Vogue UK - March 2020

C

ecil Beaton’s appeal never seems to pall.

Dutiful Vogue readers will know him as a

photographer who elevated – in Britain, at

least – fashion and portrait photography to

something of an art. I suspect, however, most people

know him best for his Oscar-winning costume designs

for My Fair Lady (1964), and in particular that

dazzling conceit, the black-and-white Ascot scene.

He was, by many accounts – mostly and charmingly

his own – ungenerous and difficult, jealous and

snobbish. And yet, when his early work is in front of

you, full of fun and artifice (he’s not yet going for the

skull beneath the skin), he is impossible to resist.

Soon, at the National Portrait Gallery, Beaton’s

work will once again be centre of attention – in

the last exhibition before the gallery’s closure for

a £35.5 million revamp this June. Cecil Beaton’s

Bright Young Things concentrates on the joie de vivre

of the 1920s and 1930s, when he finds his first

success and realises what he can do with photography

and, as significantly, what photography can do for him

• the doors it can open.
  Looking at Beaton’s photographs is to glimpse through
  a keyhole into another, now distant world; atoms of the
  past swirling in front of our eyes. He is an absorbing guide,
  and much else, too: a talented writer, incisive social
  commentator, compelling diarist, garden designer, interior
  decorator, painter and illustrator – and all with a deceptive
  lightness of touch. For Vogue, he was all but indefatigable.
  His first photograph appeared in 1924, his last in 1979, a
  year before his death. “When I Die, I Want To Go to Vogue,”
  he supposedly replied to David Bailey, when asked what he
  might call his memoirs of a life in fashion.
  As the gallery restyles itself for the 2020s, and the new
  wave of portraiture that will surely come its way thereafter,
  it’s not a bad time, perhaps, to step back a century and
  examine one of our greatest chroniclers, and the fast-paced,
  endlessly fascinating era that shaped him. n
  Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things is at the National Portrait
  Gallery, WC2, from 12 March to 7 June

Spirit of the age

A major new exhibition will explore the flamboyant world of glamour

and rebellion through the lens of Cecil Beaton, says Robin Muir

Beaton’s Bright Young Things in

Vogue: left, from top, Lady Pamela

Smith and Zita Jungman, November

1927; poet Nancy Cunard in 1929.

Below, from top: actress Tallulah

Bankhead, April 1929; writer Lady

Eleanor Smith, September 1927.

Bottom left: Cecil Beaton (on left) and

Stephen Tennant in an image from the

National Portrait Gallery exhibition

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