Celebrity
Portraits and images of famous people, and art about how fame is made, sold and consumed.
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About
Celebrity images record people known to strangers, and they have always done two jobs at once: flattering the famous and feeding public appetite. Joshua Reynolds enthroned the actor Sarah Siddons in Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1784), and in the 1860s cheap photographic cartes de visite let buyers collect royals, actors and generals in albums. Nadar's Paris studio photographed Sarah Bernhardt, George Sand and Charles Baudelaire.
Magazines turned the portrait into a brand. Philippe Halsman made more than a hundred covers for Life and asked sitters from Marilyn Monroe to Richard Nixon to jump for his camera. Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych (1962), made weeks after Monroe's death, repeats a publicity photograph until it smears and fades, a meditation on fame's afterlife. Later photographers such as Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino staged stars for magazine covers, while Elizabeth Peyton paints small, intimate portraits of musicians and royalty.
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