CECIL
BEATON
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Index Biography : Early life and education Career Photography Royal and war photographer Stage and film design Last public interview Last years War photographs : The Home Front The Middle East Tyneside Shipbuilding The Far East After theWar Maryln Monroe Vogue and Fashion 3
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introduction Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) had a brilliant aesthetic eye, which combined with his theatrical persona, ambition and addiction to social advancement kept him in work for over six decades. From young socialites to Andy Warhol and the Rolling Stones, 1920s flappers to Twiggy, Beaton straddled the twentieth century, recording its heroes and starlets, fashions and tastes.
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biography
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Early life and education Beaton was born on 14 January 1904 in Hampstead the son of Ernest Walter Hardy Beaton, a prosperous timber merchant, and his wife, Esther "Etty" Sisson. Cecil Beaton was educated at Heath Mount School and St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, where his artistic talent was quickly recognised. When Beaton was growing up his nanny had a Kodak 3A Camera, a popular model which was renowned for being an ideal piece of equipment to learn on. Beaton's nawnny began teaching him the basics of photography and developing film. He would often get his sisters and mother to sit for him. Beaton attended Harrow School, and then moved on to St John's College, Cambridge, and studied history, art and architecture. Beaton continued his photography, and through his university contacts managed to get a portrait depicting the Duchess of Malfi published in Vogue. Beaton left Cambridge without a degree in 1925.
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• Master of the self-timer, Beaton gives the impression of relaxing on the terrace
• Beaton and Jean Shrimpton at Reddish House,photo by David Bailey, 1965
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Career After a short time in the family timber business, he worked with a cement merchant in Holborn. This resulted in “an orgy of photography at weekends” so he decided to strike out on his own. Under the patronage of Osbert Sitwell he put on his first exhibition in the Cooling Gallery, London. He left for New York and slowly built up a reputation there. By the time he left, he had “a contract with Condé Nast Publications to take photographs exclusively for them for several thousand pounds a year for several years to come.” From 1930 to 1945, Beaton leased Ashcombe House in Wiltshire, where he entertained many notable figures. In 1947, he bought Reddish House. Here he transformed the interior, adding rooms on the eastern side, extending the parlour southwards, and introducing many new fittings.
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• Cecil Beaton. Orson Welles, 1937
• Cecil Beaton. Self-portrait, 1930s
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Photography He set up his own studio, and one of his earliest clients and, later, best friends was Stephen Tennant. Beaton’s photographs of Tennant and his circle are considered some of the best representations of the Bright Young People of the twenties and thirties. Beaton’s first camera was a Kodak 3A folding camera. Beaton was never known as a highly skilled technical photographer, and instead focused on staging a compelling model or scene and looking for the perfect shutter-release moment. He was a photographer for the British edition of Vogue in 1931 when George Hoyningen-Huene, photographer for the French Vogue travelled to England with his new friend Horst. Horst himself would begin to work for French Vogue in November of that year. Beaton is known for his fashion photographs and society portraits. He worked as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue in addition to photographing celebrities in Hollywood. In 1938, he inserted some tinybut-still-legible anti-Semitic phrases into American Vogue at the side of an illustration about New York society. The issue was recalled and reprinted, and Beaton was fired.
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• The Duke and Duchess of Windsor posed for Cecil Beaton on their wedding day in 1937
• Queen Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret at Buckingham Palace, photograph by Cecil Beaton, 1942
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Royal and war photographer Beaton returned to England, where the Queen recommended him to the Ministry of Information. He became a leading war photographer. Beaton often photographed the Royal Family for official publication. Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother was his favourite royal sitter, and he once pocketed her scented hankie as a keepsake from a highly successful shoot. Beaton took the famous wedding pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor . During the Second World War, Beaton was first posted to the Ministry of Information and given the task of recording images from the home front. During this assignment he captured one of the most enduring images of British suffering during the war, that of 3-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne recovering in hospital, clutching her beloved teddy bear. When the image was published, America had not yet officially joined the war, but images such as Beaton’s helped push the Americans to put pressure on their government to help Britain in its hour of need.
