Cecil Beaton: Surrealism and Romanticism in 20th Century Fashion
Love, Cecil is a 2017 documentary about the life of Cecil Beaton, an English photographer and personality who made a significant impact on both the history of fashion and war photography in the 20th century. Watching the documentary inspired me to write about this author.
His style reflects a clear love for theater and black-and-white Hollywood cinema, using cinematic backdrops and dramatic lighting to transform his subjects into icons of spectacle. His ability to blend tradition and modernity allowed him to transform, with his 1939 photographs, the image of the Queen and the royal family into romantic and timeless figures.
His portraits are romantic, elaborate, and meticulously detailed. They reflect his fascination with high society, which Beaton captured from a young age, using his photography as a means to connect with it.
Cecil has an innovative, eccentric, extravagant, and highly ambitious gaze, skillfully blending a touch of nostalgia, escapism, and modernity. His ambition took him to America, where he engaged with local beauty and society, becoming one of the greatest fashion photographers for Vogue in the 1950s and photographing all the icons of the era, such as Coco Chanel, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Barbara Streisand, and Marlon Brando.
At the same time, he sought to break conventions to reveal aspects of his subjects' personalities that had never been captured before. What is beauty to him? Beauty shows itself when there is something curious in itself, when it plays with the idea of the person and not with the person themselves. For Cecil, beauty is in fantasy, and to show it, he borrows from theater the effect of suspension of disbelief.
Cecil Beaton wanted to live his life in the same way. He was entirely self-taught (he even dropped out of school), poor with mechanics and technique but so ambitious and determined that he managed to learn how to achieve the effects he aimed for. His artistic sensibility also poured into evocative writing and meticulous illustrations, earning him two Oscars for costume design in 1959 and 1965.
Beaton was also a street photographer of American reality and a war photographer during World War II, playing an important role in raising awareness to convince American public opinion to support England.
Finally, he opened a dialogue with the art of his time, finding inspiration in the photo surrealism of the 1930s with the use of shadows and unsettling atmospheres, or using Jackson Pollock's works as backdrops for a dialogue between energy and refinement, or portraying artists of the time, including Picasso and Dalì.
The documentary concludes with an excerpt from his notebooks in which I recognized myself and which perhaps sums up the complexities of a figure like this man, this artist who loved life and daydreaming. I tried to translate it to report it here: "Perhaps in my life I have digressed, but if one did not want to specialize in just one thing? Try to take risks, to be different, to be a dreamer, to be anything that demonstrates the honesty of your intentions and your creative vision against those who prefer not to take risks, the slaves of the ordinary. What if one is a dreamer?"
