- The Australian
- June 13, 2011
Chris Levine's Lightness of Being, a 2007 photographic portrait, is a haunting image of inner serenity. Source: The Australian
THE evolution of the way the Queen has been represented visually in the past 60 years is much more than a document of her life and reign. Images of the sovereign arise from, and are a record of, changing times, attitudes and values. Such portraits of the Queen reflect critical developments in the role and perception of royalty, but they also hold up a mirror to those wider social changes that form the context for the creation and evaluation of royal image-making.
Images of the Queen have constantly negotiated a balance. On one side they reflect an exalted and historic role, one invested with constitutional, ceremonial and symbolic significance. On the other, they reveal an individual inhabiting that role and maintaining a relationship with society. The Queen is a figure who stands apart from the world but, at the same time, is inseparable from its advances, reversals and vicissitudes. In the past 30 years, the speed and depth of social change has affected the monarchy profoundly, transforming the way the Queen has been represented.
The beginning of that transformation dates from the early 1980s and may be identified with the appearance of Diana Spencer. By late 1980, the media had begun to speculate about a romance between Diana and Prince Charles. By February 1981 the couple's engagement was announced. Images of the Queen produced around this time demonstrate the radical shift that coincided with the impending royal marriage.
Gilbert and George's collage Coronation Cross 1981 comprises 49 postcards, including 36 depicting gothic arches and 13 reproducing Beaton's coronation photograph arranged in a cross.
Made shortly before the 30th anniversary of the Queen's coronation, this image is at once celebratory and ironic. The Queen has a central position, but the cross arrangement has multiple connotations. As well as possessing historic, national significance, it is also connected to crucifixion.
Patrick Lichfield's photograph of Queen Elizabeth with Diana on her wedding day could hardly be more different in atmosphere and the contrast is revealing. Taken in the picture gallery at Buckingham Palace after the marriage ceremony it depicts Diana centre-stage. For many the centre of gravity was in a new place.
Transmitted by television around the world, the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales was seen by an estimated audience of about 750 million people. In terms of profile, the royal family had never been so visible. However, two aspects of this visibility were significant departures. The first was the fascinated adulation accorded to princess Diana. The second was the shift of attention away from the Queen towards the younger members of the royal family. With Diana as the focus, the preoccupation of the press and public with the image presented by royalty would continue unabated.
The relationship of the formal, public role of the Queen with the private person became an increasingly contested area in the way royalty was perceived. This idea is the central theme of the four large screen-print portraits of the Queen made by Andy Warhol in 1984. Part of a series entitled Reigning Queens, for these images Warhol appropriated an earlier, official Silver Jubilee photograph of the Queen by Peter Grugeon. He manipulated that original, formal portrait, simplifying detail and repeating the image as a set of colour variations.
The effect is to dehumanise the sitter, creating a glamorised - but unreal - representation that hides the individual's identity. Transformed and repeated, the image of the Queen has become a mass-produced mask. The portraits demonstrate that, while the Queen remained to some extent removed from the upsurge of media interest, presenting members of the royal family as celebrities was a phenomenon to which the Queen was not immune.
At the beginning of the 21st century, and with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in prospect, one question in particular is pertinent: what now does the Queen represent? Artists and other image-makers have responded in various ways. A memorable press photograph taken in July 1999 shows the Queen taking tea with a Scottish family in their Glasgow home. This understated image advances an accessible Queen, meeting ordinary people in day-to-day situations.
Lucian Freud's controversial portrait of 2001 presents a not unrelated view, emphasising a fallible human being in an exalted role. Characteristically, Freud's view of his sitter is an unflinching one, executed without the faintest trace of flattery. With her crown balanced somewhat precariously, the Queen is presented as a woman burdened with tradition and the trappings of state, striving stoically to maintain dignity in an age alert to irony. As with Freud's best work, the portrait has an affecting humanity.
More recently, Chris Levine and Annie Leibovitz have, in their respective ways, probed the long-standing question of the relation of the reality of monarchy and its outward appearance.
Levine's startling photographic portrait, Lightness of Being, of 2007 shows the Queen with her eyes closed. This is an image of supreme inner serenity and equanimity, a personification that is at once immediate and remote. According to the artist, this arresting evocation of royalty came about unexpectedly during the course of the sitting. Levine's use of long exposures proved tiring for the Queen and there was a brief moment, while she was resting, when the sitter seemed to relax and to withdraw into herself.
Paradoxically, that moment of inner communion conveyed something more palpable and compelling than any of the positions or expressions she had adopted earlier in the session. Levine was able to capture this apparition. The result is one of the most haunting but telling evocations of royalty by any artist. Poised in the void created by suspended self-consciousness, the person inhabiting the role seems illuminated.
Leibovitz's photograph is similarly timeless. But where Levine summons a fugitive impression, Leibovitz's portrait casts a line across the years, as if flickering across a surface of different moments from the Queen's reign.
Presenting the monarch as a central presence in a natural setting, Leibovitz draws upon Pietro Annigoni's first great portrait of the young Queen. Depicting the Queen wearing a buttoned cape also implies Annigoni's second, less romanticised portrait of the older, more experienced royal incumbent, as well as Cecil Beaton's photographic portrait of 1968, with its secular view of royalty.
These earlier images inhabit Leibovitz's frame of reference, but these allusions are refracted through a contemporary sensibility. Like her predecessors, Leibovitz presents the Queen as an enduring, indomitable figure. But seen against a backdrop of turbulent skies, she now appears as a constant within an unpredictable world.
During her reign, images of the Queen have taken innumerable different forms, and perhaps this very fact is revealing about the manifold, elusive nature of the subject. While the occupant and her public role are real and tangible, the monarchy remains an abstraction: a mutable ideal, open and responsive to change.
For more than 60 years the Queen has sustained these different elements, negotiating a balance between the individual, her duties and what those duties represent. At the beginning of the 21st century, there is a sense that she has become the vital representative of her times, providing a reassuring link with the past and reflecting the present, as those around her confront an uncertain future.
In that respect, the Queen eludes any single, definitive visual representation, but inspires a paradox best captured by T.S. Eliot:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
Edited extract from The Queen: Art and Image, Hardie Grant, $36.95, released in Australia on July 1.
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