National Portrait Gallery Publications

This book explores Francis Bacon's deep connection to portraiture and how he challenged traditional definitions of the genre. From his responses to portraiture by earlier artists, to large-scale paintings memorialising lost lovers, works from private and public collections showcase Bacon's life story. As well as the artist's self-portraits, sitters include Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer. This is the first publication in over 20 years dedicated to the portraits of Francis Bacon. From his renowned triptychs and paintings of ghostly figures, to tender and psychologically revealing individual portraits, the figurative works displayed in this publication chart the development of a groundbreaking artist, highlighting the influence of his peers and other artists. Edited and with introductory texts by National Portrait Gallery curator, Rosie Broadley, Francis Bacon: Human Presence also features biographies and photographs of Bacon and his circle, bringing lesser-told stories to the fore. A series of short essays from a range of contemporary thinkers and experts on Bacon explore the individuality of the artist through different lenses, providing fresh perspectives on the artist, his portraits and his world.

Drawing into Painting reveals Lucian Freud’s lifelong focus on the human face and form, tracing the intimate dialogue between his sketches and paintings from the 1930s to the early 21st century. Lucian Freud (1922–2011) is celebrated as one of the great figurative realist artists of the twentieth century, who devoted his artistic life to portraiture. Famously stating that ‘everything is a portrait’, he created intensely observed portraits of animals and plants, as well as his family members and those in his social circle and daily life. Drawing into Painting explores how drawing remained central to Freud’s artistic practice throughout his life. From quick sketches to finished works in charcoal, pastel, and etching, his drawings offer a rare window into his process, revealing shifts in style, experimentation, and his evolving way of seeing. Spanning from his childhood to his final years, the book traces the unconventional path from his drawing practice to his painting, and back again. Alongside a selection of key paintings by Freud and others, the book includes conversations with David Dawson, Freud’s close friend and assistant, and Bella Freud, the artist’s daughter. Insightful essays by writer and curator Catherine Lampert, British Museum drawings curator Isabel Seligman, and acclaimed novelist Colm Tóibín further illuminates Freud’s world and legacy.

'Saville can be appreciated as one of the greatest of any era' ***** Review of Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, National Portrait Gallery - Evening Standard Jenny Saville's large-scale depictions of the human form are a celebration of flesh and paint, figure and abstraction. Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting brings together works from across the artist's career, ranging from pencil drawings to monumental paintings in oil. The British artist Jenny Saville is one of today's leading painters, for whom painting the human body gives the artist 'the possibility to work in both an abstract and figurative way'. Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting accompanies Saville's first major museum exhibition, showcasing over 50 works from throughout her career in a broadly chronological framework. Essays consider the development of Saville's practice, marking key moments and the strong connection she makes to art history, while a conversation with the artist gives us a glimpse into her life in the studio, her working methods and influences.

The Face Magazine: Culture Shift celebrates The Face’s most iconic portraits from 1980–2004. It explores the magazine’s role in the evolution of style photography and its international and enduring impact on visual culture. The Face is the original, definitive, style bible – a ground-breaking magazine that has radically disrupted youth culture in Britain and beyond since its launch in 1980. Known for its striking design, bold, inclusive content and innovative photography, the magazine has launched the careers of many leading photographers, writers, designers, stylists and models. The Face Magazine: Culture Shift includes portraits of iconic sitters including Kate Moss, Annie Lennox, Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop, Snoop Dogg, David Bowie, Ewan McGregor, Madness, The Sex Pistols, and Kylie Minogue. It features the voices of some of the key contributors to the magazine and celebrates the ongoing legacy of the magazine’s imagery in British art, design and culture. It showcases striking portrait photographs from the likes of Miles Aldridge, Elaine Constantine, Corinne Day, David LaChapelle and Juergen Teller, alongside selected covers from the print magazine.

