Cecil Beaton Style King In New York By Alexandra Anderson-spivy
The fizzy Cecil Beaton show at the Museum of the City of New York focuses on this clever
, prolific gadabouts relationship with Manhattan over almost 50 years of ceaseless transatlantic activity. The result is like going to an A-list, celebrity-studded cocktail party thrown by an extravagant gay host.
A photographer, illustrator, writer, designer and consummate self-promoter, Beaton (1904-1980) was never less than busy -- and he was especially busy when he came to New York City, a place that was fertile territory for his kaleidoscopic talents. This master of perpetual self-reinvention was very popular in Manhattan, parlaying his flamboyant position in emerging Caf Society into professional access to subjects for his pictures. Here, his career was able to maintain a feverishly high pitch. To quote the exhibitions press release, society figures, media giants, impresarios, celebrities, actors, artists, writers and the merely famous passed in front of his camera in an endless parade of glamour and style.
From the get-go, Beaton was a top-flight expert at cross-pollinating various worlds (including the then-cloistered world of high gay culture). Beginning with the era of Londons Bright Young Things and dawning of the Jazz Age, when he started using his Kodak to shoot homemade photos of local debutantes and his own sisters, to his pursuit of International Caf Society and then the trendy artists and musicians of the Swinging Sixties, an increasingly celebrity-driven society benefited from and adored the proto-campy elegance of Beatons suave, Edwardian-dandy persona.
Just as working for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair catapulted Annie Leibovitz to star photographer status, so working for Vogue did Beaton. Only days after the tyro photographer and fledging social butterfly arrived via ocean liner in Manhattan in 1928, crafty editor Edna Wollman Chase had signed him up as a photographer and correspondent for Cond Nasts popular magazines. It became a long-term relationship, only briefly interrupted in January, 1938, when he was summarily fired for some anti-Semitic remarks he had spitefully encoded on the borders of an illustration published in Vogue. By the early 40s though, his reputation sanitized by his WWII photos, he was back in the Vogue fold.
The current show succeeds best at capturing the exuberant glamour of Beatons universe, economically encapsulated in one big ground floor gallery, with a scattering of photos installed along the main floor corridor. Wallpaper derived from his 1940s fabric design, Beaton Rose, jauntily functions as an over-the-top, party-time backdrop to a potpourri of photographs, sketches and theatrical costumes as well as an interesting cache of Beaton ephemera that includes letters, books, drawings and even photos of the fancy hotel apartments he customized and stayed in when in New York City. (They were rented out at a premium when he was not in residence.) He was a very good writer with a gimlet eye for the foibles of those he courted; his frequently bitchy remarks and his even bitchier diaries and memoirs did lead one wag to call him Malice in Wonderland.
Beatons black-and-white portraits return to centerstage, iconic 20th-century celebrity personalities and society beauties, some of them -- like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo (with whom he conducted a torturous love affair), the two Hepburns (Audrey and Katharine), editor Diana Vreeland and a seductive Marilyn Monroe -- still in fames pantheon. Others, such the best dressed Mona von Bismarck and Natalie Paley (the Russian princess and fashion plate once married to couturier Lucien Lelong), these days may hold interest only to dedicated style queens.
by: aarenbrowns
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