Cathy's Art Diary

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 remember...

Delightful exhibition at the Garden Museum looking at Cecil Beaton's gardens and the influence of gardens and flowers on his work. This show was beautifully designed by Luke Edward Hall incorporating his delicate murals reflecting Beaton's style. I had recently seen him do a similar response to the work of Oliver Messel at Glyndebourne and of course Beaton and Messel were friends. I will say though that I didn’t see the purpose of the tin foil in the display cabinets other than that they gave a sense of glitz. The coverage of the show was broader than I expected covering theatrical designs by Beaton which were influenced by flowers and portrait photographs which included them. I loved the inclusion of a set model for Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera House alongside headdresses from the Covent Garden version of the production. My favourite sections looked at the gardens he created at Ashcombe House and Reddish House and how he used them for parties and with friends. C...

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.