“A girl should be two things: Classy and Fabulous.”
– Coco Chanel
UNRIVALED
To contrast with the strong poses and expressions of Newton’s pictures, here Jamie has captured Sylvia’s softer side in this sensual pose with Model Mel Wayman.
The stunning realism of Higgie’s draughtsmanship is undercut by the geometric patterns she lays over her images. The result is a fascinating symbiosis of the natural and the mathematical.
This stunning life drawing of a beautiful Japanese lady is fashioned out of an expert manipulation of shadow to create form. Bathed in white light, the model reads an issue of Playboy. Inspired in part by a set of Japanese transparencies from the 1920s, this series is a comment on the culture clash of East meets West.
Put me together again or I’ll have to work on it again. I love the time, the experience and the interaction with the world, and you, that created the facts of me.
The Marilyn Monroe series is arguably Warhol’s most recognized portfolio. Fascinated by her fame, Warhol used Marilyn Monroe as one of his earliest muses. These prints are based on a photograph of the star taken by Gene Korman as a publicity shot for her 1953 film Niagara.
In ‘Isobel’, Grimwood’s semi-abstract portrait of a young blonde woman reflects the expressive colour and form of great painters such as Matisse and Picasso. Slightly surreal in its figuring of her unbalanced eyes, this sophisticated portrait is expertly draughted in its loose form.
This ethereal photograph of a nude woman swimming in the water draws on the theme explored by some of the master’s of photography- from Helmut Newton to Richard Avedon and Mario Testino. Taken as if from the sea bed, the model’s reflection is caught abstracted over the ripples of the water at the surface of the sea. Anonymous, her head steals itself above the water for air, presenting us with an enigmatic portrait of nude swimming.
Conceived in the style of early German expressionists, this surreal painting is laden with quirky details – such as the sun as a clock or her oversized flowered hair.
In this photograph, Nicolson takes the subject of the half-length portrait of a young African girl. Standing as if her body was a canvas, we read her figure as a sculptural form on which paint has been applied. Regal, confident and proud, she stands with strength.
This rare collector’s print, from an edition of just 8, is signed personally by Hugh Hefner, the legendary founder of Playboy. This image of Marilyn Monroe, then Norma Jean, was shot in 1946 when she was just 19 and an aspiring actress although it wasn’t published in Playboy magazine until 1987, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Marilyn’s tragic death.