Madame Yevonde’s Color Revolution

In the early 1910s, while looking through the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, Yevonde Philone Cumbers came across an advertisement seeking a photography assistant. Her curiosity was piqued: she had been determined to find a career, believing it would aid the women’s movement, and photography was an important tool in creating suffragette propaganda. Soon, Cumbers (or Madame Yevonde, as she was called) was studying under the tutelage of Lallie Charles, at the time Britain’s most commercially successful woman portraitist. In 1914, she set up her own studio in London, in a building shared with the Women’s Institute, thus beginning a photography practice that would span over six decades.

Initially motivated by the women’s movement to pursue photography as a profession, Madame Yevonde became enamored with the craft. The first color photograph was created in 1861, but it didn’t take a foothold until much later in the twentieth century. Thus, while compositionally Madame Yevonde is an adept photographer, it’s her unconventional use of color and fantastical sets with dreamlike, mythological themes in the 1930s that makes her work so distinctive. This summer, the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London reopened its doors, after three years of renovations and with a new initiative to spotlight women artists, with Yevonde: Life and Colour. The exhibition serves as both a retrospective of Madame Yevonde’s work and a broader exploration of the origins of fine art color photography.

Color photography was “vilely expensive” and “very complicated,” Madame Yevonde wrote in her 1940 autobiography, In Camera. Nonetheless, she became a pioneer of the Vivex process, a trichrome-printing technique developed in the late 1920s that required three color-pigment sheets, eighty steps, and twelve hours to complete. Soon after, in 1935, Kodachrome hit the market, making color photography much more accessible. This development prompted Madame Yevonde to push against the tedium of infinite blacks, grays, and whites. “‘Be original or die’ would be a good motto for photographers to adopt,” she said in an address to the Royal Photographic Society in 1936. “Let them put life and color into their work.”

Many photographers of that era held a disparaging view of color, considering it unartistic and relegating it to the realm of advertising. “It didn’t provide the lovely rich blacks and the chalky whites that artistic photography could,” says the NPG’s associate curator of photographs Clare Freestone, who organized the exhibition. William Eggleston, a proponent of color photography whose 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York helped permanently shift color into the photography world, said that Henri Cartier-Bresson once dismissively told him that “color is bullshit.” (Cartier-Bresson himself did shoot in color, albeit rarely.) Madame Yevonde wasn’t deterred by the negative perceptions and forged ahead with Vivex prints. The resulting work is so vividly hued that it’s hard to believe it was made almost a century ago.  

Despite the successes in her time, Madame Yevonde’s pioneering work has been overshadowed in history by her male compatriots—as is often the case for many women artists. 

The exhibition will undoubtedly serve as an introduction to Madame Yevonde’s work for most visitors, but she wasn’t unknown during her time. In 1932, she had her first solo exhibition at the Albany Gallery in Mayfair, London, which was met with warm reception. Five years later, MoMA included two of her images in a photography survey: color pictures documenting the construction and interior decoration of the ocean liner RMS Queen Mary. The composition of one of these works, RMS Queen Mary, Funnel (1936), is strikingly modernist, with geometric lines and forms reminiscent of Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage (1907)—if The Steerage were richly saturated with shades of red.

Some of the most striking images on view at the NPG hail from Madame Yevonde’s series Goddesses (1935), in which she portrays society women as figures from classical mythology. One portrait features Lady Campbell as Niobe—who, as the legend goes, wept for the deaths of her fourteen children at the cruel hands of Apollo and Artemis. Foregoing the elaborate sets she created for some of her other “goddesses,” Madame Yevonde photographed her sitter so closely that the entirety of her face isn’t in frame, just the pearlescent tears streaming down her cheeks, her agony palpable.

A particularly fascinating image in the exhibition is a portrait of the actor Joan Maude, photographed in color and later inverted into a negative image, in which Maude’s skin is rendered a shimmering cobalt blue and her hair a blinding white. “She was experimenting still,” says Freestone, who chose to present the inverted print as well as separation negatives and solarizations to demonstrate the breadth of Madame Yevonde’s work. These brilliantly-hued experimentations are the stars of the show: her black-and-white imagery, taken after the war when color film was less available, misses some of the magic that those Vivex prints hold.

Despite the successes in her time, Madame Yevonde’s pioneering work has been overshadowed in history by her male compatriots—as is often the case for many women artists. The auction and museum worlds have historically played a part in diminishing the contributions of women artists: a 2019 study showed that between 2008 and 2018, women artists accounted for only 11 percent of major museum acquisitions in the United States, and even fewer have received exhibitions dedicated solely to their work. 

Yevonde: Life and Colour seems to signal a shifting tide. After acquiring her negatives in 2021, the National Portrait Gallery pulled Madame Yevonde’s existing prints from its archive, where they have mostly laid dormant since the artist herself donated them in 1971, and dedicated a show to her. It’s a clear response to a growing desire among audiences to see more historically underrecognized artists, and with this ethos, the National Portrait Gallery has reopened with a bang—and, as Madame Yevonde put it, a “riot of color.”

Yevonde: Life and Colour is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, London, through October 15, 2023.