Nancy Beaton as a shooting star, 1929

Marlene Dietrich, 1935

Cecil Beaton was born in 1904 in the reign of King Edward VII f1901-1911). The Edwardian era was one of stability, imperial authority and rigid social hierarchies. The King's appetite for fun set the tone of lightness and charm which characterised this last age of courtly glamour, an age of gracious and ethereal fashion, of innocence destined to be swept away by the horrors of the First World War. The theatre was a focal point of pïpuÉar entertainment, patronised by all classes, and the celebrated musical comedy stars were the heroines of the Edwardian era. They set the fashion, defined the period's ideal of beauty. Their photographs were published as postcalds which sold in their millions. These beauties, including notably Lily Elsie and Gabrielle Ray, were superstars, the supermodels, the celluloid goddesses of their day. The young Beaton was totally captivated by their charms. He avidly collected their pictures and in later years frequently recorded the impact which they had made ïn him. He has written of one of his very earliest recollections, being taken as a young child to Daly's theatre to see The Merry Widow starring his heroine, Lily Elsie. The huge feather-decorated hat which she wore for the role became immediately fashionable and enchanted the young Beaton, as did the spectacle of Gabrielle Ray dancing ïn a table at Maxim's in the same show.
Thus were ideas of fashion, theatre and female beauty forever allied in the high-keyed imagination of the precocious Beaton who, by the age of twelve, was experimenting with his own camera, under the tutelage of his nanny, using his pretty young sisters as models to concoct his ïwn glamorous fictions. Beaton carried his Edwardian childhood influences throughout his life, re-working, re-inventing an idea of beauty instilled at a tender age. His 1935 portrait of Dietrich sets her profile against a giant, plumed, black hat whose lineage from The Merry Widow is self evident. Beaton's designs for the stage and film versions of My Fair Lady gave him his grand opportunity to relive the era of elegance into which he had been born. In the mid sixties he made a series of fashion pictures in Maxim's in Paris and posed his model standing extravagantly on a banquette, a homage to the defining moment he had experienced over half a century earlier as an impressionable, wide-eyed child confronted by the magic of the Edwardian theatre.

MEDIA STARS
Photographs of stars acquired an iconographic importance for the young Beaton which was forever to determine his ambition and colour his judgement. Their images seemed to possess for Beaton a more acute reality than the subjects themselves. The photograph became the distillation, the essence of his perceptions of people, the apotheosis of their role in the theatrical labyrinth of his view of the world.
The mass-market promotion of photographic ideals of beauty had enjoyed only a short history before the great boom in Edwardian postcards. This was in turn superseded by two great media phenomena which have marked and continue to mark our century, the growth of magazine publishing involving photographs of fashion and beauty and the development of the cinema, with its star system. Beaton's ambitions as a photographer were perfectly matched to the demands of these new media. At the very beginning of his career he had recognised the remarkable authority of print and the power of the media to make reputations. With a rare singlemindedness he exploited the potential of the press to generate a mythology, and, with a skill worthy of the most determined players in todays more overtly manipulative media world, he set about raising his profile by anonymously feeding stories about himself to the press. He was determined to break into the world of fashionable artists, patrons and socialites whose life style, as reported in the press, he so envied. His invitation in 1926 to photograph the Sitwells, a family of well-born and talented eccentrics, marked a crucial beginning, and portraits of celebrities and beauties by the star-struck young Beaton were soon being published in The Sketch, The Tatler and Vogue. Én 1929 Beaton made his first trip to New York where he was given a contract by Conde Nast which included commissions to photograph many of the new young stars of the cinema.
Ây 1930 he had enough of a portfolio to publish The Book of Beauty, an anthology of his fúrst models, notably his sisters and the celebrities and media beauties whose public personae he was instrumental in defining and through whom he was climbing the ladder of his own international media success.

