Art review: Vanity Fair

VANITY FAIR

****

SCOTTISH NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, EDINBURGH

'VANITY of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity": whatever the original Hebrew, the authors of the King James version knew what they were doing when they chose to repeat "vanity", whether singular or plural, five times in twelve words at the beginning of the Book of Ecclesiastes. The word wonderfully compounds self-regard with futility: to be vain and to be in vain. What the preacher would have thought of a magazine called Vanity Fair and the celebrity culture that it promotes, a culture in which with perfect futility we willingly collude in the self-regard of those who are chosen, not for talent or skill, but simply because they are caught in the media's glare, I do not know.

The original Vanity Fair is in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a book that was once in every household in Scotland. He described it thus: "At this fair there is at all times to be seen juggling cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind." Then Thackeray adopted Vanity Fair as the title for his novel of 1848. Subsequently, and apparently without a hint of irony or satire, it became a magazine title, first in this country and then in the United States. There, from 1913, it was to be the pioneer of our modern image-based culture, or, if you wish to be as stern as Bunyan, of a culture dedicated to the collusion of the many in the futile self-regard of the few.

Along with Vogue, Vanity Fair was made successful by the publisher Condé Nast. Both titles were already in existence when he bought and revolutionised them. I confess I didn't know he was an individual (his middle name was Montrose) and not just a giant media conglomerate. Even so, he was not just a media tycoon in pursuit of profit, but clearly a man of imagination. Vanity Fair, for all its influence, was never very profitable and was subsidised by his other titles. In the 1930s it even pioneered colour photography before Kodak introduced colour film, using instead a hideously expensive method that followed Clerk-Maxwell's first colour photo overlaying three black and white negatives.

The original conception of Vanity Fair was as a crossover between the social and fashionable and the arts. Its relaunch by Nast was inspired by 1913's Armory Show, the exhibition that brought European Modernism to America. "We shall not lack authority in those things that make the smart world smart," declared the first editorial. Smart was where art and wealthy sophistication met. The magazine flourished, but in the 1930s, with dark clouds gathering on the international horizon, smart began to look a little out of touch. The magazine had appealed to both sexes, but began to lose its male readership. It folded in 1936, but 50 years later smart was back, and so it was reborn.

Nast's editor was Frank Crowninshield, who was closely involved with the Armory Show and later was one of the founders of MoMA. As modern art was international, in another piece of pioneering that has shaped the way high culture works, Vanity Fair was inclusive from the beginning. Europe and America sat side by side on its pages. For both Nast and Crowninshield, photography was the modern art form of choice, so from the start photography, but especially portrait photography, played a central role in the magazine. The portraits that it commissioned and published in both its early and later incarnations are the subject of a major exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery – and the counterpoint between the two is illuminating.

A central item in the first issue was Snapshot from the Hall of Fame, a celebrity showcase with text and pictures. The magazine employed the best photographers and gave them space, even star status of their own, and so was responsible for some of the most memorable portrait images of the first part of the 20th century. Through it, the photograph became the agent of glamour and the vehicle of the new celebrity. Art became glamorous too. Picasso took his place as a celebrity alongside Josephine Baker, Isadora Duncan and all the glamour of Hollywood. Picasso's portrait by Man Ray is formidable in its latent power.

George Hoyningen-Huene shows Josephine Baker naked but for her beads and a narrow column of drapery that drops vertically to spread in a wide puddle at her feet. The picture was taken in 1929 and her pose is a voluptuous mockery of the Oscar statuette introduced the year before.

Posing her between the columns of the Parthenon, Edward Steichen makes Isadora Duncan the epitome of classical grace. He was house photographer for the magazine in the 1920s and his portrait of Gloria Swanson behind a flowered veil is the true face of Hollywood's golden age: a symbol of the tantalising exchange between the real and the imagined personified in the star system, but also of our insatiable curiosity about the actual lives behind the glamorous veil.

That was what really nurtured Vanity Fair and has fuelled the market for all the pictorial gossip magazines that followed. Nevertheless, in its pages glamour was not limited to those who were its merchants by profession. Buckminster Fuller is here in a picture by FS Lincoln. So is Einstein. His portrait by Martin Höhlig of 1923 is fascinating.

This is not the woolly-haired mad scientist of later pictures – made safe by incipient lunacy perhaps – but a man in a dark suit and wing collar. He is still young, even if his hair is greying, and is ordinary in everything except the electrifying intelligence in his eyes.

There is something very different about the portraits from the magazine's second incarnation. Maybe modern celebrity is simply shallower and more meretricious, or perhaps the difference runs deeper. Harry Benson's portrait of Ronald and Nancy Reagan dancing together really defines a moment in history. As Reagan clearly understood, it was not just the triumph of style over substance; it was that glamour, sex-appeal even, were the new power. For better or for worse, the world had caught up with Vanity Fair. Poor Gordon Brown.

Other things were changing, too, and Benson's picture of Boris Berezovsky looking shiftily out of a curtained limo in front of the Kremlin encapsulates the new Russia.

Helmut Newton's portrait of the great capitalist Gianni Agnelli makes him look like an eagle and just as indifferent to the fate of those he devours. Agnelli is nicely paired with Newton's Margaret Thatcher looking like a carnivorous alien. Nevertheless it is Annie Leibowitz who carries the later incarnation of the magazine. Her group portrait of George W Bush and his War Cabinet would be just as terrifying if you didn't know who they were and what they stood for. Her picture of Robert Mitchum on a stormy pier, like Steichen's Gloria Swanson, fuses the real and imagined. Here as elsewhere you also feel she is a little too knowing, too conscious of such precedents.

Nevertheless, her Robert de Niro sitting alone in an empty space is a strong and simple image, while her portrait of a pregnant Demi Moore made pregnancy fashionable. Perhaps it even had a demographic impact. Its publication was certainly loyal to an editorial declaration nearly 80 years earlier: "We hereby announce ourselves as determined and bigoted feminists."

But even Leibowitz can't make Nicole Kidman look convincing as a star. Nor can she do so with Tom Cruise, posed pretentiously against a landscape with his new wife and child. Maybe that is the point – vanity. Pure self-regard displays its own futility. Or maybe celebrity is just no longer the same. Certainly Jennifer Lopez by Firooz Zahedi proudly displaying her bottom in half a satin bikini in the columned porch of some anonymous villa is a very long way indeed from Steichen's Isadora Duncan among the columns of the Parthenon.

• Until 7 December