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Cecil Beaton: VALOUR in the FACE of BEAUTY

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Cecil Beaton:
VALOUR IN THE
FACE OF BEAUTY

FROM BRIGHT YOUNG THING AND DOCUMENTER OF LONDON‘S LOST GENERATION OF THE 20S TO A DOCUMENTER OF A NEW GENERATION WHO WOULD LOSE THEIR LIVES IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR, THIS IS JUST ONE SLICE OF Cecil Beaton‘s REMARKABLE LIFE THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY.

TEXT Mark Simpson

CECIL BEATON SELF-PORTRAIT, CAMBRIDGE FOOTLIGHTS, 1925

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CECIL BEATON

In a world saturated with social me-dear surveillance and

Beaton: No, no one could help me. It was up to me to find

  • the sort of world that I wanted.
  • suffused with surplus selfies, being ‘interesting’ becomes ever-

more compulsory – just as it becomes ever-more elusive. Not just for artists in this brave new connected, visual, attentionseeking world, but for civilians too.
Little wonder that Cecil Beaton, a man who essentially invented himself and his astonishing career with a portable camera loaded with his ambition and longing, one of the brightest of his bright young generation of the 1920s, has become more famous, not less. As we plough relentlessly into a 21st century that he anticipated in many ways, long before his death in 1980, I suspect ours is a world he would be as much horrified as impressed by.
He was by his own admission, “driven by the visual”, and claimed not to have read a book before he was 18, which makes him sound almost millennial. But luckily for posterity, he also had a wicked way with words. His books and waspish

diaries contain many timeless quips:

“What is elegance? Soap and water!” “All I want is the best of everything and there’s very little of that left.” “Perhaps the world’s second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore.” And my personal favourite: “Never in the history of fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so much that needs to be covered so badly.”

But perhaps the most oft-quoted Beaton aphorism in our

e-Darwinian age is his scornful advice to “Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.”
Beaton was undoubtedly one of the most interesting men

who ever lived – and the life he lived is itself a kind of fantastic

fairy-tale, albeit a lonely one without a happy ending. His advice, then, is certainly to be taken seriously, but I harbour some scepticism about how fully people who quote him on their Instagram and Patreon pages understand what being ‘interesting’ really involves. Where it comes from. And what it costs.
The 19th-century French writer and flâneur Charles
Baudelaire did. He believed that the dandy – and Beaton most certainly was one, even if he didn’t describe himself as such – has “no profession other than elegance... no other status, but that of cultivating beauty in their own persons... The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror.”

F a ce to Face, 1962

Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was born in 1904 into a prosperous Edwardian middle-class family in Hampstead, a leafy suburb of London. He was the product of true theatrical romance: his mother Esther was a Cumbrian blacksmith’s daughter who was visiting London when she fell in love with his father Ernest, a timber merchant, after seeing him onstage in the lead role in an amateur dramatic production.
True to his origins, as a boy Beaton took to hanging around outside theatres, admiring and losing himself in the pretty posters marketing the actresses of the day. Using a Box Brownie camera he was given at the age of 11, he dragooned his pretty, blonde younger sisters, Barbara (Baba) and Nancy, into recreating that world: a fantastical, stage-y, lushly artificial dreamworld that he was, almost by sheer wishful thinking, later to people with actual starlets and some of the century’s greatest celebrities.
Beaton, who went on to photograph so many famous

women with an eye that was more conspiratorial than

analytical, began his life-long love affair with the camera at the instruction of a woman – his photography-enthusiast nanny. Beaton’s gaze was not exactly what you’d call ‘male’. It was rather more ambiguous than that.
“My mother’s dressing table drawer of powder, rouge and mascara held an uncanny fascination for me,” he wrote. “One day, I stole into her bedroom and painted my face. My father caught sight of me. He became so enraged that I was locked in my bedroom.”
Neither was the world of men, or boys, Beaton’s. He had a difficult and distant relationship with his father and “the noise of laughter in the billiards room” as he called it later. He hated his first (boys only) school, Heath Mount, not least because he was mercilessly bullied by fellow classmate Evelyn Waugh, who probably found Beaton’s unabashed sissiness a personal affront. Which is a kind of distinction in