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• Princess Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, 1945, England. Museum no. E.1361-2010. Š Victoria and Albert Museum, London
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• Princess Elizabeth and Prince Charles, photograph by Cecil Beaton, 1948, England. Museum no. PH.218-1987. Š Victoria
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• MY FAIR LADY, 1964 Audrey Hepburn, 1963
• MY FAIR LADY, 1964 Audrey Hepburn, 1963
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Stage and film design After the war, Beaton tackled the Broadway stage, designing sets, costumes, and lighting for a 1946 revival of Lady Windermere’s Fan, in which he also acted. His costumes for Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady (1956) were highly praised. This led to two Lerner and Loewe film musicals, Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1964), each of which earned Beaton the Academy Award for Best Costume Design. He also designed the period costumes for the 1970 film On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. He designed the sets and costumes for a production of Puccini’s last opera Turandot, first used at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and then at Covent Garden.
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• Oliver Messel in his costume for Paris in Helen! by Cecil Beaton, 1932.
• Nancy and Baba Beaton by Cecil Beaton, 1926.
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Last public interview The last public interview given by Sir Cecil Beaton was in January 1980 for an edition of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs. The interviewer was Desert Island Discs’ creator Roy Plomley. The Beaton programme is considered to be almost the final words on an era of “Bright Young Things” In closing, Roy Plomley asked Beaton for the one record that he would retain on the Desert Island should the others get washed away on the tide. The immediate reply was Beethoven’s Symphony No 1. Beaton’s chosen book was a compendium of photographs he had taken down the years of “...people known and unknown; people known but now forgotten.”
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The Silver Soap Suds: (from left) Baba Beaton, the Hon Mrs Charles Baillie-Hamilton and Lady Bridget Poulett, 1930.
• Nancy Beaton as a shooting star, 1929
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• Greta Garbo, 1946, photo by Cecil Beaton
• Kin Hoitsma, 1965, photo by his lover, Cecil Beaton
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Personal life and death Beaton had relationships with various men: his last lover was former Olympic fencer and teacher Kinmont Hoitsma. He also had relationships with women, including the actresses Greta Garbo and w, the dancer Adele Astaire, the Greek socialite Madame Jean Ralli,and the British socialite Doris Castlerosse He was knighted in the 1972 New Year Honours. Two years later he suffered a stroke that left him permanently paralysed on the right side of his body. As a result of his stroke, Beaton became anxious about financial security for his old age and, in 1976, entered into negotiations with Philippe Garner On behalf of the auction house, Garner acquired Beaton’s archive, excluding all portraits of the Royal Family, and the five decades of prints held by Vogue in London, Paris and New York. By the end of the 1970s, Beaton’s health had faded. He died on 18 January 1980 at Reddish House, his home in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, four days after his 76th birthday.
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War Photographs
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The Home Front As an official photographer for the British Ministry of Information, Beaton travelled far and wide to document the impact of war on people and places in his own unique style. In later life, Beaton came to regard his war photographs as his single most important body of photographic work. He took some 7,000 photographs for the Ministry of Information covering all aspects of the Second World War. Beaton’s first assignment was a series of portraits of British war leaders, including an iconic image of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, at the height of the Battle of Britain in 1940. The Blitz, the Defence of Britain and the domestic war effort dominated Beaton’s early war photography. Photographs such as the portrait of a small girl, Eileen Dunne, recovering in hospital after being injured in an air raid had enormous impact at home and overseas.
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Eileen Dunne, aged three, sits in bed with her doll at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, 1940
• 1940s Cecil Beaton print of bomb damage, Bloomsbury Square, London, 1940.
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• The Western Desert 1942: A sandstorm in the desert: a soldier battling his way to his tent.
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The Middle East In 1942, Cecil Beaton was sent on his first official overseas assignment to the Middle East. After an introduction to the exoticism of Alexandria and Cairo, Beaton toured British forward bases in the Western Desert, Iran, Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan and Syria. He produced a memorable series of beautifully composed images which made spectacular use of the local light. Subjects ranged from dramatic abstract studies showing the detritus of war to ordinary people posed against the extraordinary settings of the Middle East theatre of war. These were published in magazines around the world as well as another book by Beaton himself, called Near East (1943).
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• A girl welder with protective head gear raised from her face. In the background a ship under construction in a slipway can be seen
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Tyneside Shipbuilding Returning to Britain in mid 1942, Beaton was soon on the move again. He spent months documenting British war production, which by then was reaching its zenith. A spectacular series of photographs on Tyneside ship construction in 1943 document an industry which would largely disappear after the war.