Featuring works from the 1950s onwards, this book explores Francis Bacon’s deep connection to portraiture and how he challenged traditional definitions of the genre. From his responses to portraiture by earlier artists, to large-scale paintings memorialising lost lovers, works from private and public collections will showcase Bacon’s life story. As well as the artist’s self-portraits, sitters include Lucian Freud, Isabel Rawsthorne and lovers Peter Lacy and George Dyer. The first publication in over 20 years dedicated to the portraits of Francis Bacon, this book accompanies the exhibition of the same name opening at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in October 2024. From his renowned triptychs and paintings of ghostly figures, to tender and psychologically revealing individual portraits, the figurative works displayed in this publication chart the development of a groundbreaking artist, highlighting the influence of his peers and other artists. Edited and with introductory texts by National Portrait Gallery curator, Rosie Broadley, Francis Bacon: Portraits also features biographies and photographs of Bacon and his circle, bringing lesser-told stories to the fore. A series of short essays from a range of contemporary thinkers and experts on Bacon explore the individuality of the artist through different lenses, providing fresh perspectives on the artist, his portraits and his world.

'Be original or die would be a good motto for photographers to adopt…let them put life and colour into their work.' - Yevonde. Yevonde (1893-1975) was a businesswoman and tireless creator, as an innovator committed to colour photography when it was not considered a serious medium, her work is significant in the history of British portrait photography. Yevonde championed photography during a time where there were few women photographers working professionally, and this book tells the story of her life, works, and 60-year career. Yevonde: Life and Colour brings the photographer's works together again for the first time in 20 years and features previously unpublished works. This book showcases her experimentation with a range of techniques and genres including colour photography, portraiture, still-lifes, solarisation, and the Vivex colour process, and repositions her as a modern artist of the twentieth century. This highly illustrated publication provides in-depth context to Yevonde's images, considering their aesthetic and mythic references. Yevonde's portraits embody glorified tradition countered with a desire for the new. Her most renowned body of work is a series of women dressed as goddesses posed in surreal tableaux from the 1930s.

With just under a thousand portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, the National Portrait Gallery boasts some of the most treasured and famous official portraits of the Queen captured at key historic moments, as well as day-to-day images of the monarch at home and with family, following her journey from childhood, to princess and Queen, mother and grandmother. This publication highlights the most important portraits of Elizabeth II from the Gallery's Collection. Paintings and photographs from the birth of Elizabeth II to the present will take readers on a visual journey through the life of Britain's foremost icon. The book will reflect on the Queen's life, presenting family photographs alongside important formal portraits to explore how, as her reign became record-breaking, she became an iconic figure in modern British culture and history. The publication features works by key artists depicting the Queen from 1926 to the present day, including Baron, Cecil Beaton, Dorothy Wilding, Patrick Lichfield, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz and David Bailey. This book features an introductory essay by Alexandra Shulman, exploring how the collected portraits depict the Queen throughout her life and reign, and a timeline of key historical events and moments from Elizabeth II's life.

This book, which accompanies the first major exhibition devoted to David Hockney's drawings inover 20 years,will explore Hockney as a draughtsman from the 1950s to now, with a focus on himself, his family and friends. From Ingres to the iPad -this book demonstrates the artist's ingenuity in portrait drawing with reference to both tradition and technology. David Hockney is recognised as one of the master draughtsmen of our times and a champion of the medium. This book will feature Hockney's work from the 1950s to now and focus on his depictions of himself and a smaller group of sitters close to him: his muse, Celia Birtwell; his mother, Laura Hockney; and his friends, the curator, Gregory Evans, and master printer, Maurice Payne. This book will examine not only how drawing is fundamental to Hockney's distinctive way of observing the world around him, but also how it has been a testing ground for ideas and modes of expression later played out in his paintings. From Old Masters to modern masters, from Holbein to Picasso, Hockney's portrait drawings reveal his admiration for his artistic predecessors and his continuous stylistic experimentation throughout his career. Alongside an in-depth essay from the curator, this book will feature an exclusive interview between author and curator, Sarah Howgate, and artist, David Hockney. In addition, an 'In Focus' essay by British Museum curator Isabel Seligman, will explore the relationship between Hockney, Ingres and Picasso drawings.

