Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World – Interview with Robin Muir By Michael Diemar
In November 1968, the National Portrait Gallery, London, opened Beaton’s Portraits 1928 – 1968, an exhibition of Cecil Beaton’s most celebrated portraits. It was curated by Roy Strong, later Sir Roy Strong, who in 1967 at the age of 32 had been appointed as the gallery’s Director. It was produced in collaboration with Beaton himself and Richard Buckle, ballet critic and set designer, known as ‘Dickie’. For some, it must have seemed a more than bold move on Strong’s part. This was not only the first time that the gallery had exhibited photography but also the first time that representations of living people were displayed on its walls. But Strong believed that the exhibition could be a blockbuster and he was proved to be right. The exhibition was enormously successful – 30 000 visitors saw it in its first month – and its run was extended twice.
It was also a success for photography as a medium. As Richard Buckle would later write, “The record-breaking show was regarded by members of the profession as the official acceptance of photography as an art.” In 2004, there was a second Beaton exhibition at the gallery, curated by Terence Pepper. In the catalogue, Strong reminisced about the 1968 exhibition, “Not long afterwards an enterprising young woman called Sue Davies came to see me, asking what I thought about the notion of her opening a gallery devoted to photography. I said it was a great idea. The result was The Photographers’ Gallery, still vibrant today.”
In March 2020, the National Portrait Gallery opened its third Beaton show, entitled Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things and curated by Robin Muir. Bright Young Things was the moniker dreamt up by the tabloid press to describe a group of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites in the 20s and 30s, a deliriously eccentric, glamorous and creative era of British cultural life, combining High Society and the avant-garde. The show opened and was closed within a week because of COVID, Muir tells me.
It was a bitter blow but the gallery kindly asked me to stage it again and to enlarge it. The new show, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World, takes up the whole of the ground floor. It’s the fourth Beaton show at the gallery and it reconfirms his standing as one of Britain’s great cultural figures of the 20th century.
Cecil Beaton (1904 – 1980) was not just a photographer but also a painter, illustrator, and author of some three dozen books, as well as costume and set designer for stage and film, with credits including Gigi (1958) and My Fair Lady (1965). He was knighted in 1972. I asked Muir to give an overview of the exhibition.
It builds and expands on the previous show and it focuses on his fashion work because that has never yet been the focus of a Beaton show. Calling it Fashionable World allowed me to include all sorts of beautiful people wearing fabulous clothes. The show starts in 1922 when Beaton went to Cambridge to study and first began taking photographs of people who weren’t immediate members of his family. It ends around 1956 when he was asked to do costumes for the stage production My Fair Lady on Broadway and then two years later on London’s West End and finally it was turned into the 1964 film for which he also created the sets. It was also a turning point in his career as a photographer. He had quarrelled with American Vogue and British Vogue, his great patron since the 1920s, did not renew his contract. He increasingly focused on his stage-related work so My Fair Lady, both on stage and screen, seemed like a good moment to end the show.
Michael Diemar : Did you come across new material during the working process?
Robin Muir : Yes, lots, in fact. Having suffered a stroke in 1974, Beaton became worried about his finances. This led to an arrangement with Sotheby’s, an idea brought forward by Philippe Garner, whereby the auction house would acquire Beaton’s archive and hold a series of auctions to recoup the cost. There was, however, an issue with Condé Nast concerning copyright, as Beaton had been under contract as a staff photographer. The matter was finally resolved a few years ago. The archive went to Condé Nast and is now stored in a facility in Stockwell in South London. I was incredibly lucky to be able to have access to this extraordinary resource as well as to the work that had been retained by British Vogue all along. I spent a long time going through absolutely everything within the time period I had given myself. I found some fantastic things, like his colour work from the 40s and 50s, which isn’t at all as well known as the black and white work. Those prints are in great condition, not at all faded. Going through all the images also underlined that Beaton always aimed to make his prints as good as they could possibly be. I have only included vintage prints in the show. Not all are in pristine condition. Some have bends or tears but that just adds to their aura as historic artefacts.
Beaton was, in a sense, an escapee from the world that he was born into.
