 |
ARTLOOK #15 | September 2005
Photo Audrey Hepburn, 1954 © The Conde Nast Publications Inc./National Portrait Gallery
A quest for beauty
kathleen fisher discusses cecil beaton’s search for the nirvana of perpetual beauty
LIFE WAS theatre for British portrait photographer Cecil Beaton. From royalty to rock stars, he cast his subjects as performers and very consciously made himself director. For five decades he chronicled the lives of the rich and famous with a defining style of elegance, showing his subjects as unearthly creatures-exquisite, yet distant and untouchable.
Cecil Beaton: Portraits marks the centenary of the photographer's birth. Travelling from the National Portrait Gallery in London and curated by Terence Pepper, Curator of Photographs, the exhibition stops at Australia's National Portrait Gallery, providing Australia with the opportunity to see more than 150 of Beaton's most recognised works.
Beauty was Beaton's main aim. He understood that the camera was a tool to create, rather than mimic, reality and used it to flatter his subjects in the same way cosmetics are used to enhance the face. Not that he was short of sensational models, including Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, Gary Cooper and Marlon Brando. However, he understood all too well that even the world's elite needed to invent images of themselves or hide evidence of age.
Gods and goddesses, and their human representatives, royals, appear to have epitomised Beaton's notion of beauty. His portraits of Britain's aristocratic women recall Ancient Greece deities, for example. Surrounded by classical urns and columns, his subjects are draped in endless fabric and arranged in poses that could have been chiselled in marble. Likewise, many images of the twentieth century's new blue-bloods, such as actors and pop stars, evoke mythology and religion. Marilyn Monroe, as photographed in 1956 for instance, is a wide-eyed nymph, as fresh and pure as the chrysanthemum pressed against her creamy breast. Equally wide-eyed is Mick Jagger in Marrakesh in 1967. His hands may be pressed together in prayer but his under-lit face against a pitch background has a devilish, Puck-like air.
If his subjects were like characters from ancient mythology, then Beaton could easily have been given the role of Zeus. In his quest for beauty, Beaton relished the role of creator and director. He constructed images in considerable detail, building sets and locations, casting roles and designing costumes. At the same time, he apparently enjoyed drawing attention to the dreams he created, pointing out where photographs had been retouched and did not match reality.
A manipulative persona emerges, one eager to control. However, Beaton seemed to have been equally keen to transform himself as he did others. As Peter Conrad comments in Beaton in Brilliantia, in the exhibition catalogue, the photographer climbed from so-called middle class drabness into artistic society by attention to his elocution, deportment and dress.
Worldly ambition is one explanation for such behaviour; determination to find a higher state of being is another. It is possible that Beaton was driven to find a Nirvana of perpetual beauty, one in which himself and his friends, lovers and subjects could exist as artworks to adorn an ageless world.
KATHLEEN FISHER is a Canberra-based freelance writer and photographer, specialising in arts, lifestyle and travel.
CECIL BEATON: PORTRAITS, NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, OLD PARLIAMENT HOUSE 16 SEPTEMBER–27 NOVEMBER
