Just in time for the holidays, Assouline is publishing the gorgeous Cecil Beaton: The Art of the Scrapbook, based on 42 volumes owned by Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Sotheby’s London. Bound in beautiful sunflower yellow with bold black lettering and a slipcover box, the book, with a foreword by James Danziger, shows the creative process of Sir Cecil Beaton, the Vogue photographer once described by Louise Dahl-Wolfe as “unfair to himself. He was a very good photographer, but he was always too keen to flatter and please.”
Beaton not only glued in inspirations as diverse as matadors in habit de lumiere and Marlene Dietrich at a polo match but pieces of newsprint like the November 23, 1963, front page of the International Herald Tribune. One of my favorite portraits, a watercolor of Mona and Harrison Williams in their Palm Beach house (1937), is included, as are great photos of Donyale Luna, one of the first black Vogue models, in a boldly printed evening dress that resembles a caftan, and a close-up of needlepoint slippers owned by Baron Philippe de Rothschild on an Aubusson carpet at Mouton, an iconic Vogue image. [#image: /photos/5891f27d7edfa70512d67f06]||||||
In 1929, Beaton arrived in America with $20 and a mile-long list of introductions and connections. A social climber if ever there was one, Beaton was also a hard worker who crisscrossed the continents to become a war photographer and an official court photographer to the English royals. By the Swinging Sixties, he had turned his camera and his incredible eye toward Mick Jagger, seen in the scrapbook in what looks like a huge tent of a black cape, as well as one of his favorite models and friend, Penelope Tree. Jagger shows up again, next to elegant French couturier Hubert de Givenchy, wearing a short fur cape in the countryside. Brigitte Bardot with tousled hair is in a collage next to Maria Callas, wearing glasses with mouth agape, and Coco Chanel, sitting on her famous white-linen staircase, in deep scrutiny of a collection or a passing model.
If you ever read any of Beaton’s diaries, you get the sense of a man with a camera as precise as a surgeon with a scalpel. But he could be a terrible snob. “If Beaton arrived at your party,” Kenneth Tynan once said, “he would give the impression that he had just come from a very much better one upstairs.”