ART: Just a talent to amuse?
Cecil Beaton: Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery
The exhibition of portraits by Cecil Beaton now running at the National Portrait Gallery richly deserves the enormous popular success it will, no doubt, achieve. Is it too odd to wonder whether Beaton’s amiable spectre is hovering over the proceedings? It is difficult, otherwise, to explain the strange air of festivity embracing those low rooms with their ranks of framed images — not least, since the subjects of so many of these portraits came to sticky, unenviable and over-chronicled ends. Yet I’ve never seen a press view where so many people ended up smiling at each other — where the expressions of amusement and delight were so spontaneous and genuine. Beaton made his reputation as a photographer not by being worthy or difficult, but rather by being adorable. That reputation is, surely, entirely secure.
The exhibition — the successor to Roy Strong’s famous Beaton retrospective of 1968, which was the first time the NPG had run a show fully devoted to photography — is set out over five rooms, each of them dealing with a decade of Beaton’s work, from the 1920s to the 1960s. In terms of celebrity culture, this might as well be the whole of human history, taking us all the way from Stephen Tennant and ‘Baby’ Jungman to Mick Jagger and Twiggy, Walter Sickert to David Hockney, from Windsor to Simla, Baghdad and Tehran to New York City and Hollywood, from writers and crowned heads to actresses and people who really were mostly famous for being famous. There is an image of the Queen Mother based Winterhalter’s canvases, and a photo in which a topless Truman Capote looks like a naughty, happy faun. The exhibition benefits from generous loans provided by Sotheby’s, to which Beaton gave his own archive shortly before his death in 1980, as well as privately-owned works and items from the NPG’s own collection. Terence Pepper, who curated Cecil Beaton: Portraits, says that he chose these images with a preference for the relatively unfamiliar over the too-well-known. All the same, there are plenty of absolutely classic portraits here — in some cases, the defining image of a particular subject, going well past mere representation to sum up a career, to give form to a legend.
The timing of the exhibition perhaps reflects the fact that this year saw the centenary of Beaton’s birth. Raised in north London, he took the opportunity to escape a dowdy mother and tediously conventional father by throwing himself whole-heartedly into the life of post-Great War Cambridge — less its academic life than the ADC, lots of dressing-up, and the company of a wealthy, aristocratic and sexually ambiguous circle of friends. It was amongst this circle that Beaton first established himself as a portrait photographer, and while he was later to apply his abundant improvisational skills and ready wit to everything from drawing and painting to the design and production of films — and to produce torrents of intelligent, perceptive, distinctive prose — it was for his photographic portraits that he is, today, best remembered. As well as a good eye and a willingness to make himself agreeable, this line of work required charm, subtlety, wit, sympathy and flexibility. What it did not require was a preciousness about technique, self-importance, the burning desire to be a ‘great artist’ — or, on the other hand, the stern recording angel of unpleasant truths. Alas, our age is not always kind to those who feel no need to don that sort of protective armour. Had Beaton been born in another time — that of Holbein, say, or Inigo Jones — no one would suppose that his willingness to please detracted from his power to do so. Beaton saved his waspishness for those endless diaries and doodles. Whatever ‘honesty’ there was in his portraits lay in the projection of his own fantasies onto his subjects. Portraiture was, in effect, a glorified form of dressing-up. He loved androgyny, ambiguity — and artifice. Of course he could be lazy, allowing certain visual signifiers to become slightly too well-worn, or allowing the nonchalance of the gentleman-amateur to stray over the border into incompetence when it came to dull things like focus or lighting. When everything worked, however, his images were pure enchantment. Perhaps this isn’t the way the world really looks — but wouldn’t it be marvellous to live in a world that looked like a Beaton exhibition?
As with any success, Beaton had — and has — his detractors. He made enemies as well as friends. Sometimes he made enemies one by one. That other north London social-climber, for instance, Evelyn Waugh, cordially detested him. And sometimes he made enemies on an almost industrial scale. In New York City on the eve of the Second World War, an ill-judged drawing for a magazine led to charges of anti-semitism which Beaton might have done better to deny a little more strongly. Years passed before he was able to work in the States again. And there have always been those who were quick to accuse him of superficiality and the shameless flattery of his subjects — as if either were, per se, a bad thing. Elsewhere he is damned with the faint praise of providing ‘an index not only to the history of celebrity [ … ] but to the changes in public image which celebrity has permitted itself,’ for all the world as if his role had been to record passively a reality on which his actions could have no effect.
Yet as I wandered through the NPG’s current exhibition, the fantastic cast of characters made less of an impression on me than did the sheer distinctiveness of Beaton’s vision. For while some of the images are so familiar now as to seem somehow natural or inevitable, many of them actually address their subjects in surprising, rather exciting ways. This is as true of that marvellous early photo of Rex Whistler (1927) reclining on a leafy bank in Byronic dress, playing a guitar, or his transformation of Sugar Ray Robinson (1953) from sturdy middleweight to urban dandy, as it is the high-camp brocaded romanticism of his nude portrait of Patrick Procktor (1968). Beaton seems to have had a particular gift for producing memorably counter-intuitive images of artists. Picasso (1933) is not the playful old fraud in a fisherman’s jumper that he would later become, but rather a smartly-dressed bourgeois enjoying his comfortable apartment, with only a flicker of those huge, wary eyes, and the glimmer of some very famous works all around him, to suggest that we are seeing anything out of the ordinary. Beaton’s friend Francis Bacon (1951), pinned up against a wall of old engravings, looks both pointlessly combative and terribly vulnerable. Then there is that extraordinary portrait of Lucian Freud (1956) — Freud stares at the camera with a look that is both flirtatious and aggressive, but folds his arms across his chest as if to make sure that no one will ever be allowed close enough to find out what is going on there, near to his heart, while a portrait by Francis Bacon looks out darkly over his shoulder. Down below the ornate mantle, Lady Caroline Blackwood crouches on the floor, hardly visible, hands folded tight before her, as beautiful and unhappy-looking as a penned-up wild animal. I am no great believer in the prognostic power of art, and doubtless one reads a lot back into the picture — more than one realises. Still, I think it is safe to say that there is more emotional drama evident in this little image than in virtually anything Freud ever painted himself. I have no idea what Beaton meant to portray here, but in the light of hindsight — the only light we have — this Nietzschean vision of the artist as destructive, creative superhero is almost unpleasantly unforgettable.
