Cecil Beaton. Celebrating Celebrity

It is organized by the State Hermitage Museum in collaboration with Cecil Beaton’s Studio Archive in a frame of the Hermitage 20/21 project. General partner of the exhibition is DLT.

Presenting around one hundred photographic images made by Beaton throughout his career, it will feature some of his most celebrated works, as well as photographs that have never been seen before. Cecil Beaton’s (1904 – 1980) career spanned five decades, starting with his friendship with the ‘bright young things’ of the 1920s, moving on to serious images of fashion, theatre, ballet and the social scene in the 1930s. Then he became a war artist in the 1940s and from the 1950s onwards his career was crowned with the title of official photographer of the royal family of Great Britain. Core to the exhibition concept is the history of photography and celebrity culture interweaving, seen through Beaton’s professional biography. He was born into a middle class family; being a ‘total self-creation’, as his friend Truman Capote once described him, he elevated to the upper echelons of British society with the help of his photographic talent and personal charm. Starting with photographing his own friends dressing up, he moved on to work for “Vogue” and “Vanity Fair”, made portraits of Hollywood stars and of royalty. He ensured a welcome in some of the most aristocratic and wealthy European houses. Not only was he invited to one of the most luxurious social events of the century, the Beistegui ball in Venice in 1951, but his work served as inspiration to such events: is was Beaton’s costume design for “My Fair Lady“ that inspired the chic “Black and White Ball“.

Beaton also contributed significantly to the development of fashion photography, with an inherent instinct to dramatize the boundaries between real life and dream. He famously claimed his job was “to stage an apotheosis” and saw social life as a performance of a persona that is defined through garments, gestures, and surroundings. He refined his theatrical sensibility in a series of images that became iconic for the 20th century. The photographer witnessed how the face of fame was changing, and made a dramatic contribution to the development of glamorous tabloid media. Having made his way into the beau monde, he came to be one of the most important and rigorous arbiters of good taste, and he was always in the very center of celebrity culture, which was the precursor of modern social media.

Prof. Mikhail Piotrovsky, the General Director of the State Hermitage Museum, notes: “Cecil Beaton is one such exceptional figure: both fashionable with the public and engaged in fashion himself, we see in him a distillation of all the social exoticism and beauty surrounding the life and work of a modern fashion photographer. The art and industry of fashion provided one of the best social ladders of the twentieth century, and our exhibition tells the absorbing story of how it worked and looked. It is a world that has everything: the horror of war alongside royal ceremonial; one in which the photographer transforms people, and people create the image of the photographer. We have already had two celebrity exhibitions – Irving Penn and Annie Leibovitz. This is in the same rank, but what makes it exceptional is the wonderful combination of photographic works and the artist’s writing, which is just as elegant, clever and witty as the visual images he created”.

Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton biographer, remarks: “The key to Cecil Beaton’s approach to life was visual, and since he was a photographer of great distinction perhaps that is all that mattered. Cecil Beaton minded how things looked more than how things were. Anyone examining his work should remember that his first love was the theatre and therefore a strong theme of theatricality permeates everything he did. Truman Capote wrote perceptively of Beaton’s ‘visual intelligence.’ Beaton’s eye missed nothing. Capote was right to say: ‘The camera will never be invented that could capture and encompass all that he actually sees.” Gillian Sutro pointed out: ‘If there was a safety pin somewhere, he would find it.”

The exhibition «Cecil Beaton: Celebrating Celebrity» is organized by Contemporary Art Department of The State Hermitage Museum (Dr. Dimitri Ozerkov is the Head of that Department).

The exhibition curator is Daria Panaiotti, Researcher of Contemporary Art Department. An illustrated academic catalogue accompanies the exhibition (both in English and in Russian). It contains an introduction by Prof. Mikhail Piotrovsky, the General Director of the State Hermitage Museum, essays by Daria Panaiotti, Hugo Vickers and Dr. Olga Khoroshilova, the art historian, St. Petersburg. An additional emphasis made on Cecil Beaton’s travel to the USSR in 1935. (Fontanka Publishing House, London, 2020).

«Cecil Beaton: Celebrating Celebrity» exhibition is organized by The State Hermitage Museum in collaboration with The Hermitage Foundation, Great Britain.

General partner of the exhibition

The exhibition is supported by:

We are grateful to the Hermitage Foundation, Great Britain, for their support.

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