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For decades Cecil Beaton photographed models and celebrities for the world’s best-known fashion magazine where he was known as the ‘King of Vogue’. But his ever-creative eye led him into a huge variety of other artistic ventures.
At one time or another he worked as a costume designer, set designer, fashion illustrator, war photographer, diarist and caricaturist. His royal portraits of the Queen Mother, Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, Princess Margaret and the future Queen Elizabeth II and Charles III remain some of the defining shots of the era.
“I was very slow in finding a vocation and I think I took a shot in every direction,” he once admitted. “I don’t get stale. By the time I’m through one particular job, and I come to another one, I approach it with complete freshness. I think that’s a great advantage.”
Now Beaton’s extraordinary range of skills is on display at a new exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery. Called Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, its depth and range prove why he was one of the most celebrated photographers and style luminaries of the 20th Century. Among his portraits on display are images of actors such as Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper, John Wayne and Liz Taylor; artists such as Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and Salvador Dali; dancer Fred Astaire; boxer Sugar Ray Robinson; and writers Truman Capote and Jean Cocteau. There’s also a section dedicated to royalty and another to photography of World War II.
“There was nobody else like him,” says Robin Muir, the exhibition curator. “His impact spans the worlds of fashion, photography and design. Unquestionably one of the leading visionary forces of the British 20th century, he also made a lasting contribution to the artistic lives of New York, Paris and Hollywood.”
Muir says it was Beaton’s tenure at Vogue – on both sides of the Atlantic – that cemented his reputation as a truly great photographer.
“I think one of the reasons Vogue liked him so much is that there is a certain homespun, slightly amateurish aspect to his work,” he tells the Daily Express. “It's not completely perfect. No one ever pretended he was technically brilliant. In fact, he was the last to say he was.
“He was not interested in peeling back the skin to get some sort of psychological, penetrative portrait. He just wanted you to look the best you ever did at that moment.”
Born in north London in 1904, young Beaton first learned his way around a camera thanks to his nanny, an amateur photographer, who taught him to develop negatives in the bath. His first subjects were close family members.
It was in the 1920s, among London’s Bohemian aristocrats and socialites known as the Bright Young Things, when Beaton first made a name for himself.
He used to compose sumptuous portraits of debutantes and society toffs against lavishly decorated backgrounds. Soon he was getting regular commissions.
“I wasn’t very interested in the sitters themselves,” he once explained. “I wanted to make pictures with the camera. I wanted to make something that didn’t really look like a photograph.
“I created a fantasy, I created a dreamworld. In that dreamworld you didn’t want to see crow’s feet and veins in the neck.”
Muir, who also works as a contributing editor and archivist for British Vogue, explains how Beaton’s subjects found the whole process of being photographed “an immense amount of fun”.
He adds: “Before Beaton, going to be photographed was something to be endured rather than enjoyed. Rather like going to the dentist. You would have to make that journey into the West End and just face the camera. There would be people fussing around you with lights and so on. Cecil did away with all that. His subjects had really good fun being photographed.”
Beaton himself admitted he was embarrassed by what he considered his rather ordinary middle-class upbringing and he hankered to be accepted by the aristocrats in his portraits.
“He really wanted to be part of a different class,” says Muir. “He wanted to better himself and was always terribly disappointed that his mother was not a grand society hostess.”
It wasn’t long before he inveigled his way into the bedrooms of the rich and famous, sleeping with both men and women. Lovers included Australian actress Coral Browne, British Viscountess Castlerosse, dancer Adele Astaire (sister of Fred) and American fencer Kinmont Hoitsma. He also enjoyed a lengthy on-off relationship with actress Greta Garbo.
“For over 30 years they performed an elaborate and exhausting dance of advance and recoil,” say the gallery curators.
But Beaton always felt alienated from the upper-class circles in which he mixed. His father was a timber merchant, his grandfather a blacksmith. There was never enough money in the family, as his academic peers at Harrow School and Cambridge University constantly reminded him.
It was this feeling of alienation that perhaps led him to be so acid-tongued and backbiting about many of those around him. Throughout his life he published six volumes of diaries, his famously waspish words cruelly ridiculing the people he met over the years.
Cecil Beaton’s wit and waspish remarks
In his various books, diaries and interviews, the acid-tongued Beaton was quick to scorn aspects of fashion, society and people he disapproved of. “Malice in Wonderland” was how French writer Jean Cocteau once described him.
“Perhaps the world's second-worst crime is boredom; the first is being a bore.”
“I am all in favour of spontaneity, providing it is carefully planned and ruthlessly controlled.”
On Salvador Dalí: “I loved him for being such an original individual but today was terribly put off by his really appalling bad breath.”
On Julie Andrews: “You do have the most unphotogenic face I have ever seen.”
On Liz Taylor: “A great thick revolting mass of femininity.”
“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.”
“The truly fashionable are beyond fashion.”
“What is elegance? Soap and water!”
“All I want is the best of everything and there’s very little of that left.”
“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.”
Shortly before World War II, his career very nearly self-destructed when he inserted some tiny but just legible antisemitic phrases into American Vogue magazine, next to an illustration about New York high society.
The exhibition curators describe it as “a maelstrom of his own making, for reasons he never quite explained.” The offending issue of the magazine was pulped and Beaton was fired.
It was World War II that saved him. On the recommendation of the Queen (the Queen Mother to be), he was employed as a war photographer by the Ministry of Information, visiting many of the British troops’ theatres of war from Europe all the way to Asia.
Beaton felt this was his most important work. He earned particular respect for his images of beleaguered Brits during the Blitz.
“He spent almost an entire year going round naval and RAF bases in Britain, photographing ordinary servicemen,” Muir explains. “He was incredibly sympathetic in those war photographs. He saw great things in his photographs of tank drivers and nurses. He gives them a heroic beauty they didn’t think they possessed. He tries to make them as dignified as he possibly can.”
One photo, which ended up on the cover of both Life magazine and the Illustrated London News – of a bomb-injured three-year-old girl in a hospital bed with her teddy bear – had enormous global impact and was later used as a propaganda poster. Muir believes this single image helped sway public opinion in America and, in no small way, influenced the United States government to finally join the Second World War.
After the war, Beaton turned his artistic genius to ballet, theatre and film set design. By the mid-1960s he had won three Oscars in costume design and set decoration – for the film musicals Gigi and My Fair Lady. The gloriously colourful photos of Audrey Hepburn in the latter form the highlight of the current exhibition.
Knighted in 1972, Beaton died in February 1980, shortly after recording Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4. Many consider this interview the final words on the era of the Bright Young Things – a social movement he had done so much to promote.
Now that almost half a century has passed since his death, Muir wonders what Beaton would make of modern-day portrait photography.
“I think he would be amazed that everybody is now a photographer,” he concludes. “Because everybody’s got a phone with them. I think he would have responded quite well to that.”
- Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World is on at London’s National Portrait Gallery until January 2026, tickets £23, visit npg.org.uk