At the entrance to the National Portrait Gallery’s new Cecil Beaton exhibition, there’s a wall-sized reproduction of a 1948 colour transparency, originally printed in Vogue. In it, eight coiffed white women wear elegant evening gowns by designer Charles James, chatting and preening in an 18th-century style French-panelled room. They engage only with each other, uninterested in the camera, looming larger-than-life above us. The effect on the viewer is of being excluded, unseen. This feeling only mounts as you proceed through Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, a show that presents the photographer as a sharp-tongued socialite obsessed with high society, beauty – and himself.
Beaton’s first exhibition at the NPG was in 1968. It was then the first ever solo show by a photographer at a British museum. Sixteen surviving silver gelatin prints from it are presented in the show’s first room. They are lavish, theatrical portraits of brooding beauties with dark-painted lips, a swansong to the age of elegance.
Beaton was known as the “King of Vogue” – he worked for the magazine for almost half a century, but was also a very willing subject himself. The exhibition includes an edifying caricature of him by Anthony Wysard and photographs by Dorothy Wilding and Francis Goodman. Each shows his panache as a performer – he never plays the same character twice. As soon as he had the right kit for it, he started to take self-portraits, though you can never be sure which pose represents the real Beaton. The wall text points to a telling diary entry he wrote as a child: “I don’t want people to know me as I really am, but as I am trying and pretending to be.”
This made him a good fashion photographer, but not a good portraitist. The expressions of his sitters are flat, the poses repetitive. Beaton’s backdrops are often more interesting than his subject – he experiments with foils, fabrics and fresh flowers, adding different transparencies and textures to the image. This understanding of textiles made him a great success as a costume designer, from the clothes he made for his little sister for a ball to his Oscar-winning creations for My Fair Lady, which end the exhibition.
The show includes a segue into a small selection of Beaton’s war photography. His photograph of a three-year-old blitz victim sitting in a hospital, head bandaged and clutching a doll, appeared on the cover of Time magazine and became world-famous. Yet some other pictures seem to aestheticise conflict – soldiers have smouldering stares like models in a fashion shoot. They are shown in a room next to glossy portraits of smiling Royals – another frequent subject.
It is uncomfortable to see how narrow Beaton’s idea of beauty was, especially when you remember the notorious incident in which he included an antisemitic slur (so small that a magnifying glass had to be used to see it) in a cartoon he drew for Vogue. I am drawn to a 1929 picture of the Chinese American actor Anna May Wong, in which she poses laconically, while Beaton brings all his romance and photographic technique to the image, to scintillating effect. The portrait stands out for its beauty but also because Wong is the only woman of colour I see in the exhibition, which has more than 200 works. It’s a reflection of the times, but also where Beaton was looking and what he was interested in – white women with classical, slightly masculine Edwardian features. His work wasn’t about representation, but the artificiality of it all becomes wearying.
One of Beaton’s first subjects outside his family was the late historian Steven Runciman. They met at Cambridge after Beaton accidentally set fire to a passerby’s straw hat, when he chucked a cigarette out of the window. Beaton described Runciman as “huge and ugly and strong”. But in the picture, he seems pensive, shy, a young man holding a flower. Beaton saw something else in him. It’s one of the few moments of emotional depth in the show.
Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World raises more questions about the man who made the images than the evolution of fashion photography – and there’s certainly plenty of dirt on Beaton, much of it drawing on the often vicious accounts of events he recorded in the diaries he kept throughout his life. It all gets borderline stalkerish in the scrapbooks he kept on Greta Garbo, with whom he had an on-off romance. He once photographed her dressed like a clown in a ruff – and though she thought it was a private shoot, the picture ended up in Vogue. There seems to have been few limits to what Beaton would do to climb the social ranks – he even tried to have his family home’s postcode changed to W1.
It seems difficult to get away from Beaton at the moment. Another show on him at London’s Garden Museum has only recently closed. Fantasy and frolics are fine but A Fashionable World is pat, reinforcing a very English idea of beauty and fashion that now seems constricted and parochial. It might be Beaton’s world, but I’m glad I don’t have to live in it.
