Beaton

Cecil Walter Hardy (1904-1980). English photographer. For more than half a century he was the portraitist of international high society. He began to take photos while in high school at Harrow in London and later at St. John’s College in Cambridge. From the almost Victorian mannerism of his first portraits — Daphne du Maurier, for example — he came to the “angry” poses of the painter Graham Sutherland and the poet W.H. Auden. A great snob, he was attracted by famous people whose portraits he would carefully “construct.” In England, he was for decades the court photographer, helping to create an image for Mary, the Queen Mother, and for Elisabeth II. In the meantime, in the 1930s, already famous for his fashion work in Vogue, he discovered Hollywood. Endless was the stream of celebrities who posed for him for Vanity Fair. Among them were Buster Keaton, Gary Cooper, Lillian Gish, Vivien Leigh, Norma Shearer, Johnny Weissmuller, Marlene Dietrich, Marlon Brando — very young, in 1947 — Audrey Hepburn, Sinatra and his clan, Marilyn Monroe and, above all, Greta Garbo. He himself, in his memoirs, wrote that the diva was his only female passion. After idolizing and chasing her for years, he was finally able to meet her again only in 1946 in New York. He fell in love to the point of asking her, in vain, to marry him. In 1940, the man who made frivolity and refinement into a way of life was called to the service of his country. At first, he was asked to take the official photos of the Queen to be sent to the troops, and then to portray Winston Churchill at his very tidy writing-desk, with a giant cigar in his mouth and a crafty look on his face. His photograph of a little girl wounded during a bombing in London and recovering in the hospital was published on the cover of Life and helped convince the American public of the need to enter the war. He photographed the London underground when it was used as a bomb shelter. Then he was asked by the Ministry of Information to document the war in North Africa and the Far East. At the end of the war he returned to high society and to his passions, among which was the design of costumes for the theater and cinema. His designed for Anna Karenina with Vivien Leigh in 1947; for My Fair Lady on Broadway in 1956 and, later, for the film with Audrey Hepburn, which won him an Oscar; and for Gigi in 1957. In 1972, he was knighted. Semi-paralyzed but determined not to give in, he did his last work for Vogue on the Autumn 1979 Collections. The novelist Truman Capote said about him, “What makes Beaton’s work so unique is the extraordinary visual intelligence that permeates his photographs. The historians of the next century will be even more grateful and thankful to him than we are.” Among his books are The Book of Beauty (1930) and The Best of Beaton (1968). In 1971, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London exhibited his work as an eye witness to fashion.