Back to my day in London at the beginning of the month, and in the afternoon into the West End and the National Portrait Gallery. (I have to say I wasn't that impressed with the re-jigging of the gallery - too many unresolved bits in the architecture. Funny how is this supposedly cash-strapped land of ours money can always be found for such projects. Those bronze doors by Tracey Emin are pretty thin fare, artistic gruel.) I was there to see the current exhibition: 'Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World'. My second Beaton exhibition this year. But what can I say about Beaton, that I haven't already said? Nothing. Here then is what I wrote in the summer after visiting the Beaton exhibition at the Garden Museum.
"Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) was one of the most important, and influential, British photographers of the mid 20th century. He was also a designer for stage and film. He won an 'Academy Award for Costume Design' for his work on Vincent Minnelli's 1958 adaptation of 'Gigi'; and (more importantly for this exhibition) two further Oscars for Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction for George Cukor's 1964 adaptation of Lerner and Loewe's musical 'My Fair Lady'. He has been described as a polymath. Beaton was also a dandy, with amazing personal style. An aesthete. An inhabitant of the Beau Monde. He was a (waspish) diarist, and [] a very keen gardener. Piquant and perennially fascinating; perhaps his greatest work of art was himself."
He led that sort of life that the rest of us can only dream of.
This lavish exhibition - it contains an overwhelming number of both images and items - is by way of a retrospective. It covers some 40 years of Beaton's live from his student days at Cambridge and concluding with his work on George Cukor's screen adaptation of Lerner & Loewe's stage musical of 'My Fair Lady' in 1964. An apotheosis of sorts.
It was not however a steady, even trajectory - his career can be divided into two parts. The first half, roughly corresponds to the Interwar period. It is the ascent of a highly ambitious young man into the rarefied atmosphere of the Beau Monde, of the Sitwells and the 'Bright Young Things'. He also began work on British Vogue supplying both photographs and artwork to the magazine, which led in turn to work for American Vogue, based in New York. This was the time also of his first experience of Hollywood. Judging by a quotation accompanying a photograph of, perhaps, Gary Cooper, it must have been quite overwhelming for the twenty-something Beaton. I cannot remember the quotation in full but he did describe Hollywood actors as 'gods'. Of the actor Gary Cooper himself, who he first met in 1929, he wrote: "The new hero, the Western cowboy, with agate eyes, huge shoulders, hairy chest, flat cardboard flanks; hipless, with big hands, expressive and sensitive, became the new Adonis.”
Given this reaction to Hollywood it is perhaps not surprising that Truman Capote - and he was not alone in this - once described Beaton was 'a recorder of fantasy'. I don't know the context of Capote's quote but perhaps Capote underestimates Beaton, for he was more than a recorder of fantasy; he was its creator. I don't mean just the obvious fantasy of the designs for film and stage, but something that ran deep through all he did. There are those incredible photographs, inspired by Surrealism, he created of the Sitwells (for example), in which the taking of the photograph is but one moment of a long and laborious creative process. And it used to be said that the camera never lies.
There are also those weekends of dressing up, and the fetes and routs he staged at Ashcombe (his country home - 1947) and elsewhere. And then there is the circus bedroom he created for himself also at Ashcombe. Perhaps 'Fantasy' is not even sufficient to describe what he was doing which, I suppose, was actually creation of a heightened reality in which he was both director and star.
In 1938 American Vogue published one of Beaton's illustrations. It was a depiction of New York society. On closer inspection it was found to contain a number of anti-Semitic phrases. Beaton was sacked, the edition recalled and, I believe, pulped. He returned to the UK. He continued to be commissioned by the Royal Family, and when the War came he became an official photographer for the Ministry of Information. As Beaton himself said: the War has pitchforked me out of my self-made rut into all sorts of different worlds. That world of fantasy never returned in quite the same way. His War work helped rehabilitate him and return to America: in 1956 he won a Tony for Best Costume Design for his work on 'Quadrille'; a second Tony for Best Costume Design followed for the stage production of 'My Fair Lady'; a third Tony in 1960 and a fourth in 1970. His first Oscar in 1958 for his work on 'Gigi' and two further Oscars for 'My Fair Lady' in 1964 for Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design. Quite the feat. Though the reviewer for the Guardian thought it all too narrow, parochial, and English.
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