The
resulting exhibition consisted of just over 100 images,
of which one third had been newly printed up from the
original negatives in the archive. The exhibition opened
at the Royal Photographic Society's gallery in Bath
on 19th May 1990, where it remained for seven weeks
before moving on to the National Portrait Gallery in
London on 20th July 1990, for a stay of ten weeks. In
the following year, it spent six weeks at the Rochdale
Art Gallery and a further six weeks at Bodelwyddan Castle
in N. Wales, before finally coming to an end at the
Art Gallery and Museum in Kelvingrove, Glasgow in January,
1992. The tour had been a great success, attracting
large crowds and receiving excellent reviews wherever
it appeared. Above all, it provided the Yevonde Portrait
Archive with valuable experience of the museum and gallery
world, and served as a springboard for later exhibitions.
Long
before this tour came to an end the Yevonde Portrait
Archive had already started planning its next move,
and finally decided on a two-pronged exhibition strategy.
Since Madame Yevonde was predominantly a portrait photographer
and had made countless portraits of actors and actresses,
revue artistes, dancers, musicians, novelists and playwrights,
as well as sculptors and painters, the decision was
taken to target arts festivals, where large crowds of
cognoscenti gathered to pay homage to their favourite
artists and performers, offering the perfect opportunity
for displaying portraits of the very people they had
come to celebrate. In this way, many thousands of visitors
to the festivals in Cheltenham, Kings Lynn, Canterbury,
Liverpool, Guildford and Southampton in particular became
acquainted with Madame Yevonde's work. At the same time,
a series of exhibitions staged in large public galleries
in London, Birmingham, York, Durham, Liverpool, Swansea,
Nottingham and Halifax, to mention but a few of the
cities involved, gave thousands more people the opportunity
to experience the full range of work produced by the
artist. In all, more than 30 such exhibitions were held
over a period of about six years, greatly swelling the
number of people to whom Madame Yevonde was more than
just a name on a poster.
By
now, the Yevonde Portrait Archive had made considerable
progress towards its stated objective of re-establishing
Madame Yevonde's name in her home country, and in 1996,
started to turn its attention to the Continent of Europe.
Over the next couple of years, important exhibitions
of Madame Yevonde's colour and b/w work were held in
commercial galleries in Amsterdam and Nijmegen in Holland,
at the Villa Ichon in Bremen, N. Germany, and at the
International Month of Photography in Athens. Madame
Yevonde's work was also shown at prestigious art fairs
in Amsterdam and Basel, and at the Paris Photo. Further
exhibitions on the Continent are planned for the future.
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