Cecil Beaton is making a triumphant return to London's cultural scene with a comprehensive new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. After the photographer's previous show "Bright Young Things" was cut short in spring 2020 due to COVID-19 restrictions, closing after just six days, the gallery has launched "Cecil Beaton's Fashionable World" - a much more expansive showcase that runs until January 11, 2026.
This blockbuster exhibition presents Beaton's extraordinary range, featuring portraits spanning from Victorian actress Lillie Langtry (captured clasping lilies) to Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. The show includes extensive fashion photography alongside some of his more serious photojournalism work. Beaton's subjects read like a who's who of 20th-century glamour, encompassing everyone from 1920s socialites to screen legends.
Beaton possessed an unparalleled ability to make women appear picture-perfect. His earliest ultra-stylish studio portraits from the 1920s and 1930s transformed high-society subjects into porcelain-skinned goddesses without a single visible blemish. This talent attracted both royalty and Hollywood stars - from Princess Margaret photographed in a controversial crinoline during postwar austerity, to Leslie Caron captured Venus-like in draped white silk.
Far from being merely a flatterer producing shallow fashion plates, Beaton constantly experimented with innovative photographic techniques. The exhibition traces his artistic evolution from gelatin silver prints to the hyper-saturated color palette of the postwar era. His work often echoes that of Madame Yevonde, another photographer recently featured at the gallery. Particularly striking is "The Second Age of Beauty is Glamour," rendered in stunning gradations of scarlet.
Beaton's early inspiration drew from seemingly contradictory sources - the powdered elegance of Rococo art and the stark modernist aesthetic of the film "Metropolis." Some subjects appear surrounded by clouds of oversized blooms, while others pose against sheets of tin foil. One enchanting photograph, "Shooting Star," features his doe-eyed sister Nancy dressed for a fancy party with stars in her hair and an impossibly pointed crown, all framed by yards of cellophane - a creative use of newly invented everyday materials.
The photographer's backgrounds consistently captivate through inventive use of texture and materials. Subjects push through walls of torn paper, emerge from hat boxes, and pose against lace-like decoupage, rough burlap, shattered mirrors, and even Jackson Pollock paintings. Beaton had a particular fondness for graphic elements - dots, stripes, and stars. In one of the exhibition's final images, Audrey Hepburn, costumed for "My Fair Lady," poses against a sequence of monochrome receding squares that epitomizes 1960s style.
"I don't want people to know me as I really am, but as I am trying and pretending to be," Beaton once declared. This exhibition has the scale and space to examine both the man and his artistic output in detail. Drawing from the gallery's collection of 360 images of Beaton himself, plus numerous representations of his friends, associates, and patrons including the Sitwells, Ottoline Morrell, and Stephen Tennant, visitors encounter multiple versions of the photographer.
The show presents Beaton in various guises throughout his life: as a child in 1910 reading his mother's fashion magazines in bed, as a Harlequin in 1920s Venice, as a 1930s matinee idol, as a smart RAF officer, as a distinguished older gentleman, and notably, dressed as various women. Refreshingly, the curators avoid imposing contemporary interpretations, allowing Beaton's sexuality and love of cross-dressing to speak for themselves without didactic commentary.
While fashion photography draws many museum visitors today, this exhibition demonstrates Beaton's versatility beyond glamour. Though primarily associated with fantasy, he proved equally capable of stark realism. His wartime photographs of Arab legionnaires, Chinese commandos, and RAF officers planning maneuvers display the same attention to flawless composition and clarity found in his portraits, while offering glimpses into a world far removed from fashion's frivolities.
These contrasting worlds converge in "Fashion is Indestructible" (1941), showing a female BBC announcer in utility wear amid the bombed ruins of Middle Temple. Another powerful image depicts a bandaged three-year-old in a hospital bed clutching a soft toy - this photograph appeared on Life magazine's cover and significantly influenced American public sympathy for London's wartime suffering.
The exhibition's curation by Robin Muir, a photographic historian and Contributing Editor to Vogue, proves highly successful. Muir expertly showcases Beaton's images through thoughtful design choices, including sympathetic wall colors in moss green, duck-egg blue, and fuchsia, plus clever use of architectural features to frame oversized Vogue fashion plates. Some walls incorporate texture elements, such as white paper flower garlands spilling across midnight blue backgrounds in the gallery of beauties, echoing motifs from a portrait of Sita Devi, Princess Karam of Kapurthala.
Critics acknowledge that Beaton's work undeniably emphasizes surface, artifice, fantasy, and disguise. As one visitor observed, "It's the slightly shallow narcissism that puts you off." However, for admirers of interwar and mid-20th-century glamour, particularly Beaton's unashamedly elaborate version, this exhibition offers a truly heavenly experience that celebrates both the photographer's technical mastery and his unique aesthetic vision.
