Compelling close-ups from Merle Oberon to John Singer Sargent’s sassy debutantes

Michelle Williams Gamaker, herself British-Sri Lankan, has made an exquisite and entirely nonjudgmental portrait of Oberon’s life and motives in several films of her own. At Matt’s Gallery, she is showing four shorts while also creating a longer fifth, the set of which is at the heart of the show. A psychoanalyst’s office, complete with mandatory couch and uncanny pictures, it is where visitors sit to listen to a tense encounter between Oberon and the analyst. But before this come the shorts.

At first, Williams Gamaker appears to keep a tight focus on Oberon’s racial origins. There are films of bandages being unwound, of Oberon gazing at her reflection in mounting horror, her suppurating face hideously swollen. Ammoniated mercury is applied. Operations are performed. She begs a masked surgeon, formidably disapproving, to remove her scars. Brilliantly staged, the operating theatre exactly resembles an early Hollywood set.

But are they scars from skin lightening or from the car crash in which Oberon was severely injured in 1937? Her second husband, cinematographer Lucien Ballard, famously devised the Obie light to throw the emphasis instead towards her eyes. (Not incidentally, the analyst appears to be named Ballard.) And who is this stunning actor on our screen who passes for the real Merle Oberon?

The relationship between life and art is explicit in Oberon’s biography. A woman who conceals her past, and keeps on attempting to conceal its traces in her skin, is constantly made up by studio employees, just as she constantly makes herself up. But Williams Gamaker takes the analogy further by casting the young actor Thara Schöön, so heavily made up that the distinctions between the two women simply vanish.

Matt’s Gallery is effectively a working film set throughout the show’s run, the analysis sequence being filmed when they close for a week in June. But the script you hear through speakers is highly allusive, running from her voice coaching and surgery to Oberon’s compulsion to train the past out of herself, from telling exchanges about escapism to William Wyler’s 1939 movie of Wuthering Heights, in which Laurence Olivier plays the dark-skinned Heathcliff, Oberon the white-skinned Cathy.

Williams Gamaker’s forthcoming film will be screened next year, but even without it, Strange Evidence spools through the imagination in the most unexpected ways. What illusions are we projecting about ourselves? Oberon’s black-and-white screen tests for Powell and Pressburger are showing in a vitrine full of Oberon memorabilia. She turns to and fro, in a white veil, then a black one, in all her staggering beauty. At least, they appear to be Merle Oberon. I don’t know how Williams Gamaker even made them.

How a woman wishes to appear to the world, for posterity, is also the subject of Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits at Kenwood House. This is riveting social history in images and words: the stories of 18 “dollar princesses”, as they were disparagingly known, who married into the British aristocracy.

Grace Hinds from Alabama, who weds Lord Curzon but sleeps with Oswald Mosley (also lover of her three stepdaughters): nose tilted, in muckle tiara. Cora Smith from Louisiana, who marries the Earl of Strafford, frock slipping off one shoulder a la Madame X (did she pay extra?). Edith, Lady Playfair, armour-plated in shining satin, whose stepson remembered her as “one of the last capitalists to drive round Hyde Park every afternoon in a carriage-and-pair”.

The show is beautifully displayed, so that you can look back and forth between Nancy Astor young and old, say, while also watching Sargent blatantly borrowing from Velázquez, Gainsborough or Manet. Some portraits are charcoal drawings, which patently cost less but make every sitter look roughly the same: pert nose, expensive jewels and hairdo. He uses the medium like maquillage, widening their eyes with dots of light, using the putty rubber for burnishing highlights. The paintings, alas, are as glib as Sargent could be when churning them out.

Miles of apricot satin, its sheen hastily indicated with a couple of licks; wasp-waisted torsos and swan necks in ludicrous elongations; fumbled arms and chins. Cora Smith’s hands are so casually botched you’d think she would have asked for her money back.

The wall texts, by curator Wendy Monkhouse, are superbly written, better than most of the paintings. Visitors may find themselves reading their way round the exhibition. But for the sitters, the whole point was that whatever you were, or had once been, you were now a John Singer Sargent. Every portrait here is transactional.

Michelle Williams Gamaker: Strange Evidence is on view at Matt’s Gallery, London SW11; until 20 July. Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits is on view at Kenwood House, London NW3; until 5 October.

Photographs by Paulina Figueroa; Jonathan Bassett; Christopher Ison © English Heritage