RM : He was the middle-class son of a fairly prosperous timber merchant whose career started to slide during his childhood, and he was slightly embarrassed about being middle-class. He wanted to go beyond the closeted, genteel world of his parents and never really forgave his mother for not being a great society hostess. He would insert small ads into the back of The Times, saying, “Mrs. Beaton will be at home at Hyde Park Terrace” on such and such a date, trying to fabricate a grand story for his family. With his camera, he promoted his sisters as society ornaments and luckily for him, they were very pretty, patient and pliable. He did succeed in turning them into society figures and in so doing, he reinvented himself. Beaton’s life is really all about reinvention, artifice and fantasy, that you can be whoever you want to be, and not be beholden to what you were born into.
And he worked hard at reinventing himself.
RM : Yes, and he had many patrons. He was picked up by the Sitwells, siblings Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell. They really understood him and what he was trying to do, and they promoted him in the avant-garde world. In return, he made the definitive portraits of them. He was also desperate to meet Stephen Tennant, the exciting, young, beautiful society figure whose flamboyant personal style was an early influence on Beaton. They did meet and became lifelong friends. Stephen Tennant set an example for Beaton, that you can be who want to be, just go out and do it. And that’s what Beaton did. He was performing Cecil Beaton for most of his life.
Intriguingly enough, Beaton was taught photography by his nanny, Ninnie Collard.
RM : She was a fairly accomplished amateur photographer and showed him the rudiments of photography. He was given a Box Brownie camera on his 10th birthday, and two years later, in 1916, a new camera, a Kodak No. 3-A. Late in life, Beaton gave it to the Fox Talbot Museum in Lacock and we borrowed it for the exhibition. Remarkably enough, that was the camera he used from 1916 right up until he went to America for the first time in 1927. It’s such a primitive camera and yet he managed to make it work. He took all his early Vogue pictures with it. I suspect it was down to his extraordinary work ethic. It was trial and error until he got it right. He became very, very adept as a photographer. Still, all through his life he would say, “I don’t know how it works. I just point the thing and somehow the picture just appears.” But it required a lot of work on his part to be so nonchalant.
He also worked hard to promote himself as a photographer in those early years, even writing letters to magazines under assumed names, recommending “the photographer Cecil Beaton”.
RM : Indeed, and early on he recognised that he could mask any sort of technical deficiency in his work if he applied style, that style was always going to triumph over form. And eventually, it opened the doors at British Vogue for him. He was reinventing not only himself through photography but also reinventing magazine photography in Britain. Beaton was the first homespun photographer that British Vogue could call its own discovery. He brought a sense of elegance to the magazine but very much on his own terms, such as his props and sets. He used balloons, cellophane, mirrors, vases of lilies, and all sorts of sleight of hand, and managed to turn quite ordinary people into paragons of fashion and beauty. Yes, he was looking at the work of Baron Adolph de Meyer, seeing how he manipulated lights, used props and so forth but he took those things and turned them into a curiously English version of what the Baron might have done. It’s a little bit clumsy and homemade but it was entirely successful and from 1927 and onwards, British Vogue completely bought into his inventions, so much, I think, that when we think of Vogue in London in the interwar years, we invariably think of Beaton’s pioneering photographs.
There’s another thing that strikes me when I think of his early years at British Vogue. If we look at the history of fashion, there used to be a very strict line between designer fashion and youth fashion/street style. They were two separate worlds. In 1962, British Vogue started The Young Idea section in the magazine to capture the growing youth market but it was in the 80s and 90s that erosion of that line became much more significant, Jean Paul Gaultier for example, taking inspiration from the street styles of London. Even so, I’m wondering, didn’t Beaton get there first?
RM : That’s a very, very good point. If we look at the early pictures he took of fashionable people for British Vogue, they’re not styled in the way that his later photographs would be. People came to the studio in whatever they were wearing. Clothes weren’t brought out for them to wear as on other shoots. They came as they were and then Beaton started to work his magic on the surroundings.
But didn’t Beaton go further than that, with the Bright Young Things, designing clothes and costumes for them? I’m reminded of punk, the New Romantics, Leigh Bowery even.
RM : Yes, the dressing-up box that came into play, absolutely true. When he was visiting Stephen Tennant at Wilford Manor, they went to the dressing-up box, pulled out all these clothes and created extraordinary, rather self-regarding tableaux. Stephen Tennant was always finding something new and exciting to wear, like his brother’s leather flying jacket, which made him look incredibly modern. And there were an awful lot of society parties, galas and events and dressing up and fancy dress was the order of the day. Beaton was able to help dress his friends in the most extraordinary costumes. While he couldn’t sew to save his life, he could design clothes and costumes that were simply spectacular.