itself – if the future author of Decline and Fall and Brideshead

Revisited picks on you at school, you must have something about you. In fact, Waugh proved to be a thoroughly dedicated follower of Beaton’s, and continued to bully him and in effect shadow his career into adulthood and old age – and Beaton returned the compliment.
Beaton not only lived in front of the mirror, taking many self-portraits, some in drag, and maintaining an impeccable dandified image most of his life, but he went behind the mirror as well, photographing and capturing the mysterious charms of beauty in his many celebrity portraits. Beaton accessed a beautiful dreamworld betwixt life and death that he never quite left. He was perhaps the last great dandy and romantic, which is the loneliest kind of life. But he nevertheless performed a great public service

“EVELYN WAUGH IS MY ENEMY. WE DISLIKE ONE ANOTHER INTENSELY. HE THINKS THAT I’M A NASTY PIECE OF GOODS, AND, OH, BROTHER, I FEEL THE SAME WAY ABOUT HIM” – CECIL BEATON, 1962

Others were enchanted in a more convivial fashion. The writer Cyril Connolly, who attended Beaton’s next school, St Cyprian’s in Eastbourne – along with George Orwell – wrote in his autobiography of being overwhelmed by the beauty of Beaton’s singing at school concerts.
Interviewer: Your mother wasn’t able to help you in this particular difficulty?

CECIL BEATON SELF-PORTRAIT

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NANCY AND BABA BEATON, CECIL’S SISTERS, BY CECIL BEATON

BABA BEATON BY CECIL BEATON

JUNIOR AIRMEN, RAF TORQUAY AND DARLINGTON, 1941, BY CECIL BEATON

WOMEN WORKING ON THE BARRAGE BALLOON, 1941, BY CECIL BEATON

EAGLE SQUADRON PILOT, 1942, BY CECIL BEATON

SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL IN THE CABINET ROOM, 1940, BY CECIL BEATON

CECIL BEATON

  • At Harrow, Beaton found himself bored and unable to fit
  • Aesthetically, Tennant was an even more epicene, more

elegant – and more aristocratic – version of Beaton. He was what Beaton aspired to be – so Beaton knew exactly how to capture him. His hypnotic other/unworldliness shines out in Beaton’s photos. In some of the photos he took of them together they look like fairy twins – or satanic angels.
With the help of Osbert Sitwell, Beaton was able to put on his first exhibition at the Cooling Gallery in 1927, featuring many of his photos of the Bright Young Things – including his famous portrait of angular Edith Sitwell posed as a gothic tomb (Edith was to remain a close friend until her actual death in 1964). Beaton’s reputation as the most fashionable photographer of his generation was sealed.
In 1928, with the wind in his sails, Beaton steamed to New
York with the unassailable conviction that America would throw itself at his feet. But initially America proved somewhat impervious to his charms, especially after he made a remarkable appearance on film in which he criticised, looking and sounding every inch the faggy limey dandy, New York women for not looking like English aristocrats. (At the end, in a hilarious touch – Beaton was both very funny and very sincere – he affectedly studied his fingernails/claws).
After a year of “difficulty” he landed himself a lucrative contract with V o gue magazine, where he worked as a highly successful photographer for the next decade, using his sense of theatricality, wit, artifice, love of the surreal (e.g. the famous head-in-a-hatbox photo) and taxidermist’s skill, to turn selling into an art form and help invent fashion photography as we know it today. Fashion, after all, presents us with a through-the-looking-glass dreamworld we can inhabit – for a price. Beaton proved the perfect spirit-guide to that world, one he had been inhabiting as often as possible since his youth.
He also travelled the globe photographing celebrities such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Jean Cocteau, Coco Chanel and Pablo Picasso. Beaton was queen of the world – so it was fitting that he was appointed court photographer to the royal family in 1937. Queen Elizabeth (the future Queen Mother) took to the witty, catty, stylish young man, and he took photos of her in the gardens of Buckingham Palace styled almost as an Edwardian actress, in a white (in fact pale pink) dress complete with parasol that helped turn her into a camp icon.

