Fragile Beauty, V&A, review: Frisky men and ‘beautiful’ 9/11 images – Elton John’s photo collection is wild
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What do you give someone who has everything? If that person is multimillionaire musician Elton John, the answer’s simple: a rare photograph. A new exhibition at the V&A showcasing “aspects” of this photography fanatic’s co​llection of more than 7,000 prints includes a group of self-portraits in which the American Peter Hujar hops and skips, naked, around a studio. Elton received them from his husband, David Furnish, for his 70th birthday. Who says your twilight years can’t be frisky?
The pair have been collecting photography since the 1990s, after pop’s “Rocket Man” went sober. (In the catalogue, John reveals that he used to consider photography “a ‘pain in the a---’, not an “art form”, because he associated it with having his portrait taken, which he “hated”.) In 2016, Tate Modern presented their modernist holdings, including a print of Man Ray’s Glass Tears (1932) for which, in 1993, John paid almost $194,000, then a record sum. Fragile Beauty is a sort of sequel, by turns glitzy and sobering, examining the medium’s evolution after 1950.
It begins, against peach-pink walls, with the couple’s latest acquisition: Richard Avedon’s brilliant black-and-white shot of a pale part-time beekeeper as bald as Buddha, partially covered with buzzing workers and drones. This establishes two themes: an interest, often explicitly homoerotic, in the male body as a subject (brace yourself for some full-frontal nudity, including what is essentially an arty “dick pic” by Robert Mapplethorpe); and a preoccupation with vulnerability and physical and emotional pain. To get that shot, Avedon’s model was stung four times.
Yet, for all the talk of “fragile beauty” as the “filament” binding everything together, this behemoth of an exhibition – with, depending on how you’re counting, more than 300 prints on display – proves bewilderingly various. What else can we make of a show that encompasses a portrait by Norman Parkinson of Miss Piggy and Richard Drew’s Falling Man, taken at 9.41am on September 11, 2001? (John describes the latter as “one of the most beautiful images that I’ve got”.) As I passed through the exhibition’s nine sections – which include “Fashion”, “Desire”, and “Reportage”, as well as a room of “Stars”, many of them musicians (Bob Dylan, the Fab Four, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin) – I felt like a pinball whooshed willy-nilly around a gigantic arcade game.
I suppose we should forgive the man behind Candle in the Wind his sentimental interest in Marilyn Monroe. I felt less tolerant, though, of self-aggrandising moments such as the positioning of Mario Testino’s colourful 2002 close-up of John’s thickset, be-ringed hands – which, held against an intricately patterned pink suit, call to mind Hans Holbein the Younger’s likenesses of Henry VIII – beside a porthole offering a view onto a portrait, in the next room, of John Lennon.
For all that, Fragile Beauty is worth visiting. Considered individually, these prints, of immaculate quality and provenance, are often spellbinding. Six free-spirited shots, scattered throughout, by former wunderkind Ryan McGinley – a superstar of contemporary American art circa 2003 – are still invigorating. Harley Weir’s 2015 photographs of Senegalese youths are superbly chic.
Sometimes, things even get surprisingly cerebral. “Towards Abstraction” presents comparatively demanding yet scintillating, sensuous images by, among others, Richard Caldicott, Thomas Ruff, and Wolfgang Tillmans. It’s a world away from the earlier celebrity-worship, candyfloss silliness, and soft porn.
From May 18; vam.ac.uk
