Following a three-year refurbishment, London’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is slated to reopen this June. A highly anticipated exhibition of previously unseen photographs taken by Paul McCartney at the height of Beatlemania and another by little-known color portrait photographer Yevonde (1893-1975) will inaugurate the museum’s updated space.
More than 200 candid photographs taken between December 1963 and February 1964 by McCartney of his bandmates, entourage, and others will be included in the exhibition “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm,” which opens on June 28. As the Beatles played concerts across major cities and made their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, McCarthy was capturing the moments around him. A book of the photographs will accompany the exhibition.
The life and career of portraitist Yevonde, who was an early advocate of color photography in the 1930s, will be traced in the show “Yevonde: Life and Colour,” which opens on June 22. The NPG acquired Yevonde’s archive in 2021 and the exhibition will showcase her experimentation with developing techniques like solarization and the the triple-negative Vivex colour process among her portraits and still life photographs.
The “David Hockney: Drawing for Life” exhibition will return to the gallery on November 2, after its initial run was cut short due to the Covid-19 lockdown in spring 2020. The show focuses on the portraits of five people Hockney repeatedly painted, and will include new portraits that the artist made of visitors to his home in Normandy, France during the pandemic. See three images from the upcoming exhibitions below.