He was however to make amends in the most spectacular

and convincing fashion, in a way that transformed him and his legacy, marking his late arrival into adulthood – and demonstrating how true dandyism requires great courage.
After the outbreak of war in 1939, he was offered the job of photojournalist by the Ministry of Information. He was to travel to fronts all over the world, to China and the Middle East, find himself in crossfire and plane crashes, taking

photos that captured the intimate personal impact of this

global war in a style as direct and immediate as his previous photography was artificial and dreamy. His talents were now enlisted for propaganda rather than fashion – for capturing ordinary men and women in the service of their country, rather than pampered starlets in the service of glamour. And what glorious propaganda he made!

It was in particular his photos of the war on the Home

Front – the land girls, the Blitz, the Battle of Britain pilots of 1940 – that rehabilitated Beaton. His famous portrait of threeyear-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne in a hospital bed, head bandaged, clutching her teddy bear and looking reproachfully into the camera, appeared on the cover of Life magazine and helped mobilise public opinion in the US on Britain’s side.
His portraits of young RAF airmen as they waited for the scramble bell to toll them into the skies above England to face the Luftwaffe and death were the grounded counterpoint to his Bright Young Things period. But then, the 1920s generation shaped by the apocalypse of the first world war had scrambled and were now taking on Hitler and the second apocalypse.
Nancy Mitford became an ARP driver for a while, worked shifts at a first-aid post in Paddington and looked after

evacuated East End families at her London home – and

denounced her fascist-sympathising sister Unity. Harold Acton joined the RAF. Rejected as unfit for military service, John Betjeman worked for the films division of the Ministry of Information. Rex Whistler served in the Guards Armoured Division and was the first member of his battalion killed in the Normandy campaign. For all their decadence, the Bright Young Things were made of stern stuff, and when the time came, many of them did their duty and more.
Beaton did his duty to his country and himself. The theatrical aspect, the drama that Beaton always sought and often found in his photos, was provided by the stage – and apparatus – of war, the struggle against Nazism, and the threat of death, his genius for composition finding a new, fresh, much larger canvas. The war-factory women dwarfed and yet centred by the geometry of a deflated barrage balloon. A bowtied Winston Churchill surrounded by the weighty paraphernalia of the War Cabinet, frowning resolutely into the camera. up quality to some of them at a time of course when, as for most of Beaton’s life, any and all male homosexuality was completely illegal, if rather common. The images are even more poignant and affecting when we consider that in some cases this may have been the subject’s last ever photograph. in with the laughter in the billiards room. He cheered himself up by dressing up in theatrical costumes with other alienated boys and taking photographs – escaping into the wonderland of his Box Brownie. After going up to Cambridge in 1922, he spent most of his time and energies on the Amateur Dramatic Club, failing his exams and leaving without a degree in 1925, much to his father’s consternation.
He had however been submitting his photographs to various publications, sometimes under an alias enthusiastically recommending the work of ‘Cecil Beaton’. Eventually in 1924 he succeeded in selling a photo of the Duchess of Malfi to V o gue. It seems entirely Beatonesque that his first celebrity portrait was in fact a slightly out-of-focus photo of a male student in drag – shot outside the gents’ lavatory of the Cambridge ADC. After all, illusion and artifice are the heart of glamour.