He made many friends in Paris, including the Russian-born photographer George Hoyningen-Huene who shot for French Vogue, and the multi-talented Jean Cocteau who worked with Les Ballets Russes, directed films, wrote novels and plays, designed jewellery for Elsa Schiaparelli and much else. How important were those friendships to Beaton?
RM : They were extremely important. When Beaton first went to the US, he was told by Condé Nast himself that he couldn’t use his Kodak No. 3-A camera for the magazine, and that he would have to get a plate camera. Well, he did so and the resulting pictures were successful. After which Nast sent him to Paris, the home of couture, on seasonal assignments. He befriended Hoyningen-Huene who became a lifelong friend and he was much more engaged with the fine art side of fashion photography. Beaton approached fashion photography as an untutored amateur. Through Hoyningen-Huene, and to some extent Horst, though he and Beaton disliked each other intensely, he saw how fashion photography was really made, making visible every cut and fold, how the dress should be beautifully lit and the models perfectly posed. From then on Beaton started making photographs in the accepted Vogue way, though not by imitating Hoyningen-Huene but finding his own way, becoming one of the leading 1930s high fashion photographers. Hoyningen-Huene also introduced him to the compact 6 x 6 Rolleiflex camera, which gave Beaton an awful lot more freedom, both inside and outside the studio. And through Hoyningen-Huene and his circle, Beaton also got to know a lot of the avant-garde figures in Paris, including Jean Cocteau, who called Beaton “Malice in Wonderland”, which Beaton absolutely loved. Or thought he did. He was never quite sure what Cocteau meant by it! He became friends with Christian Bérard, the great Parisian set designer and fashion illustrator and the equally significant choreographer George Balanchine in Paris at the time. They all influenced him in various ways. Cocteau, for instance, suggested that rather than bring in a whole lot of disparate accoutrements to style his photographs, he should style each photograph to be in tune with the sitter. It forced Beaton to do a lot more research and choose props with greater care. He started using fishnets and even bedsprings as props and there are several Cocteau-esque motifs that run through those 30s photographs. Beaton was nothing if not a magpie. He borrowed and stole things from other people but always succeeded in making them his own.
Beaton took numerous portraits of Cocteau and one of them caused an absolute scandal, of Cocteau smoking opium.
RM : I haven’t included it in the show. People found it very shocking. I don’t think Beaton ever wanted to try smoking opium but he was probably quite surprised by the reaction, which brings me to another thing. Beaton was quite naive in many ways, perhaps because of his sheltered life as a child. When you read his early diaries about him trying to come to terms with sexuality, it’s very naively put, “Women fascinate me but I’m just not that interested in them.” It’s like a confessional but he wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed of his sexuality. He just had difficulty working out what it was. There’s the same rather naive sensibility when it comes to drugs and other sorts of bad behaviour. Beaton was never a partaker. He never got too drunk nor had to be carried out at parties. He was always very much in control and always observing. He probably thought this whole opium thing with Cocteau was rather extraordinary but while it was shocking to everybody else, he himself wasn’t that shocked. Beaton was a very odd figure, a mixture of innocent abroad and a man full of peasant guile.
While publisher Condé Nast liked Beaton’s work a lot, Dr M F Agha, art director at American Vogue was much less keen. What was it about Beaton’s work that Agha disliked so much?
RM : It could be down to something as mundane as the fact that Beaton was not an Agha discovery but had been foisted on Agha by Condé Nast. There might also have been an element of hubris, arrogance and entitlement that followed Beaton around at this time. In 1927, he showed his first exhibition at Cooling Gallery in London, accompanied by a small catalogue with an essay by Osbert Sitwell. The exhibition was a massive triumph. All the people who had sat for him came to it. Mayfair was thronged with people wanting to see the wunderkind photographer’s work. As a result, he became the most famous photographer in Britain and he was only in his early 20s. He went to America the same year, thinking, “And now, I can conquer New York.” And he sort of did but I think he behaved rather grandly, an attitude that rankled with Agha and many others and the more successful Beaton became, the more Agha disliked him.
