GRGR(4) 78.12 Cecil Beaton

[s~Z]

Beaton's career took off after his introduction to the poet Edith
Sitwell and the aesthete Stephen Tennant. Edith Sitwell was one of the
many sitters whom he photographed against strikingly original
backgrounds: encased in a glass dome; wrapped in cellophane; posing as a
saint or the Madonna. Tennant later saw Beaton's genius for exotic
photographs as his 'greatest contribution to modern life and art'. In
1928 he first visited America and quickly attracted the attention of
Conde Nast with whom he signed a contract to work for Vogue. Successful
trips to Hollywood followed where he photographed film stars such as
Gary Cooper and the Marx
Brothers. Unfortunately suspicions about his being anti-Semitic,
provoked by a drawing, entitled 'New York Society', forced him to resign
from Vogue in 1938. 

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Beaton was commissioned by the
Ministry of Information to take official photographs. Many of his images
from the dark days of 1940-41 show the resilience of the British coping
with the threat and reality of enemy action. From this period date many
memorable images: the faces of evacuees at Wilton, Buckingham Palace
stripped of its treasures, airmen waiting the call to fly, and the Prime
Minister, Winston Churchill, looking up from his Downing Street desk.
One particularly powerful image of the three-year-old Eileen Dunne
sitting up in her hospital bed clutching a toy was published on the
cover of Life and persuaded Vogue to reemploy him. Following the British
victory of El Alamein in 1942 the Air Ministry sent him to the Near East
to photograph the retreating German forces and to record the activities
of the armed services there, the fighting, the devastation and the
personalities. Out of the assignment came such famous compositions such
as the photographs of burnt-out German tanks and of military commanders
like Glubb Pasha and Arthur Tedder, as well as a portrait of the young
king Feisal of Iraq, who was to enter Harrow School in 1949 and be
assassinated during a military coup nine years later. Beaton's final
tour of war of war duty was in India and the Far East, where the
splendour of the British Raj in its closing phase contrasted with the
general poverty of the region and the horror of the continuing warfare
in Burma and China.