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Cecil Beaton: VALOUR in the FACE of BEAUTY

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Cecil Beaton: VALOUR in the FACE of BEAUTY 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. ©THE CECIL BEATON STUDIO ARCHIVE AT SOTHEBY’S. STUDIO ARCHIVE AT ©THE CECIL BEATON TEXT Mark Simpson CECIL BEATON SELF-PORTRAIT, CAMBRIDGE FOOTLIGHTS, 1925 Another Another 254 Man Summer/Autumn 2020 Man 255 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 suffused with surplus selfies, being ‘interesting’ becomes ever- the sort of world that I wanted. more compulsory – just as it becomes ever-more elusive. Not Face to Face, 1962 just for artists in this brave new connected, visual, attention- seeking world, but for civilians too. Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton was born in 1904 into a Little wonder that Cecil Beaton, a man who essentially prosperous Edwardian middle-class family in Hampstead, a invented himself and his astonishing career with a portable leafy suburb of London. He was the product of true theatrical camera loaded with his ambition and longing, one of the romance: his mother Esther was a Cumbrian blacksmith’s brightest of his bright young generation of the 1920s, has daughter who was visiting London when she fell in love with become more famous, not less. As we plough relentlessly into his father Ernest, a timber merchant, after seeing him onstage a 21st century that he anticipated in many ways, long before in the lead role in an amateur dramatic production. his death in 1980, I suspect ours is a world he would be as True to his origins, as a boy Beaton took to hanging much horrified as impressed by. around outside theatres, admiring and losing himself in the He was by his own admission, “driven by the visual”, and pretty posters marketing the actresses of the day. Using a claimed not to have read a book before he was 18, which Box Brownie camera he was given at the age of 11, he makes him sound almost millennial. But luckily for posterity, dragooned his pretty, blonde younger sisters, Barbara (Baba) he also had a wicked way with words. His books and waspish and Nancy, into recreating that world: a fantastical, stage-y, diaries contain many timeless quips: lushly artificial dreamworld that he was, almost by sheer “What is elegance? Soap and water!” “All I want is the best wishful thinking, later to people with actual starlets and of everything and there’s very little of that left.” “Perhaps the some of the century’s greatest celebrities. world’s second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a Beaton, who went on to photograph so many famous bore.” And my personal favourite: “Never in the history of women with an eye that was more conspiratorial than fashion has so little material been raised so high to reveal so analytical, began his life-long love affair with the camera at much that needs to be covered so badly.” the instruction of a woman – his photography-enthusiast But perhaps the most oft-quoted Beaton aphorism in our nanny. Beaton’s gaze was not exactly what you’d call ‘male’. e-Darwinian age is his scornful advice to “Be daring, be It was rather more ambiguous than that. different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of “My mother’s dressing table drawer of powder, rouge and purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the mascara held an uncanny fascination for me,” he wrote. “One creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” day, I stole into her bedroom and painted my face. My father Beaton was undoubtedly one of the most interesting men caught sight of me. He became so enraged that I was locked who ever lived – and the life he lived is itself a kind of fantastic in my bedroom.” fairy-tale, albeit a lonely one without a happy ending. His Neither was the world of men, or boys, Beaton’s. He had a advice, then, is certainly to be taken seriously, but I harbour difficult and distant relationship with his father and “the some scepticism about how fully people who quote him on noise of laughter in the billiards room” as he called it later. their Instagram and Patreon pages understand what being He hated his first (boys only) school, Heath Mount, not least ‘interesting’ really involves. Where it comes from. And what because he was mercilessly bullied by fellow classmate it costs. Evelyn Waugh, who probably found Beaton’s unabashed The 19th-century French writer and flâneur Charles sissiness a personal affront. Which is a kind of distinction in Baudelaire did. He believed that the dandy – and Beaton most itself – if the future author of Decline and Fall and Brideshead certainly was one, even if he didn’t describe himself as such – Revisited picks on you at school, you must have something has “no profession other than elegance... no other status, but about you. In fact, Waugh proved to be a thoroughly dedicated that of cultivating beauty in their own persons... The dandy follower of Beaton’s, and continued to bully him and in effect must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live shadow his career into adulthood and old age – and Beaton and sleep before a mirror.” returned the compliment. Beaton not only lived in front of the mirror, taking many self-portraits, some in drag, and maintaining an impeccable “EVELYN WAUGH IS MY ENEMY. WE DISLIKE ONE dandified image most of his life, but he went behind the mirror ANOTHER INTENSELY. HE THINKS THAT I’M A NASTY as well, photographing and capturing the mysterious charms PIECE OF GOODS, AND, OH, BROTHER, I FEEL THE of beauty in his many celebrity portraits. Beaton accessed a SAME WAY ABOUT HIM” – CECIL BEATON, 1962 beautiful dreamworld betwixt life and death that he never quite left. He was perhaps the last great dandy and romantic, Others were enchanted in a more convivial fashion. The which is the loneliest kind of life. But he nevertheless writer Cyril Connolly, who attended Beaton’s next school, St performed a great public service Cyprian’s in Eastbourne – along with George Orwell – wrote Interviewer: Your mother wasn’t able to help you in this in his autobiography of being overwhelmed by the beauty of particular difficulty? Beaton’s singing at school concerts. CECIL BEATON SELF-PORTRAIT Another 256 Man 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 He was however to make amends in the most spectacular up quality to some of them at a time of course when, as for in with the laughter in the billiards room. He cheered himself elegant – and more aristocratic – version of Beaton. He was and convincing fashion, in a way that transformed him and most of Beaton’s life, any and all male homosexuality was up by dressing up in theatrical costumes with other alienated what Beaton aspired to be – so Beaton knew exactly how to his legacy, marking his late arrival into adulthood – and completely illegal, if rather common. The images are even boys and taking photographs – escaping into the wonderland capture him. His hypnotic other/unworldliness shines out in demonstrating how true dandyism requires great courage. more poignant and affecting when we consider that in some of his Box Brownie. After going up to Cambridge in 1922, he Beaton’s photos. In some of the photos he took of them After the outbreak of war in 1939, he was offered the job cases this may have been the subject’s last ever photograph. spent most of his time and energies on the Amateur Dramatic together they look like fairy twins – or satanic angels. of photojournalist by the Ministry of Information. He was to Club, failing his exams and leaving without a degree in 1925, With the help of Osbert Sitwell, Beaton was able to put on travel to fronts all over the world, to China and the Middle “I HAVE NEVER BEEN IN LOVE WITH WOMEN, much to his father’s consternation. his first exhibition at the Cooling Gallery in 1927, featuring East, find himself in crossfire and plane crashes, taking AND I DON’T THINK I EVER SHALL BE IN THE WAY He had however been submitting his photographs to many of his photos of the Bright Young Things – including photos that captured the intimate personal impact of this THAT I HAVE BEEN IN LOVE WITH MEN. I’M REALLY various publications, sometimes under an alias enthusiastic- his famous portrait of angular Edith Sitwell posed as a gothic global war in a style as direct and immediate as his previous A TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE HOMOSEXUALIST AND TRY ally recommending the work of ‘Cecil Beaton’. Eventually in tomb (Edith was to remain a close friend until her actual photography was artificial and dreamy. His talents were now SO HARD NOT TO BE” – CB 1924 he succeeded in selling a photo of the Duchess of Malfi death in 1964). Beaton’s reputation as the most fashionable enlisted for propaganda rather than fashion – for capturing to Vogue.
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