Cecil looking at Henry and Christopher and Augustus

Wednesday 28 January 2009
Ron Brownson

Between the two World Wars, Cecil Beaton (1904 - 1980) was one of England’s best known photographers. His fame resulted from two facts; he regularly recorded celebrities and he always ensured his portraits were published in magazines which had a massive circulation.

Beaton adored royalty and cherished members of European aristocracy, yet his gritty character never dissuaded him from writing exceptionally negative comments about the nobility in his tell-all diaries.

Beaton accepted the fact that he was a committed snob. He was only interested in ‘cultured’ people, those who lived privileged or extraordinary lives. The portraits he made as a war photographer frequently seem more like decorative and romantic compositions. He staunchly avoided what he considered to be 'ugly subjects' so his military images often come across like campy fashion shots of wartime. However, as a challenging artist, Beaton never let his affection for celebrating ‘taste’ deflate his personal preference for surreal, and even bizarre, photographic oppositions.

One of Beaton’s astonishing gifts was his ability to visually dramatise reality. The Gallery owns two of his exceptional photographic portraits. Beaton’s double portrait (above) of the curator Henry Geldzahler and his partner, the painter Christopher Scott, was taken in 1969, the same year in which David Hockney completed his double portrait (Abrams Family collection, New York) which was used as the photograph's hilarious back-drop. The conceit of this photograph is simple – replicate an already novel painted composition as a pictorial re-staging by using the painting’s actual subjects. In the painting both men are made to look like a zombie couple, not the adoring partners that their friends knew them to be in life.

Hockney had spent January and February of 1969 completing his huge double portrait, which the painter described as ‘St Henry radiating light visited by an angel in a raincoat’. Kynastan McShine of the Museum of Modern Art commented that the painting was 'the scene of a contemporary annunciation' (see: Peter Webb, Portrait of David Hockney, London, Chatto and Windus 1988, p103). However, Beaton’s photograph has more humour than Hockney’s portrait because the painting’s sitters are participating in a staged, and stagey, homage to Hockney's own painting of them.

Notice how comfortably the two men inhabit their trad-boho clothes in Beaton's shot. He was totally skilled at transforming the occasion of a photograph into a session of collaborative fun. Beaton's portraits on the wedding day of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II resulted in the most memorable photographs of any British royal wedding simply because he made that special photo-event into a theatrical performance with royal players.