Product Details
Hardcover
320 pages
Stewart, Tabori & Chang
Published 1996
From Publishers Weekly
Born in 1904 to a London timber merchant, Cecil Beaton transformed society and fashion photography from a realm of idealized beauty and artifice. The globe-hopping Vogue and Harper's Bazaar photographer, who died in 1980, created, with eclectic abandon, a vernacular of novel imagery that combined surrealistic settings inspired by Dali and De Chirico, neo-Romantic flourishes, baroque interiors and witty variations on fashion themes. From diverse influences?Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Pirandello's plays, modernist photography?Beaton took a sense of multiple identities, unstable gender and playful metafictionality. A remarkable compilation of images, this album includes shots of Picasso, Marlene Dietrich, David Hockney, Colette, Jean Cocteau, Johnny Weissmuller, Rudolf Nureyev, Lillian Gish and Marilyn Monroe. In their sensitive essay, British art historian Mellor and Sotheby's, London senior director Garner observe that Beaton was also capable of satirical grotesques, an observation born out in photographs of Augustus John, Mick Jagger and Dali.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Though Beaton is fixed in the public's mind as perhaps the last true dandy, a position cultivated by Beaton himself, the authors here strive to secure for him the more productive reputation of major photographer. But Garner, Sotheby's London director in charge of decorative arts and photography, has wisely not attempted to subdue Beaton's preoccupations with artifice, beauty, social status, and his own self-construction in the process. The pages are liberally laced with telling quotes from... read more |
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