STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN.- In this year's summer exhibition at Gripsholm Castle (through September 30) the Swedish National Portrait Gallery has chosen to highlight the memory of Greta Garbo as well as presenting portrait photography as a new field for collecting.

Greta Garbo is mentioned by name in two of Graham Greene's novels. Her beauty has been analyzed by Roland Barthes, the French critic. David Bowie sings "I’m the twisted name on Garbo's eyes". The myth of Garbo is much greater than the sum of Greta Gustafsson's life and films. Today, 64 years after the last première in the cinema, she remains the most famous of all Swedish actresses. The 18 September 2005 marks the centenary of her birth. This year's summer exhibition at Gripsholm Castle in Mariefred is devoted to portrait photography and to Greta Garbo. A small exhibition entitled Den gudomliga. Greta Garbo 100 år (The Divine. Greta Garbo 100 Years) will be shown on the third floor of the castle in the former dressing room of the theatre from 4 June to 30 September. The Swedish National Portrait Gallery at Gripsholm Castle, currently comprising more than 4000 items, is managed by the Nationalmuseum. Two years ago a decision was made to collect photographic portraits on a more active basis.

Portrait photography was just as important as the cinema in creating the Garbo myth. Greta Garbo did not fit the period's picture of female beauty as such. Rather, photographs emphasized the androgynous elements that appealed both to women and men. The exhibition at Gripsholm takes as its starting point the suggestive photographs by Henry B. Goodwin and Ferdinand Flodin of Garbo as a teenager before she left for America. Her launch in the USA started in 1925 with Arnold Genthe's pictures for Vanity Fair which were done before the film companies stamped their influence on Garbo's image.
After Greta Garbo arrived in Hollywood she was restyled by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Her hairstyle was altered, her eyebrows plucked and her body slimmed. Garbo appeared as a vamp in the silent movies of the 1920s at which time female roles in American films were much more daring than in later decades. Photographer Ruth Harriet Louise emphasized the seductive aspects of Garbo's roles in the portraits she took for MGM's marketing division. She was superseded as house photographer by Clarence Sinclair Bull in 1929.

At this time, thanks to her success in the cinema, Garbo had much greater control over the parts she played and came increasingly to appear as a character actress. Her soulful eyes and the pure, classical lines of her face were emphasized in the photographs. In 1946, after she had ended her career in films, British society photographer Cecil Beaton took a series of portraits of Greta Garbo. Since these photographs were only sparingly touched up, they enable us to see how time had left its marks on this still hauntingly beautiful forty year-old face. The Nationalmuseum recently purchased one of these portraits for the National Portrait Gallery.

While this Beaton photograph marks the end of the exhibition it also represents the start of a further development in the acquisition policy of the portrait collection. Exhibition curator and project manager: Eva-Lena Karlsson,.