For a photographer whose portfolio abounds with beautiful
women, Richard Avedon had an eye for unconventional beauty. His solo exhibition
at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, which spans six decades of work
memorializing women with his lens, captures his remarkable ability at once to
sharply define the margins of beauty and to mar them: he builds and he
shatters. This tension is perhaps most evident among his many portraits. Take
his shots of the young and luminous Brigitte Bardot and of Danish author Isak
Dinesen, imperious in her old age: while it is clear who would win the beauty
contest, Dinesen’s proud face rising from a swath of fur is arresting; it is
hard not to call it beautiful.
Avedon summons the vitality from within his subjects,
whoever they may be. Even his glamour shots transcend the generic,
assembly-line poses so common to fashion photography. We see life behind the
faces of the German model Veruschka as she leaps ecstatically, and of Marilyn
Monroe, who somehow manages to look both iconic and genuinely happy at the same
time—no easy feat. We discover that beauty is also a pajama-ed socialite in bed
with her pet skunk and it is a pregnant woman from Las Vegas, her androgynous
face and bright eyes locking onto our own. This is an exhibition so full of
sly, unexpected images that it makes even Avedon’s best-known work look fresh
and newly arresting.
Richard Avedon, Women,
Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, through December 21, 2013.
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