This book, which accompanies a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, considers Cindy Sherman's oeuvre through the lens of portraiture. Featuring key examples of her work - from her earliest photographs through to her most recent - it explores the mercurial relationship between appearance and reality Cindy Sherman is among the most influential artists of her generation. Using herself as model, wearing a range of costumes and portraying herself in invented situations, she interrogates the imagery employed by the mass media, po pular culture and fine art. Television, advertising, magazines, fashion and Old Master paintings all form part of her visual language. Whether using make-up, costumes, props and prosthetics to manipulate her own appearance, or devising elaborate tableaux, her entire body of 40 years' work constitutes a highly distinctive response to contemporary and earlier culture, whose stylistic tropes she appropriates and quotes. This book will explore the rich cultural sources that Sherman plunders in creating provocative and ambiguous images that lead us to question the things we see. Sherman's work is surveyed through two related themes. Examining Sherman's art within the context of portraiture it explores the way that identity is constructed from appearance. It also considers the nature of Sherman's involvement with a range of styles by positioning her work in the context of the pre-existing imagery that she appropriates.

Michael Jackson, one of the most successful recording artists of all time, also has the distinction of being the most depicted cultural figure; an inspiration for an extraordinary array of leading artists - from Andy Warhol and Isa Genzken to David Hammons and Glenn Ligon - working in a variety of styles and media. This book, which accompanies a major exhibition, examines their artistic responses to an enduring international icon and features essays by Margo Jefferson and Zadie Smith. Michael Jackson (1958-2009) is certainly one of the most influential cultural figures of the last fifty years. Almost a decade after his death, Jackson's impact shows no signs of diminishing: his record sales, now well into the hundreds of millions, continue to grow, his videos are still watched and his enormous fan base remains loyal to his memory. Alongside his lingering influence as a recording artist, the questions that surrounded his fame, success, race and gender during his lifetime remain an indelible aspect of his legacy. Coinciding with what would have been Jackson's sixtieth birthday in 2018, this book will be published at a moment when his cultural significance and the many complex issues it raises will be reassessed and made newly relevant. Nicholas Cullinan and his co-authors ask why so many contemporary artists have been drawn to Jackson as an image and a subject, and also why he continues to loom so large in our collective cultural imagination. In addition to existing works spanning several different generations of artists and across all media, the book features several new portraits by major artists commissioned especially for this unique project. Like Jackson himself, this innovative book will simultaneously have mass appeal and raise complex and thought provoking questions. Artists include: Rita Ackerman, Dara Birnbaum, Candice Breitz, Mark Flood, Isa Genzken, Maggi Hambling, David Hammons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Jonathan Horowitz, Gary Hume, Rashid Johnson, Isaac Julien, David LaChapelle, Louise Lawler, Klara Liden, Glenn Ligon, Paul McCarthy, Dawn Mellor, Lorraine O'Grady, Catherine Opie, Grayson Perry, Paul Pfeiffer, Donald Urquhart, Andy Warhol, Kehinde Wiley, Hank Willis Thomas, Jordan Wolfson

100 Photographs

Vogue 100 : A Century of Style

100 Pioneering Women

Vogue 100: A Century of Style

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary. David Bailey The portraits in this book have been personally selected by Bailey from the wide range of subjects and groups that he has captured so brilliantly over the last five decades: actors, writers, musicians, politicians, film-makers, models, artists and people encountered on his travels to Australia, India, Sudan and Papua New Guinea; many of them famous, some unknown, all of them engaging and memorable. Baileys Stardust will be accompanied by a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in spring 2014, which will then tour to venues on four continents. The book, like the exhibition, is structured thematically, with iconic images presented alongside many lesser-known and previously unseen portraits, and includes an illuminating introduction by the art historian Tim Marlow. Initially engaged as an assistant to John French in 1959, Bailey was contracted by British Vogue the following year. He has since worked for the French, Italian and American editions of the magazine, created album sleeves for major recording artists such as the Rolling Stones, directed television commercials, and made documentary films, including in-depth studies of Cecil Beaton, Luchino Visconti and Andy Warhol. Baileys photographs helped to define the cultural and social scene of the 1960s, and immortalising figures from the worlds of fashion, music, film and art soon elevated Bailey to the status of celebrity himself. Antonionis cult film Blow-up (1966), about a London fashion photographer, was inspired by Bailey, whose life was also dramatised recently in the BBC film Well Take Manhattan (2012), which tells the story of his 1962 New York fashion shoot with the model Jean Shrimpton.