The National Portrait Gallery held an exhibition of Cecil Beaton’s photographs in 1968. It was the Gallery’s first ever photo exhibition, the first time it featured living people and the first show of a living British photographer. And it was the first major photographic exhibition I saw in London – I still have the book published to accompany it, The Best of Beaton. A trip to see the current show, ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ was something of a sentimental journey.
Unlike the 1968 exhibition, this one is dedicated to Beaton’s contributions to fashion and portrait photography. The work embraces the Jazz Age and the Bright Young Things, high fashion from the 1950s and the unforgettable success of My Fair Lady. Over 200 exhibits include photographs, letters, portrait sketches, fashion illustration and costume. Here are the great and iconic figures of the 20th century, Marilyn Monroe to Marlon Brando, Queen Elizabeth II to Salvador Dali.
Beaton can sometimes be seen as a dandyish, rather dilettante figure, but that’s a cultivated image. Not born poor by any means, his background was less aristocratic that he might have wished and he was a Class A snob. In the section called ‘The Essence of Artifice’, a quote from a schoolboy diary records: ‘I only want to be Cecil Beaton. I don’t want people to know me as I really am, but as I am trying and pretending to be.’ Behind the image, hard work was allied with creative flair and consummate technical skill to produce often stunning results. The hard work included cultivating contacts and creating flattering images of debutants, minor aristocracy and wives of people with influence.
One should not go to this exhibition expecting it to be something that it is not, a comprehensive overview of Beaton’s work: it is all surface and image, beautiful prints glamourise beautiful people, even war looks seductive. It’s a world of brilliance and wealth conjured from and for an elite during the decades when the majority of the population faced great hardship. ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ is a nostalgic look back to a time much of which is on the edges of living memory. It’s a feast of beauty – but a feast comprising entirely of desserts. My recollect of the 1968 exhibition is that there is more to savour in Beaton’s. This is an exhibition in tune with our age.