Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008
Until September 21; Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

The National Galleries of Scotland have kicked off their summer season with two photography shows for two very different audiences: the star-studded American glossy is up against the cutting edge of European modernism. Both shows are brimming with quality, and the rest is a matter of taste.

At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 150 pin-sharp celebrity portraits adorn the walls, borrowed from the archives of the illustrious Vanity Fair. The show draws on both eras of the magazine’s existence – the Jazz Age of the early 20th century, and the current incarnation, now 25 years old. The exhibition’s atmosphere is surprisingly sombre, its black frames and white walls inviting us to take it seriously as high art.

Meanwhile, at the Dean Gallery, Foto: Modernity In Central Europe takes at look at the avant garde photographic experiments of the early 20th century. Abstract explorations of light and shadow hang alongside radical, politically-charged photomontages and surrealist fantasies.

Vanity Fair’s first manifestation (dating from 1913 to 1936) corresponds closely with the period covered by Foto (1918 to 1945) but you have to look hard to find any obvious overlap. One photographer, Dr Erich Salomon – the first to smuggle secret cameras into A-list events – makes it into both shows. Man Ray’s small but explosive diptych of dancer La Nijinska in gruesome make-up is a visual hand grenade at the centre of the Vanity Fair beauty pageant. But otherwise, the radical experiments of modernism are buried discreetly under the surface of the magazine’s elegant portraiture.

While artists in central Europe were busy slicing the image, its meaning and its making to pieces, Vanity Fair’s photographers were conspiring with their subjects to create public images which would imprint themselves on the collective memory. Greta Garbo will forever hold her hair back from her face, captured in a moment of frustration by Edward Steichen. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr and Joan Crawford will always lounge on that sun-kissed beach, as seen through the lens of Nickolas Murray.

Condé Nast introduced the magazine to the world in 1913, as Dress And Vanity Fair. After four underwhelming issues, Nast dropped the “Dress”, hired modern art enthusiast Frank Crowninshield as editor, and relaunched. Crowninshield was to make Vanity Fair into the phenomenon which promised to “ignite a dinner party at 50 yards”.

Vanity Fair had its finger on the pulse. Europeans and Americans were ready to party, the future was exciting, and Victorian morality was thrown off by a new, liberated generation. Modern art was finding its way across the Atlantic, and Crowninshield promised to coax his contributors into being, like their French counterparts, “a little more free in their technique… even absurd”.

Vanity Fair has always given pride of place to its photographs, prominently crediting the photographers and leaving generous white margins around the edges. Edward Steichen, chief photographer for most of the magazine’s first age, enjoyed a massive salary. Many of Hollywood’s earliest stars are remembered through Steichen’s eyes, and his portraits boast an originality which makes them timeless. Actress Anna May Wong is one element of a powerful composition which floats somewhere between Surrealism and Constructivism. Gloria Swanson lurks like a tiger behind patterned black lace, three dimensions collapsed into two.

Vanity Fair portraits come into their own when the subject is a willing and expert accomplice, and although the early period is packed with cultural heavyweights such as Virginia Woolf, Sergei Eisenstein, Albert Einstein and Claude Monet, it was always the stars of stage and screen who did it best.

Cecil Beaton’s portrait of Katherine Hepburn is all curves and angles, layered like a sculpture, or like one of the artist’s more outrageous hats. Hepburn’s pouty scowl seems to accord with the wayward ruffled material behind her. Stage actresses Beatrice Lillie and Hope Williams slot themselves with professional ease into the geometric space provided for them by Tony Von Horn, the first of many female photographers on Vanity Fair’s staff (“We hereby announce ourselves,” said the March 1914 editorial, “as determined and bigoted feminists”.)

By 1936 the age of partying and excessive consumption was over. The Depression had taken its toll on the American people, and a large political cloud hung over Europe. Advertising revenue was a fraction of what it had been, and Vanity Fair folded, until a new age of parties, money and social recklessness beckoned.

That new age was, of course, the 1980s. Celebrity was now an obsession, image was everything, the art market and advertising were booming, and it was time for Vanity Fair to be reborn. This time, it survived the bust after the boom, and this time, the intellectual heavyweights have been kept to a minimum, nudity encouraged, and scandal courted.

So far, 26 people have posed naked for Vanity Fair covers, the most famous being Annie Leibowitz’s shot of a heavily pregnant Demi Moore in 1991. Unable to cope with the sexuality of a pregnant woman, America was up in arms against this terrible outrage – in some places it was banned, in others it was wrapped in paper like porn. It’s hard to see why; looking at the elegant image, its dusky lighting is more Vermeer than Hugh Hefner.

Leibowitz, Vanity Fair’s chief photographer and the modern answer to Edward Steichen, has shot nearly 130 covers since she was lured away from Rolling Stone. With every year her creations have become more theatrical; when she turned up this April to shoot Francis Ford Coppola, for an advert, on the set of his film, he pointed out that her crew was bigger than his.

Leibowitz’s epic productions have become the signature style of Vanity Fair. Surely the most ambitious was her Hollywood group shot of 2001, where 10 actresses were shot in 3 different locations, to be stitched together into one quasi-painting, dripping with history and velveteen luxury. As the exhibition moves through the years to the present day, the photographs sink deeper into history, becoming ever more painterly. Most seductive of all is Michael Thompson’s Julianne Moore, reinvented as Ingres’s Grande Odalisque of 1814. Her skin is like the purest marble, perfect for that Neoclassical look.

With so many lavish and iconic images in this show, you expect each one to appear on a monumental scale, but most turn out to be unexpectedly small. That is, except for Helmut Newton’s Margaret Thatcher, who towers over you, several feet taller than any other picture. Newton, apparently, had an obsession with power, and consequently considered Thatcher “the sexiest woman in the world”. It takes all sorts.

That’s why Vanity Fair succeeds – it takes all sorts of pictures, of the highest possible quality. Members of Radiohead lounge in a tattered old room, not posing, not glamorous; and hung immediately below them, in an extraordinary feat of theatrics, Run DMC relax in their vintage car as it floats down the Hudson River. Nearby, dancer Natalia Vodianova wafts romantically across Georgian stonework, while below her, supermodel Gisele Bündchen sits naked astride a white horse, oozing in-your-face sexuality. Vanity Fair’s portraits are not always subtle; they’re not always avant garde; but they are always irresistible.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 22.06.08