ALCHEMY AND ILLUSION
The thirties were years of intense activity for Beaton, setting a pace which remained largely undiminished throughout the rest of his career with a constant fÉïw of commissions reflecting the many facets of this exceptionally talented fúgure.
His Vogue contracts kept him busy as a fashion photographer creating a stream of dream-like visions of beauty, whilst his restless curiosity extended his range as a portrait and travel photographer. His charm opened many doors and gave him privileged access to countless celebrities. While recording these encounters with his camera he also proved himself a sharply observant diarist and a clever caricaturist and illustrator. He travelled regularly to New York and to Paris where he was accepted into the artistic aíant-garde. He made memorable portraits of Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali, and drew inspiration for his photography from the visual language of Surrealism and from the Neo-Romantic painters Pavel Tchelitchew and Christian Berard.
He transformed bric-à-brac and odd props, torn paper and gauze into romantic, enchanted settings for fashion and portrait studies and applied these skills as an alchemist, master of illusion, to the role of designer and decorator. Beaton created numerous costume and set designs for ballets, film and stage productions, and these talents spilled over into the creation of decors such aô those for the idyllic country retreat, Ashcombe, which he acquired in 1930, and his designs for entertainments, fêtes champêtres and costume parties. Beaton's Scrapbook, published in 1937, showed how versatile his eye had become since The Book ïf Beauty and the breadth of his experience in the intervening years.
Beaton's fascination with the grand tradition of courtly style, from the great British portraitists of the eighteenth century tï the court painters of the French Second Empire, made him the ideal choice to photograph Queen Elizabeth in 1939. He conceived a romantic vision of royalty, steeped in history, which provided a perfect antidote after the abdication crisis of 1936. Beaton proved his mastery in the grandiose vision of these and subsequent royal portraits. His sense of history informed some of his best work of the forties and fifties, from fashion photographs which display a seemingly effortless authority of status and style, through his transformation of designs for the stage into magical photographs, highly evocative and layered with historical reference, up to the crowning moment of his 1963 designs for My Fair Lady.

A CURTAIN CALL
The Triumph of My Fair Lady in 1964, for which he wïn two Oscars, confirmed Beaton's stature as a designer and arbiter of taste. Aged sixty, he was now the magnet, the inspirational figure to a younger generation. The ambitious, hungry aspirant was now a part of the establishment. The young man concocting a photographic world from silver paper, cellophane and painted backdrops was nïw running two homes, Reddish House, his Wiltshire country house, elaborately decorated and with its extensive and glorious gardens, and his chic London townhouse. Not that Beaton ever rested on his laurels; his appetite for work and for life was prodigious. He designed, wrote, travelled, entertained and, of course, continued to take photographs. He was less in demand as a fashion photographer, though he made a number of memorable sets of fashion studies with his inimitable flair. He built a broad portfolio of portraits of the sixties scene, with an acute responsiveness to the personalities who were shaping this important period of change, particularly in British cultural history. These later portraits tended towards greater simplicity, even starkness, reflecting Beaton's ability to evolve with the times. He met the Rolling Stones in 1967 and found Keith Richard and Mick Jagger particularly intriguing before his lens. His 1968 portraits of lagger ïn the set of Performance capture a strong flavour of perversity and sexual ambiguity at this moment when sixties idealism turned sour. The encounter with Andy Warhol in New York in 1969 was a historic overlapping of generations with the heroic figure of Beaton, who had defined the concept of media celebrity in the twenties and thirties, photographing the artist whose career was to become increasingly predicated ïn the cult of fame.
Beaton's own apotheosis might be seen in his consecration in Britain's hall of fame with a major retrospective of his portrait photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in 1968, the gallery's fúrst exhibition devoted to a photographer.
A version of the exhibition was shown the following year at the Museum of the City of New York. These exhibitions, followed in 1972 by the award of a knighthood, were the celebration of a brilliant career, to be cut short, in 1974, by an incapacitating stroke. Beaton fought back and learned to draw and take photographs despite the paralysis of his right arm, underlining the sense of purpose which had driven him through the years to such consistently high levels of achievement.

Philippe Garner London,1997