Art Of The Day Weekly
#395 - from 2 July 2015 to 8 July 2015
Eternal Audrey
LONDON – She left us - much too early - twenty two years ago. But the fascination Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) exerts on the public remains intact. Her freshness, her ingenuity, her twinkling and yet melancholic eyes survive in the multiple portraits she inspired. The greatest photographers caught her in their lens– Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon, Norman Parkinson or Irving Penn -, and they ensure her universal fame almost as much as her filmography (from Roman Holiday to Charade including Breakfast at Tiffany’s). The exhibition presents some 70 images of the star, some of which show her debuts as a dancer in the night club Ciro’s in 1949. The venue now houses the archives of the National Portrait Gallery. It pushes us to decipher the process of the making of a modern icon. These images are always slick, perfectly built, excluding any intimacy, any sloppiness or any false familiarity. Will today’s stars age as well?
• Audrey Hepburn at the National Portrait Gallery, from 2 July to 18 October 2015.