“I HAVE NEVER BEEN IN LOVE WITH WOMEN,
AND I DON’T THINK I EVER SHALL BE IN THE WAY THAT I HAVE BEEN IN LOVE WITH MEN. I’M REALLY A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE HOMOSEXUALIST AND TRY
SO HARD NOT TO BE” – CB

Beaton himself died in his own bed, aged 76, at his home in Wiltshire in 1980, after a highly successful postwar career immortalising a new generation of Hollywood stars, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn. He won three Oscars himself for his inspired costume work on

films such as Gigi and My F a ir Lady and was the subject of a

1971 tribute documentary by the photographer David Bailey, featuring Mick Jagger, Twiggy and David Hockney.
Knighted in 1974, Beaton lived long enough to see his work and legacy fully acknowledged, and also to see homosexuality (partially) decriminalised in 1967, meeting and basking in the adulation of a new generation of young people influenced by his work and much more relaxed about male homosexuality.

He even made it on to Desert Island Discs in 1980.

But he died alone and by many accounts unhappy, both with being alone and being old. In his bedroom were found

three of his photos – two were of male lovers – art collector

Peter Watson and Olympic fencer Kinmont Hoitsma – who looked like younger, more masculine versions of him. And one was of his friend Greta Garbo, the (mostly) lesbian film star he asked to marry him – who looked like a more feminine, more glamorous version of himself. Photography really was his lifelong vocation and companion.
The 19th-century French writer Stendhal considered beauty to be “nothing more than the promise of happiness”. But our pessimistic dandy guru Baudelaire was perhaps more on point when he wrote: “The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.”
This is the price of being interesting. I wonder how many young people today are willing to pay it.

“THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING DRAMATIC ABOUT
THE JOB OF PERMANENTLY RECORDING THE
FEATURES OF A HUMAN BEING, IT IS THE THEATRE
BROUGHT TO EVERYDAY LIFE” – CB

Beaton’s big break however was falling in with the ‘Bright
Young Things’. This was not left to happenstance – not only had much of his life been preparation for this, he mercilessly worked his contacts to get introductions to the Sitwells – siblings Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell – who were Bright Young Thing royalty.
So-named by the tabloid press, the Bright Young Things were a group of bohemian aristocrats, socialites, poets and artists, who came of age during or just after the first world war, and whose response to the loss and horror of that conflagration was to embrace hedonism. Celebrating pleasure, art and beauty – and being alive – they held legendary champagne-and-drug-soaked parties including hijinks such as elaborate treasure hunts through night-time London. In addition to the Sitwells, leading figures included the poet John Betjeman, the critic Harold Acton, the novelist Nancy Mitford and the painter Rex Whistler. Evelyn Waugh of course hated them, and satirised them in his 1930 novel

Vile Bodies.

Beaton, with his effeteness, sharp wit, insatiable love of aristocracy and dreamy camera skills, was a hit and became in effect the court photographer of the group. He also found a patron and muse in the Brightest ‘Thing’ – Stephen Tennant, the ethereally pretty, heroically vain, lipstick-and-pancakewearing, gold-dusted, dyed-haired ‘It’ boy of the 1920s. (And also, arguably, of the 1980s, when, thanks to Beaton’s photo portraits, half the Blitz club wanted to be him.)
Tennant’s older brother Edward, a promising poet, had been killed in the first world war, aged 19. The younger Tennant, who would be an inspiration for Waugh’s dissolute, decadent, doomed beauty Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited was in many ways collateral damage.
But then, in 1938, disaster struck. Entirely self-inflicted disaster. He inserted, in tiny but fatally legible print, antiSemitic words and phrases into a V o gue collage of New York society figures. A huge scandal erupted, and he was forced to quit V o gue and New York in disgrace, his career in tatters. He was profusely apologetic, and asserted he was not antiJewish and was “violently hostile to Hitler”.
Why did he do it? Beaton said he didn’t know and seemed as much baffled by it all as he was remorseful. In hindsight it seems a product of his childish, bitchy sense of humour – and his English snobbery, acquired from the English aristocracy, who were known for their casual anti-Semitism.