And indeed, one could go on, listing favourite portraits. In truth, though, there is hardly a boring image here. Actually, contrary to these claims of ‘superficiality’, lots of the images reward repeated viewing — something easily achieved with the help of the NPG’s illustrated publications, very sensibly offered in two different formats with two very different prices. And ultimately, looking at these portraits is a lot better than hearing about them. It is easy enough to describe subjects, composition, even overall mood. What words can’t properly conjure up, however, is the lightness, the wit and elegance with which Beaton carried out his work.
Still, there are some generalisations that are almost unavoidable. The degree to which Beaton projected himself into portraits seems to have had implications for their success. This lends a sort of sympathy to his photos of writers, artists and actors. He seems, however, to have found authority figures harder work than ‘creatives’. Politicians feature hardly at all here, Churchill and Bobby Kennedy apart. Best of all, though, were his glamorous women. Conventional beauty wasn’t important — his pictures of the Queen Mother, or of Mrs Winston Churchill, are at least as persuasive as those of, say, Elizabeth Taylor or Vivian Leigh. What mattered was a matter both of character and, well, style. And contrary to his reputation, he was better at finding theatrical qualities in the real world than he was at photographing the intentionally theatrical. This is why his images of, say, Barbara Streisand in On A Clear Day You Can See Forever are very dull indeed, while his photos of Field Marshall Lord Wavell and his family in India are positively electric — funny, strange and sad all at once. And also contrary to his reputation, it has to be said that Beaton’s sympathy was often with the underdog — with the weak rather than the strong. His photos of children can be terribly moving. His wartime image of bomb victim Eileen Dunne (1940) shows her ‘enthroned’ in a hospital bed, holding her doll, meeting the eye of the camera with her own huge, wondering, beautiful eyes. Given its context, of course it is sentimental, didactic, a little bit obvious. Yet his portrait of King Feisal of Iraq (1942) , which also used that same ‘enthroned’ composition — this time, using an actual throne far too big for the little boy perched uncomfortably in it — is every bit as moving. Again, Beaton cannot have known that his subject would die young, in this case shot dead in his own palace at the age of 23, but all the same, if he had known, it is hard to see how he could have conjured up anything more poignant and appropriate than those dark encroaching shadows, the white shoes and the white uniform, the vaguely upsetting off-centre quality.
But then as I mentioned above, many of the subjects in this exhibition came to untimely ends. Of these, perhaps the most obvious is poor, beautiful, doomed Marilyn Monroe. Here the NPG has borrowed from a private collector a huge, Cartier-silver triptych, in which a large, soft, dreamy image of ‘Mrs Marilyn Monroe Miller’ (1956) is sandwiched between two pages of handwritten ‘appreciation’ produced by Beaton himself. This whole strange construction, remarkably literal-minded in its presentation of the ‘iconic image’, was once owned by the actress herself. With hindsight, the ‘appreciation’ does not make easy reading. Beaton seems genuinely to have been enchanted by Monroe — by the make-believe, unerotic quality of her sexiness as much as by her childlike sense of fun — but who else could have come up with the phrase ‘innocent as a sleepwalker’? Yet from the opposite wall, there is Bobby Kennedy looking out at her — and nearby, poor Julie Garland, her face already a little bloated, something slightly too desperate and forced in that laugh. One senses that like so many other rather waspish, rather bitchy cultural figures — John Richardson is another — Beaton’s apparent frivolity and heartlessness concealed a deeper vein of absolutely genuine, strangely old-fashioned moral conviction, all the more powerful for having nothing superficial about it. An attraction to ambiguity — and here one thinks of Beaton’s fascination with Stephen Tennant, Andy Warhol, Mick Jagger — is not the same thing as a lack of discrimination. It may, on the contrary, imply plenitude of it.
Be that as it may, the NPG was entirely correct to give Beaton a centenary retrospective. This is an exhibition that will deliver more pleasure, more engagement, more real looking than most events offered by the London art-world this year. If the exhibition has flaws, these lie more in the occasional po-faced nature of the descriptive panels and their occasional inaccuracies than in the scope or quality of the work itself. If Beaton could claim no more than, to borrow the words of one of his erstwhile subjects, ‘just a talent to amuse’ — well, this is more than many artists possess — while if there was something more, a glimmer here and there of real imaginative genius, this exhibition offers a magnificent opportunity to discover this first-hand.
Cecil Beaton: Portraits will run from 5 February – 31 May 2004 at the National Portrait Gallery. Admission £7; various concessions apply. Two versions of the fully-illustrated catalogue are available — £35 for the large hardback version, and £9.99 for the small softback version.
Bunny Smedley, February 5, 2004 03:47 PM