CecilBeaton’s early photographs showed the power of artifice and fantasy in a downtrodden Britain ✨ NPGLondon
– currently put on hold as the entire gallery closes in response to the Covid-19 pandemic – which puts on display an extraordinary collection of photographs by the image-maker, taken during the 1920s and 1930s. Featuring luminaries of the day, from Anna May Wong, Oliver Messel and Stephen Tennant, to partygoers, high society and Beaton’s own sisters, his pictures capture the giddy and delirious creative spirit which arose out of a British society demolished by World War One.
Beaton’s was the generation who had missed being drafted, just. Born in Hampstead in 1904, he was ten when the war began, and still a teenager when it ended – and it was during this time that he first would pick up a camera, a folding Kodak 3A, owned by his nanny, taking photographs of his sisters in the family garden.
And, while most exhibitions on Beaton have been surveys of his entire career – which would also see him gain renown as a costume designer, memorably outfittingfocuses on the whimsy of these early years, culminating in his induction into what would be deemed the Bright Young Things of the 1920s. It began with his introduction to Edith Sitwell, who he would go on to photograph in her ancestral home in Renishaw, and continued with friendships with Tennant, Wong and Messel.
But if these photographs – painstakingly gathered together for the very first time – are proof of how creativity can be spurned from tragedy, then it was to be short-lived. The Bright Young Things would succumb, as the rest of Britain would, to another World War. This time, Beaton became part of the war effort, training his lens on the conflict and destruction he had avoided as a teen.
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