“I EXPOSED THOUSANDS OF ROLLS OF
FILMS, WROTE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS
OF WORDS, IN A FUTILE ATTEMPT TO PRESERVE THE FLEETING MOMENT… I STARTED OUT WITH VERY LITTLE TALENT, BUT I WAS SO TORMENTED WITH AMBITION. ONCE YOU’VE STARTED FOR THE END OF THE RAINBOW, YOU CAN’T VERY
WELL TURN BACK” – CB

There is also a refreshing, arousing egalitarianism in
Beaton’s wartime photos, his snobbery short-circuited perhaps by his sexuality. His male subjects gaze into this effeminate man’s lens in a way that is entirely modern and alive: intimate. There is almost a “got a light, mister?” pick-

Special thanks to Emma Nichols at Sotheby’s. Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things is on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 7 June, 2020.

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    Leggi l'articolo su beautynews Cecil Beaton, a new exhibition in London Flamboyant, rebellious, irresponsible, glamorous, the “Bright Young Things”, effectively a youth cult of aristocratic socialites, haute bohemian party-givers and lower-born self-publicists, cut a dramatic swathe through the 1920s and 1930s. Their exploits, a headlong pursuit of hedonism – practical jokes, parties, costume balls – were written up almost daily in newspaper columns to the amazement of the young and the horror of the establishment. Their clever and inventive dealings with the media in the aftermath of the Great War foreshadowed our contemporary notion of modern celebrity culture. Many of the leading cast would become well known: writers Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, composers William Walton and Constant Lambert, stage designers Oliver Messel and Rex Whistler. Others would remain in the shadows, having accomplished almost nothing other than their own self-creations, such as aesthete Brian Howard and Stephen Tennant, the famously orchidaceous scion of a fractured dynasty. Drink, drugs and burn-out on the eve of another world war would claim more, famously and tragically, the dazzling “it girls” Brenda Dean Paul and troubled “wild child” Lois Sturt, debutante of the year and “the brightest of the Bright Young Things”. Their recording angel was Cecil Beaton, whose journey from middle-class suburban schoolboy to shining society ornament and star of Vogue revealed a social mobility unthinkable before the war, prefiguring the meritocracy of the 1960s. His dazzling photographs and incisive caricatures chronicled the original “Lost Generation”, lost in time. The Bright Young Things, 1927 Beaton organised and directed a series of late summer tableaux en fe?te champe?tre emulating the stylised, pastoral paintings of Lancret and Watteau and Fragonard.
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    Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer

    SUBLIME NOISE: MUSICAL CULTURE AND THE MODERNIST WRITER By Joshua Benjamin Epstein Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in ENGLISH December, 2008 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Mark Wollaeger Professor Carolyn Dever Professor Joy Calico Professor Jonathan Neufeld ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First thanks go to the members of my incomparable dissertation committee. Mark Wollaeger's perceptive critiques and (somehow) relentless optimism have been deeply appreciated, and Carolyn Dever's clarifying questions and sound advice have proven invaluable. As teachers, mentors, and readers of my work, Mark and Carolyn have been models of professionalism and generosity since I first arrived at Vanderbilt. Joy Calico's near-omniscience and keen critical eye have aided this project from its inception, and she has graciously tolerated my encroachment on her disciplinary terrain. Jonathan Neufeld has in many ways helped me grapple with the complex philosophical issues at stake (more complex than I had imagined!). To all four, I extend my sincere gratitude. My research has been funded by a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences; by the Robert Manson Myers Graduate Award in English; and by a year-long fellowship at Vanderbilt's Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. Mona Frederick, Galyn Martin, and Sarah Nobles have worked tirelessly to make the Warren Center a pleasant and intellectually vibrant environment, and while a fellow there I benefited greatly from the collegiality and wisdom of Michael Callaghan, Megan Moran, George Sanders, Nicole Seymour, David Solodkow, and Heather Talley.
  • THE IMPORTANCE of BEING the SITWELLS What Their Family, Their Friends, Their Critics S(])Id About This Extraordinary Literary Trio