Beaton achieved success in the US, not just with his fashion pictures but also with his portraits, including Hollywood stars and his illustrations. And then it all came to a screeching halt in 1938, because of a drawing he had made for the February issue of American Vogue.
RM : Beaton was carrying out a drawing assignment for Agha, a cartoon, and in it, he inserted an antisemitic slur. It was very small and you need a magnifying glass to see it but it is indisputably there. It was spotted by someone who then alerted the press via of Walter Winchell, who had a syndicated radio program and a syndicated column. It caused an absolute uproar. Condé Nast fired Beaton straight away, telling him, “This goes against everything that I’ve ever built my magazines upon. This sort of thing is so alien to me.” Beaton thought British Vogue might not mind so much but they absolutely did and shut him out completely. The gates of Hollywood were now firmly closed to him. It has been suggested that it was Agha who spotted the antisemitic slur and that he was the one who alerted Walter Winchell but that’s speculation. What Beaton did was absolutely inexcusable. He apologised and realised the enormity of the situation but he never really knew why he had done it and remained conflicted by his motives.
Beaton returned to London in 1938. The following year, WWII broke out. He took some remarkable images in London during the Blitz, and then he became a war photographer.
RM : Following the antisemitic debacle, Beaton needed some kind of redemption. How could he atone for what he had done? Two things happened. The first was that he was asked by the palace to take photographs of the Royal Family and they were the first in a long parallel career as a royal photographer. Beaton completely reinvented the iconography of the Queen, the king and the young princesses. He worked as a Royal photographer until 1968 when he took his last photographs of Queen Elizabeth II. The Royal photographs sort of saved him as a photographer and brought him back into the public eye. The second thing that redeemed him was his photographic work during the war years. He became an affiliate of the Ministry of Information, initially to document the rubble of London after the Luftwaffe bombings during the Blitz. He made extraordinary tableaux out of desolation and ruin and found a surrealist way of making extraordinary images out of disaster. After that, he was sent abroad. Beaton went absolutely everywhere during the war, to India, the Near East, the Far East, and to North Africa during the desert campaign. He never actually saw any combat himself. He was there for the aftermath, looking at destroyed tanks and buildings. But he was also photographing service men and women. The photographs are the opposite of absolutely everything he had stood for in the 1930s, dressing people up. They are ordinary people, army personnel or civilians and he gave them dignity and some Hollywood glamour, portraying them as shining beacons of fortitude, bravery and perseverance during the war.
What effect did the war have on him as a person? And as a photographer?
RM : It profoundly changed the way he saw the world and the people he met. The way his photography inevitably had to develop meant that he could never go back to what he was doing before the war. And for quite some time, he resisted going back to fashion photography. He did eventually because he knew he was very good at it but he treated fashion in a wholly new way, at least to begin with. For the Paris collections for French, American and British Vogue in 1945, he photographed the models against bullet-shattered walls or in desecrated gardens. It didn’t last very long. When Dior launched the New Look in 1947, Beaton embraced it and got back into his stride, making very opulent, very striking fashion pictures.
The book Unseen Vogue (2002) includes letters that were exchanged between British Vogue and Beaton in 1955. He was accused of producing uninspired work.
RM : Beaton had lost interest. Sure, there were some wonderful moments of incredible elegance and great opulence, such as the famous picture of Charles James dresses. But following his experiences of the war, and having done fashion photography almost non-stop since 1927, he had tired of this facet of photography, of trying to reinvent it. A lot of the work he produced in the 40s and 50s is pretty pedestrian. British Vogue Editor Audrey Withers noticed it and it culminated in that rather sad exchange of letters. Beaton mounted a spirited defence but he knew it to be true and they cut their ties. Ever since the 30s and 40s, he had had a parallel career in the performing arts and around 1956, he decided to devote himself entirely to it, thus almost bidding farewell to photography.
One chapter in the Beaton story concerns Greta Garbo. Their relationship is still shrouded in mystery. What has come to light since Hugo Vickers published his Beaton biography in 1985?
