Beaton in Vogue: The Man, the Magazine, The Century

Good lecture at the National Portrait Gallery by Josephine Ross talking about her biography of Cecil Beaton.

She went through his life focusing on the work he did for Vogue. His first pictures in the magazine were of a student production in 1924 and at first his main work for them was illustrations and cartoons on society life.

I had not known about the incident in the late 1930s in the US when he slipped racist and anti-Semitic comments into a drawing which led to him being blacklisted by Vogue until 1939 when he was called upon to take photographs of the Queen Mother which made her image as a wife and mother.

I was interested in his work during the Second World War and it set up an interesting parallel with the Lee Millar exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. She also outlined his renaissance in the 1960s photographing the Paris collections right up to his death in 1980.

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