Cecil Beaton: Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, London
5 February - 31 May 2004
Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) is one of the most celebrated of British portrait photographers and is renowned for his images of elegance, glamour and style. His influence on portrait photography was profound and lives on today in the work of many contemporary photographers including David Bailey and Mario Testino. Cecil Beaton: Portraits marks the centenary of Beaton's birth and coincides with a revival of interest in his work occasioned in part by the publication of his unexpurgated diaries and the recent release of Stephen Fry's film Bright Young Things. This is the first major overview of Beaton's portraits since Sir Roy Strong's ground-breaking exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 1968.
This major retrospective exhibition brings together over 100 portraits from the five remarkable decades of Cecil Beaton's career, including iconic images as well as those never seen before. Beaton captures 50 years of fashion, art and celebrity, from the Sitwells in the 1920s to the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s. Definitive portraits of 20th century celebrities are shown alongside more sombre works from his time as a war photographer.
Highlights of the exhibition include Cecil Beaton`s 1956 portrait of Marilyn Monroe, from her own collection, which is accompanied by his handwritten eulogy about her. Pages from Cecil Beaton's snapshot album of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding, showing idyllically situated portraits of Wallis Simpson in the grounds of the Château de Candé, France, are on public display for the first time.
Cecil Beaton acquired his first camera aged 11 and the exhibition opens with a portrait of his sister Baba, taken a few years later, in 1922. A number of vintage prints from Beaton's first exhibition (1927), notable for their striking red Beaton signature, have been reunited, including a celebrated portrait of Edith Sitwell posed as a gothic tomb sculpture. Edith Sitwell and her family's patronage confirmed Beaton's position as the most fashionable young photographer of the day and led to a number of exciting commissions, including a contract with Vogue, with whom Beaton was associated for over 50 years.
Other significant portraits from this early period include Nancy Cunard in front of a polka dot backdrop, the writers and poets Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stephen Tennant and Siegfried Sassoon, and bright young things including the Jungman twins, Tallulah Bankhead, and three young debutantes posing as "Soapsuds".
The exhibition features work taken from Cecil Beaton's first four Hollywood visits including images of Gary Cooper, Loretta Young, Marlene Dietrich and Johnny Weissmuler, preparing for his first Tarzan film. Other works from the 1930s include French subjects taken in Paris, such as the fashion designers Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, and the artists Beaton befriended such as Jean Cocteau and Pablo Picasso.
Cecil Beaton received the ultimate establishment seal of approval when he was commissioned by the Royal Family in 1939. The exhibition includes two studies of HM Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, at Buckingham Palace, taken in dappled light and offering fairytale romance.
With the outbreak of the Second World War, Beaton devoted himself to his work as an official war photographer. The Home Front is represented by pictures of land girls and Cecil Beaton's unforgettable portrait of the 3 year-old blitz victim Eileen Dunne (1940) in a hospital bed in the north of England. During this period Beaton also captured wartime artists such as the poet Cecil Day Lewis, composer Benjamin Britten and the memorable study of the elderly Walter Sickert and his wife Therese Lessore in their garden near Bath in 1940.
In the post-war period Beaton photographed existentialist writers Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre in Paris, and emerging actors in America, the 21 year old Marlon Brando and Yul Brynner, and the reclusive Greta Garbo, the subject of Cecil Beaton`s long-term romance.
In 1956 Beaton started work on the costume designs for the first version of My Fair Lady for the American stage with Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison and was to continue with the production in its various forms until his own Oscar-winning work for the film version starring Audrey Hepburn in 1964. In the midst of this he also won an Oscar for his work on another great film musical Gigi (1957) with Leslie Caron.
In the 1950s Beaton produced many of his most famous portraits of women including Audrey Hepburn, Maria Callas, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman. Male subjects included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Betjeman, Sugar Ray Robinson, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr and Dean Martin.
It is testament to Cecil Beaton's flexibility and skill that he reinvented his photographic style for a new decade. In the 1960s he was revitalised by working with some of the era`s brightest cult figures such as David Hockney, Jean Shrimpton, Rudolf Nureyev and most importantly Mick Jagger. Up until a paralysing stroke in 1974, Beaton continued a punishing work schedule, whether working on the Barbra Streisand's film On a Clear Day You Can See Forever or photographing Warhol and his entourage in New York.
The exhibition concludes with Cecil Beaton's late poignant portraits of Ralph Richardson and Louise Nevelson, and a recumbent Bianca Jagger photographed in the conservatory of Cecil Beaton's home at Reddish.
Cecil Beaton: Portraits is curated by Terence Pepper, Curator of Photographs at the National Portrait Gallery. Pepper first met Cecil Beaton in 1978 and was subsequently assistant curator on the 1984 Barbican Art Gallery Cecil Beaton exhibition. He has organised a wide range of exhibitions on individual photographers including Norman Parkinson (1981), Lewis Morley (1989), Dorothy Wilding (1991), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1998) and Horst (2001).
Tour: The exhibition will tour to the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, from 11 March - 6 June 2005.
Publication: The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue entitled Beaton: Portraits with a foreword by Sir Roy Strong and essay by Peter Conrad. 240 pages, over 200 illustrations, published February 2004, price £35 hardback.
Exhibition at Sotheby's: To coincide with Cecil Beaton: Portraits there is a complementary exhibition at Sotheby's New Bond Street from 10th-20th February 2004. Beaton at Large presents a selection of Beaton's most celebrated images, printed on a grand scale.
NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY
St Martin's Place, London WC2H OHE
