One of the most celebrated portrait photographers of the twentieth century, Cecil Beaton was a consummate judge of style and elegance. He had a passion for women, society, celebrity and many aspects of the Second World War, which he documented through photography, writing and illustration over the course of half a century. Although best known for his photography, he also won acclaim for his set and costume designs, including the legendary exaggerated Ascot hats and dresses for My Fair Lady and the beautifully evocative costumes for Gigi. Enormously prolific, his artistic roles were extraordinarily varied and intricately interwoven, with style and culture always at their core. Beaton intuitively understood the power of the press and media and how it could create and celebrate the notion of ‘celebrity’, including his own. Vogue’s Paris editor in the 1950s, Bettina Ballard, wrote that he was ‘forever improvising’. Philippe Garner of Sotheby’s London wrote: ”Beaton was an impresario who used fashion to colour the scenario of the play he made of his life, in which he himself starred as production photographer and leading actor.”
Beaton’s interest in photography began at an early age. While at Harrow, his parents gave him a Kodak Nº 3A Autographic folding camera, which produced postcard-sized negatives. He began photographing his sisters, Baba and Nancy, dressing them in various fantastical costumes under the guidance of his nanny. He used mirrors, cellophane or painted backdrops to create a theatrical effect and posed family members in elegant costumes, as in Baba Beaton: A Symphony in Silver, 1925. A self-taught photographer, he gradually developed a style of arty, stylised portraiture inspired by such illustrious contemporaries as Baron de Meyer and Edward Steichen, the master fashion photographers of the early twentieth century. The roots of his fantasy of beauty lay in his comfortable Edwardian childhood, while his fashion images were constructed with elaborate artifice, reflecting a kind of loosely derived drawing room surrealism.
Beaton began his career as a portraitist, where he was ‘taken up’ by the poet and socialite Edith Sitwell, of whom he made a series of memorable studies, and introduced to high society and the world of high fashion in the late 1920s. His first photographic exhibition, in London in 1927, was a great success and eventually led to a contract with Condé Nast’s Vogue magazine. Initially hired as a cartoonist for British Vogue, he was soon photographing for the magazine as well as its American and French editions. He worked for Vogue until the mid-1950s. The fact that Beaton was the only British exhibitor at the landmark Film Foto exhibition of modernist photography in Stuttgart in 1929 indicates the esteem in which his early work was held. Beaton visited the United States for the first time in 1929, where he photographed various stars for Vanity Fair.
Condé Nast, the irascible publisher of Vogue, liked to inspire his photographers by pitting them against each other to see who could produce the most striking and exciting fashion images. Beaton thus found himself competing with one of the men he had modelled himself on, the well-established Edward Steichen in New York and George Hoyningen-Huene in Paris. Although Beaton’s style did not change radically from his early, highly theatrical settings, it was refined, and his ability to make his ”interesting, alluring and important people look stunning”, in the words of his biographer Hugo Vickers, was the real key to his success. His unique, if eccentric, style was richly varied, with enough visual references to surrealism to make the photographs inventive, witty and stylish.
Beaton posed society women as well as mannequins in the most extravagant Greek tragedy poses or as if in ecstatic mystical states, as in his 1935 portrait of the actress Marlene Dietrich, in which she poses as a ”mirror image” of a classical bust. In many of his works, his human subjects became elements of an entire decorative tableau. The only condition that disturbed Beaton’s happiness at Vogue was Conde Nast’s insistence that he give up his ”little” Kodak and replace it with an 8×10 camera that would produce the quality of prints that Vogue readers expected. The small camera had allowed Beaton to crawl around on ladders and get at things from odd angles, reflecting his belief that amusement, innovation and shock were essential to fashion. But Beaton adapted to the larger format, which produced better quality images, and used it consistently, except when travelling.
Beaton himself was as interesting as his photographs. He had turned his back on middle-class conventions and entered the aristocratic world of High Bohemia with the wide-brimmed hats, flowing cravats and natty suits that became his trademark.
Articulate and creative, he was accepted into many artistic and social circles, including royalty.
He was the official photographer of Wallis Simpson at her wedding to the Duke of Windsor in 1937, is credited with helping to create the popular image of the Queen Mother after her husband’s accession to the throne, and photographed the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 in exquisite colour.
His colour photographs of Elizabeth just before she became Queen and of the young Princess Margaret are subtle, delicate and simply beautiful images of women. Of Beaton’s photographs of the Queen, The Illustrated said on 4 November 1950: “He has captured her radiance […] that elusive quality of light and fairy-tale charm that surrounds her.”
His compulsive work habits and discerning eye accelerated the process of trend-setting. Beaton moved easily through the worlds of high fashion photography, Hollywood and the theatre, becoming a member of the glamorous world of money and celebrity that he flattered with his camera.
His love of beauty and glamour served him well in the Hollywood of the 1930s, where he created portraits of film stars such as Greta Garbo in somewhat surreal settings.
With the outbreak of war in the late 1930s, Beaton’s flamboyant style fell out of favour.
During the Second World War, he became a war correspondent for the British Ministry of Information. He became the Royal Air Force’s official photographer and in late 1942 sent Vogue photographs of a burnt-out German tank and other eerie ‘abstractions of destruction’ from the North African desert. These photographs were as much an aesthetic exploration as a document. He travelled to the East and was in New Delhi with Lord Mountbatten, the Viceroy of India.
The experience of the war years influenced the style of his portraits, which became less whimsical and more direct. In December 1945 he reported on what was left of French fashion, using the crumbling walls of Paris as a backdrop for models in Balmain coats and Bruyere dresses. Beaton said of these shots: “There were very great technical difficulties. However, in some cases I think the power cuts and other disadvantages meant that we got some pictures that were outside the usual fashion sphere – in particular one of a girl standing in an artist’s garden in a Chinese flannel blouse, in which I tried to get some of the lighting of a Corot portrait. I think it is one of the best I have ever done.
After the war, still under contract to Vogue, Beaton returned to fashion photography, adopting some of the more restrained scenarios (including women dressed in high fashion but surrounded by everyday situations) that were typical of the ‘new realism’ that was prevalent at the time.
But by the 1950s, new stars in fashion photography were emerging, and the photographs of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn made Beaton’s images seem outdated. His contract with Vogue was terminated. In the late 1950s and 1960s, Beaton became increasingly involved in theatre and film.
He designed the sets and costumes for both Gigi and My Fair Lady, for which he won Oscars.
In 1956 he began photographing celebrities for Harper’s Bazaar, including actress Marilyn Monroe and writers Carson McCullers and Evelyn Waugh. These portraits were more personal and much more direct, demonstrating that Beaton’s ability to create a great portrait was not just his talent as a set designer. He was knighted in 1972. In 1974 he suffered a stroke and was unable to take photographs for several years.
Beaton was unique in the variety of roles he took on. He was not only a fashion and celebrity photographer, but also a chronicler of twentieth-century fashion and a photographic historian, whose most notable contributions to these subjects include The Glass of Fashion, published in 1954, and The Magic Image, written in collaboration with Gail Buckland and published in 1975. Beaton’s genuine love and clear understanding of the development of photography are eloquently and authoritatively expressed in these books.
Beaton’s descriptions of the contribution of individual photographers to the development of the medium are among the finest writings on photography, especially by a practising photographer. He was also a tireless diarist, filling 145 volumes with words and ink sketches from 1922 to 1974. Faced with his own mortality, in 1977 Beaton sold his entire archive of over 150,000 photographs and hundreds of thousands of negatives and slides to Sotheby’s London, which remains the principal holder of his work. In 1979, however, Beaton began to take photographs again and continued to do so until his death.