    THE IMPORTANCE of BEING the SITWELLS What Their Family, Their Friends, Their Critics S(])Id About This Extraordinary Literary Trio

    HRISTMAS FINDS: FASHIONS TO GIVE AND TO WEAR In shops of the U. S.A. _lGMT ., ... TH I!: eCI'I t'll!: NAST ,"VDi..CATIONS, (Ne I I 130 '/ LADY IDA SITWELL, MOTHER OF OSBERT, SACHEVERELL, AND EDITH DUKE OF BEAUFORT, THEIR GREAT-GRANDFATHER HENRY MOAT (IN FANCY DRESS), VALET TO THEIR FATHER LADY LONDESBOROUGH, THEIR GRANDMOTHER ON THE MATERNAL SIDE SIR GEORGE SITWELL, THEIR FATHER RENISHAW, FAMILY SEAT OF THE SITWELLS SINCE 1625; SKETCHED BY JOHN PIPER SARGENT PORTRAIT OF THE SITWELL FAMILY: SIR GEORGE, LADY IDA, AND THE THREE CHILDREN i'1\ 'I OSBERT AND SACHEVERELL SITWELL: I BEERBOHM CARICATURE VOGUE, NOVEMBER IS, 1948 131 THE -I M P ~O R TAN C E OF BE ING THE SI TWE.LL S The three Sitwells, Osbert, Edith, and Sacheverell, are the most photographed, sketched, painted, quoted, and written-about family trio in the world. Now Sir Osbert and Dr. Edith Sitwell are talking their way across. the United States on their first joint lecture tour here. In 1926, Rebecca West wrote: "They are the legatees of perhaps the most glorious group that English life has ever produced, the Whig aristocracy of the eighteenth century. The society that received Voltaire embraced their ancestors and from it they have inherited their graceful intellectual carriage, a boundless curiosity concerning things of the mind, and the quality of taste." (Their father, Sir George Sit­ well, one of the most magnificent eccentrics, whose imaginative flights from reality are superbly described by his son, Osbert, traced his line to the N ormans in 1299; their mother, Lady Ida, a richly beautiful woman, deliciously.extravagant, charmingly frivol­ ous, was the granddaughter of Henry, 7th Duke of Beaufort, a line going back to John of Gaunt.) The children of this match have had an incisive effect on the arts of their time.
  • News Release

    News Release

    NEWS RELEASE FOURTH STRFFT AT CONSTITUTION AVENUE NW WASHINGTON DC 20565 . 737-4215/842-6353 Revised: July 1985 EXHIBITION FACT SHEET Title: THE TREASURE HOUSES OF BRITAIN: FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF PRIVATE PATRONAGE AND ART COLLECTING Patrons; Their Royal Highnesses The Prince and Princess of Wales Dates: November 3, 1985 through March. 16, 1986. (This exhibition will not travel. Most loans from houses open to view are expected to remain in place until the late suitmer of 1985 and to be returned before many of the houses open for their visitors in the spring of 1986.) Credits: This exhibition is made possible by a generous grant from the Ford Motor Company. The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in collaboration with the British Council and is supported by indemnities from Her Majesty's Treasury and the U.S. Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. Further British assistance was supplied by the National Trust and the Historic Houses Association. British Airways has been designated the official carrier of the exhibition. History of the exhibition; The idea that the National Gallery of Art consider holding a major exhibition devoted to British art evolved in discussions with the British Council in 1979. J. Carter Brown, Director of the National Gallery of Art, proposed an exhibition on the British country house as a "vessel of civilization," bringing together works of art illustrating the extraordinary achievement of collecting and patronage throughout Britain over the past five hundred years. As this concept carried with it the additional, contemporary advantage of stimulating greater interest in and support of those houses open to public viewing, it was enthusiastically endorsed by the late Lord Howard of Henderskelfe, then-Chairman of the Historic Houses Association, Julian Andrews, Director of the Fine Arts Department of the British Council, and Lord Gibson, Chairman of the National Trust.