RM : There have been two books that focus on Beaton and Garbo. It’s one of the 20th century’s most curious love stories. I have absolutely no idea how this relationship worked, except that in many ways, it didn’t work at all. I think he was in love with the idea of Greta Garbo, and that she was intrigued by this very famous photographer who was completely crazy about her. They were so incompatible that it shouldn’t have worked but somehow it did. They became very, very close friends and there is every suggestion that their relationship was physical as well. Beaton was a predominantly homosexual man, but it was an extraordinary moment in his life, a friendship that seemed to endure. They fell out several times, there were recriminations and then they got back together again. It’s all very odd.
In 1946, Beaton took some famous/infamous photographs of her.
RM : Beaton wanted to capture her beauty with his camera and finally succeeded in doing so in 1946 when she asked him if he would mind taking her passport photograph. It turned into a photographic session at the hotel they were staying at. Beaton then sold the photographs to Condé Nast which led to them being published in American Vogue, totally against the wishes of the very private Greta Garbo. No photographs of her had been published since she ended her film career, except paparazzi photographs. Vogue was therefore the recipient of this extraordinary set of pictures of the world’s most elusive star. Beaton had broken the trust and the bonds of their friendship. Beaton would later claim, “Oh, she sort of gave me permission” but it is almost certain that she didn’t. It was the end of the affair.
His work for the performing arts was astonishing, whether it was Gigi or My Fair Lady. It seems to me that Beaton was at his best when he was facing a challenge of some sort.
RM : I think that’s true. Following the antisemitic incident, he had to do something not only to secure an income stream but to reinvent himself and put this terrible moment behind him. He did it with his war photography and his work for the performing arts. In 1974, at the age of 70, he faced his biggest challenge when he suffered a stroke. He had to learn to write with his left hand, how to paint, and how to press the shutter of a camera. Beaton never gave up, that had been his work ethic since he started breaking free from his middle-class upbringing. He was always pushing ahead, fighting to make things work, and eliminating every obstacle in his way.
It’s beyond the scope of the exhibition but how did he fare during the 60s? It was a tricky period for photographers of his generation. Suddenly, there was Swinging London and things were changing very, very quickly.
RM : Funnily enough, what I’d love to do next is a show on Beaton’s later years, because he did still have a career as a photographer. His antenna was always very much attuned to what was new and happening, what was out there. Beaton had a very young sensibility. He discovered the Swinging 60s while being a sort of grandfather figure in the world of photography. David Bailey discovered him and Bailey was very astute. He really got that Beaton was a fashionable link to the 1920s, a very glamorous world and the 60s were becoming very glamorous, though in a different way. He saw Beaton as a father figure and Beaton responded to it. Through Bailey, Beaton met people like Nicky Haslam, and through him, he met the Rolling Stones, and through them and American Vogue, he met Andy Warhol and the Factory crowd. His mind was always curious and open to new sensations, new people, young people, what they were doing, wearing and thinking. It culminated in a rather wonderful counter-cultural moment where Beaton, the grand old man of British photography, was chosen to photograph on the set of the film Performance, starring Mick Jagger, James Fox and Anita Pallenberg. He had reinvented himself yet again. Hugo Vickers quoted somebody saying, “He’s not Rip Van Winkle. He’s Rip Van With it.”
What kind of legacy did Beaton leave?
RM : Beaton was one of the great cultural figures of the British 20th century. It’s very difficult to think of anyone of great consequence in the arts between 1927 and 1969 who wasn’t photographed by him. And in many cases, they are the defining photographs of those figures. Beaton had a huge influence on generations of photographers, including David Bailey, Mario Testino, Tim Walker to name just a few. And as Beaton once said to Tony Armstrong Jones, later Lord Snowdon, “I’m the man who ensured that photographers never had to go through the tradesman’s entrance again.” That a photographer would walk through the front door and be greeted as an artist, not as an annoying man coming to take the family photograph. But his legacy goes beyond that. It’s difficult to overestimate the importance the 1968 exhibition at the National Gallery. It was a sensation and it profoundly changed how photography was perceived, not just by the public but also by the museums in Britain, that photography was an important medium, which had to be explored, researched and collected. All in all, he left a tremendous legacy.
This interview was first published in issue 14 of The Classic, a free magazine about classic photography. The print magazine is available at selected galleries and museums and will also be available at Paris Photo in November. A PDF is available as a free download, go to https://theclassicphotomag.com
Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World
Until 11 February 2026.
National Portrait Gallery
St. Martin’s Pl, London
WC2H 0HE, United Kingdom
https://www.npg.org.uk/
