed that this was revised several times. He left the bulk of his estate to his elder daughter, Susanna, but just before his death, added personal bequests, including a silver bowl to his younger daughter Judith, memorial rings to actor friends in London, and his second-best bed to his wife (who would have had a marriage settlement to protect her interests in the family property during her lifetime).  The three-page document has his signature on each page, all slightly different.

2016 is the 400^th anniversary of the Bard’s death, and a host of other events are planned. The papers on display here were brought out of storage to mark the occasion, and once the exhibition ends in May, they are unlikely to be seen again for many years. The writing on the documents is crabbed and hard to read, and there’s little other visual material apart from an audio-visual map of London that pinpoints locations crucial to the displays. But the curators do their best to instil life into the documents and put them in context, and it’s still a thrill to pore over the manuscripts and discover Shakespeare’s actual handwriting. An interesting footnote is that exhibition is in the Inigo Rooms of Somerset House – it was at the original Somerset House (demolished 1775) that some early performances of his plays took place.

 By me William Shakespeare: A Life in Writing runs until May 29 2016 at the Inigo Rooms, Somerset House, London. Admission £10 (Concessions available)

http://www.bymewilliamshakespeare.org/

http://www.shakespeare400.org/

Painting the Modern Garden - Monet to Matisse

Claude Monet, Lady in the Garden, 1867

Oil on canvas, 80 x 99 cm

The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

Photo © The State Hermitage Museum. Photography: Vladimir Terebenin

This is the perfect exhibition for a grey winter's day, bursting with colour and full of the promise of summer. With Claude Monet as the starting point, the Royal Academy in London has brought together 120 paintings that span the period from the early 1860s to the 1920s - a time of great change in both society and the arts. About a third are Monet's, with the rest by contemporaries such as Pierre Bonnard, Emil Nolde, Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse and Wassily Kandinsky.

Wassily Kandinsky, Murnau The Garden II, 1910

Oil on cardboard, 67 x 51 cm

Merzbacher Kunststiftung

Photo © Merzbacher Kunststiftung

 At this time, gardening was emerging as a widespread popular pastime. The middle classes were moving out of the cities and creating their own private Edens in the suburbs. Gardens became an extra room where they could relax and enjoy themselves, while artists were able to use them as outdoor studios, planting whatever inspired them to sketch and paint.  We see Camille Pissarro’s working garden, complete with gardeners, in Kitchen Gardens at L’Hermitage, Pontoise, and Gustave Caillebotte’s showy ‘cactus’ dahlias in front of his greenhouse. Kandinsky's sunflowers (above) became an experiment with abstraction while Matisse's eye was caught by a rose-coloured marble garden table, surrounded by ivy (below). 

Henri Matisse, The Rose Marble Table, Issy-les-Moulineaux, spring-summer 1917

Oil on canvas, 146 x 97 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, 1956

Photo © 2015. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence / © Succession H. Matisse/ DACS 2015

The Spanish artist Joaquin Sorolla created a Moorish-style garden around his home in Madrid, while Max Liebermann designed a garden with a geometric layout that gave the impression of rooms extending from the house, in keeping with contemporary ideas in German garden design.
Monet cultivated plants wherever he lived, selecting plants and trees by tone, shape and height, arranging them so there was colour throughout the year; one painting shows red peonies growing under a protective straw awning.  “I perhaps owe it to flowers that I became a painter”, he recalled.

Auguste Renoir, Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil, 1873

Oil on canvas, 46.7 x 59.7 cm

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Bequest of Anne Parrish Titzell, 1957.614

Photo © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT

 Renoir worked closely with Monet, and painted him early on in his career (above) as he captured on canvas a profusion of vast dahlia plants in a corner of his garden at Argenteuil – a work that is also on display.  Monet later created another garden at Vétheuil, where he portrayed his young sons surrounded by sunflowers. But his greatest creation was at Giverny, where he first rented, then bought, a property, adding to the grounds over the years.  One room at the exhibition (below) is devoted to his botanical books, original letters and plans that tell the story of his application for planning permission to create his famous water garden in the face of opposition from local farmers and villagers.

Devising and establishing the garden took years. He kept up with the latest horticultural research and techniques by subscribing to specialist magazines, and after 1890 employed a team of six full-time gardeners to help him realise his vision. He saw it as his “most beautiful work of art". In 1914 he built a bigger studio and began his huge water lily paintings. From then until his death in 1926, he continued painting the pond, the water, the sky and the Japanese bridge. Even the outbreak of the First World War didn’t stop him, despite being able to hear the sound of cannons and battle from his garden. “Yesterday I resumed work....it’s the best way to avoid thinking of these sad times,” he wrote.

Claude Monet, Nymphéas (Waterlilies), 1914-15

Oil on canvas, 160.7 x 180.3 cm

Portland Art Museum, Oregon. Museum Purchase: Helen Thurston Ayer Fund, 59.16

Photo © Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

A stunning selection of these water lily paintings closes the show. The most famous must remain in the Orangerie in Paris, where they encircle two oval rooms, surrounding visitors with their beauty. But the final room of the exhibition has a breathtaking surprise – an earlier version, the Agapanthus triptych (below). These three huge paintings, each about 13 feet long, and shimmering with colour, were created to be shown together. They stayed in his studio until after his death, before being sold to three separate museums. This is the first time they have been reunited.

Agapanthus Triptych 1916 - 1919. (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Saint Louis Art Museum, St Louis.)

A film examining the role of the garden in art history, from Impressionism to the Avant-Garde, will be in cinemas from April 12, part of the Exhibition on Screen series. Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse features behind-the-scenes visits to some of the gardens that inspired the artists, and interviews with artists, gardening experts and critics.

Painting the Modern Garden – Monet to Matisse is at the Royal Academy, London until April 20 2016. Admission £17.60 with Gift Aid (concessions available). For more information Ph 020 7300 8090 or www.royalacademy.org.uk