Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World

Annoying exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looking at the life and photography of Cecil Beaton.

There were some beautiful images and the show told the story of his life well, but I thought it tried to cover too much ground. The introduction said it was going to look at his portraits and fashion work but it included quite a number of photographs and drawings of him by other people and did venture into his war work although the images they used did all include people.

The show felt quite cramped in the space particularly in the usually large room at the end which had been divided into about 6 or 7 separate spaces. In a number of cases the room introduction panel had been placed in the entrance space causing bad bottle necks.

A lot of the labels were quite long too with good but complex biographies of the sitters. You did get an ideal of a strata of society in the early 20th century but, despite his being a period I love, I quite quickly didn't care.

I kept remembering the previous Cecil Beaton show at the gallery which didn't seem that long ago but when I looked it up it turned out to have been in 2004! Oh dear!

Closes 11 January 2025


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