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Vanity Fair Icons Are Portrait Gallery's Delicious Pleasure

by Zoe Strimpel
Tue, 19 Feb 2008 at 1:07 PM

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It's the tastiest exhibit the National Portrait Gallery has hosted in some time. Who wouldn't get absorbed in a gallery of Vanity Fair's most iconic photographs? Annie Leibovitz's naked, pregnant Demi Moore here; Julianne Moore as an Ingres nude there — nothing could be more delicious.

So the exhibition, simply called "Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913–2008," will be a crowd-pleaser. But it is also an elegant and nostalgic reminder of how our obsession with celebrity can lead to art of humanizing beauty — as well as tabloid trash.

The collection begins with some terrific portraits from Vanity Fair's earliest, agenda-shaping days in 1913. There is D.H. Lawrence looking shell-shocked and broody; a wide-eyed, inscrutable Greta Garbo; Charlie Chaplin without his moustache, and a bemused Virginia Woolf by Maurice Beck in 1929. (And lots more besides.)

Vanity Fair was shut down in 1936 as Depression-struck Condé Nast couldn't carry it any longer. It was relaunched in 1983 when a demanding new "cosmopolitan spirit" became impossible to ignore. Here are the easy-on-the-eye stars of the collection — from Herb Ritts, a luscious Kim Basinger in 1989, naked on her belly. There's the famous 1997 Diana by Mario Testino, which shows the princess smiling and beautiful in a thick-strapped black dress. A young Sylvester Stallone kisses Brigitte Nielsen before a crowd; Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard cavort, and Rob Lowe smolders with Brat Pack cool, long before "The West Wing."

This is a show people will devour, not pick at. And when we left, we felt satisfied. Yes, our eyes had lapped up the sheer gloss of those Vanity Fair cover shots we all know and love, with their Scarletts and Keiras. But seeing a groomed Albert Einstein in Berlin, before he emigrated in 1933, and a time when Jennifer Jason Leigh and Minnie Driver graced "Hollywood" covers, was a treat of a higher order.

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