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• A wounded Gurkha soldier is supported by an improvised sling in the Chin Hills.
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The Far East Beaton’s last major assignment for the MoI was a six month tour of the Far East, during which he travelled to India, Burma and China. This trip produced more publications but took a heavy toll on Beaton. He narrowly escaped injury when his aircraft crashed on take-off, and again when a vehicle ran off the road in China. He fell ill on several occasions and was consistently frustrated by inefficient bureaucracy, including the loss of 250 rolls of film. Nevertheless, Beaton’s beautiful photographs from the Far East theatre rank among the best of his career. They offer an insight into traditional communities poised on the brink of change as well as the experience of British and Empire military forces in the Far East theatre.
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• The Chinese Police Force; the Assistant Chief of Police and his staff grouped in a circular doorway at headquarters in Chengtu
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After theWar Cecil Beaton’s work for the Ministry of Information reinforced his international reputation as a photographer. The war also enabled Beaton to fulfill his longstanding ambition to work in the theatre by laying the foundations for his award-winning career in theatrical design. When his wartime photographs were transferred to the permanent care of the Imperial War Museum in 1948, he was uninterested. However, Cecil Beaton was briefly reunited with his war photography in a visit to the Imperial War Museum in March 1974.
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Marilyn Monroe
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The only photo shoot Cecil Beaton had only one shoot with Marilyn Monroe, which took place at the Ambassador Hotel in New York in February 1956. The actress turned up at his suite 90 minutes late and in his diary Beaton admitted that he was: “startled, then disarmed, by her lack of inhibition”. The photographer compared the actress to ‘an over-excited child asked downstairs after tea’ and added: “The initial shyness over, excitement has now got the better of her. She romps, she squeals with delight, she leaps on to the sofa. She puts a flower stem in her mouth, puffing on a daisy as though it were a cigarette. It is an artless, impromptu, high-spirited, infectiously gay performance”. He wrote: “The real marvel lies in the paradox – somehow we know that this extraordinary performance is pure charade, a little girl’s caricature of Mae West… There is an unworldly, a winsome naiveté about the child’s eyes that, quick as a flash, will screw up into a pair of sexy, smouldering slits and give you a synthetic ‘come-hither’ look.” Prophetically, his diary entry ends, ‘It will probably end in tears’. Six years later Marilyn Monroe was found dead of an overdose in her Hollywood home. She was 36 years old.
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Vogue and Fashion
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The Redesign He combed the antique shops of Madison and Third Avenues for carved arabesques, gesticulating cupids, silver studio work, and ceilings in imitation of the Italian rococo painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. At the same time, under the influence of surrealism he began incorporating bizarre combinations that created some of the most unusual fashion photographs of the century. The commonest object became grist for Beaton’s creative mill: expensive gowns were posed against backgrounds of eggbeaters and cutlet frills, wire bedsprings, and kitchen utensils. Models appeared wearing hats composed of eggshells or carrying baskets of tree twigs. Beaton was even accused of using toilet paper, though his background was actually made of what is called “cartridge” paper. By the middle of the 1930s Beaton was starting to be disturbed by Vogue’s restrictions on his creativity. He was called into the Vogue offices for posing models in “unladylike” poses with their feet planted well apart. Then it was found that Beaton had incorporated anti-Semitic words into the border of a pen-and-ink sketch done for the February 1938 issue of Vogue. As a result, Beaton “resigned.” In time, the incident blew over and Beaton was reinstated at Vogue, where he continued to do fashion photography for several more decades. 45
• Charles James , Vogue, May 10, 1930-“Iconic”
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• Charles James , Vogue, May 10, 1930
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• Designer Charles James pinning a suit on model NYC 1948
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• Charles James Beyond Fashion 1936
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• Photo Cecil Beaton, Fashion, 1935
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• Katharine Hepburn Cecil Beaton
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• Charles James Vogue, December 15, 1944
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• James’ Butterfly dress photographed by Cecil Beaton, 1954
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• Twiggy photographed by Cecil Beaton, 1967
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• Vogue-Mona-von-Bismarck-Cecil-Beaton-1936
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