On 8 December 2020, during the Hermitage Days, an annual celebration in honour of Saint Catherine, the patron saint of the museum, the online opening took place of the exhibition in the General Staff building “Cecil Beaton. Celebrating Celebrity” prepared by the State Hermitage in conjunction with the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive as part of the Hermitage 20/21 project.
Dmitry Ozerkov, head of the State Hermitage’s Department of Contemporary Art, welcomed everyone to the General Staff building, spoke about the author of the exhibition project, and thanked Darya Panayotti, the exhibition curator, as well as the Hermitage Foundation UK, the exhibition’s general partner – DLT, and the LAVAZZA company.
In his video address, Mikhail Piotrovsky, General Director of the State Hermitage, noted: “The exhibition has not yet opened, and people are already asking for it to be shown in Britain and Italy. This exhibition is the result of interaction between the Hermitage and the Hermitage Foundation UK in this time when the borders are closed. People cannot travel across them, but exhibits can. The exhibition is a symbol of the ties between countries and a splendid result of collaboration. This sort of exhibition is also art as a medicine – a tale of a beautiful life, that is not beautiful in itself, but when people make it beautiful, when a photographer transforms the stars in his own way. When people become stars, who were not born that way, when Cecil Beaton himself, a man from the middle classes, becomes such a celebrity. When his personages are people from Russian high society who ended up as émigrés and brought their kind of elegance as a gift to Europe. All this beauty did not simple emerge, but was born out of intellect, fate and ability. This is a wonderful photographic exhibition in keeping with the Hermitage’s new traditions. We have shown different types of photography, including works by stars of photography telling about stars: Annie Leibovitz, Irving Penn and Cecil Beaton. This is wonderful art, very democratic, an example of art that makes luxury accessible to everyone. That is what the Hermitage does – the great luxury of high art becomes accessible to all. My thanks once again to everyone that we have been able to present this during the Hermitage Days. This exhibition resonates with the Fabergé exhibition in the Winter Palace.”
After that, Darya Panayotti gave a brief conducted tour of the display in which Cecil Beaton’s works are presented.
This retrospective exhibition of the work of the celebrated photographer Cecil Beaton, the first to be held in Russia, makes it possible to see the transformation of the celebrity industry in the 20th century and to trace the development of the history of photography, which became a workshop for the creation of striking, attractive personalities. The display includes over 100 works taken by Beaton over the years, from the archive of the photographer’s studio, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the archives of the magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. Great interest is aroused not only by Cecil Beaton’s most famous photographs, but also by items that provide an insight into the “backstage realities” of fashion shoots in the middle of the last century – a series of proof prints marked with the photographer’s comments, collages and pictures with evidence of retouching. Particular attention is paid to Cecil Beaton’s links to Russian culture – one section of the display is devoted to the pictures he took for the Ballets Russes.
Cecil Beaton (1904–1980) is among the 20th century’s most celebrated photographers. He was a fashion photographer, celebrity photographer, set and costume designer, and essayist. A man of middle-class origins, he spoke on behalf of beauty, defending its interests against banality. After the Second World War, Beaton became the official photographer of the British royal court. In 1964 he was awarded an Oscar for his work on the film My Fair Lady. In 1972 he was given a knighthood.
In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Cecil Beaton managed to create a portrait gallery of enormous size and scope: from Hollywood stars of the first magnitude to bohemian artists who haunted London’s Soho district, from dancers of ballet, of which he himself was a connoisseur, to top-class couturiers – Coco Chanel and her chief rival Elsa Schiaparelli. His subjects also included Charles James, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent. Several cult models have gone down in history precisely as they were pictured by him: it was Beaton who took the portrait of the scandalous Wallis Simpson in that “lobster dress” from Schiaparelli; Beaton who shot Princess Margaret in 1949 in a sumptuous feminine dress by Dior that became a symbol of the return to peaceful life after the war.
Beaton defined his chief task in portrait photography as “to stage an apotheosis” – to arrange a person’s striking emergence in high society and on the pages of the glossy press. For Beaton fame, the world’s approval was at one and the same time a reward for a person’s merits, be it natural good looks or strength of character, the charisma of an extraordinary personality or prudence in high office, and also a virtue in itself. Non-entities, here today and gone tomorrow, those on whom fame alighted by chance just for a moment, did not find themselves in the master’s sights.
He was admired by those who possessed an innate “star quality”, such as Marlene Dietrich or Audrey Hepburn. That quality of celebrity, the ability to be popular and to present oneself in the best light meant an ability to conduct oneself accordingly, to possess the exquisite manners appropriate to a dandy, but in the 20th century dandyism was in decline, giving way to new models of popularity. Cecil Beaton with his restrained style and concise images stands between two worlds: the world of the old aristocracy with its debutantes’ balls and seasonal attire and the dynamic world of 1960s youth with its club parties and the garish clothing of the “peacock revolution”.
As Mikhail Piotrovsky 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”.
The exhibition “Cecil Beaton. Celebrating Celebrity” has been prepared by the State Hermitage’s Department of Contemporary Art (headed by Dmitry Ozerkov).
The exhibition curator is Darya Panayotti, a researcher in the Department of Contemporary Art. Commenting on the role of photography in the museum’s exhibition projects, she said: “It is impossible to imagine 20th- and 21st-century art without photography, For example, the boom in ‘celebrity culture’ … took place to a large extent precisely thanks to photography, which transformed the economy of visual images. Cecil Beaton was engaged in photography professionally for the best part of half a century and was a creator of that culture. He understood the mechanisms of fashion and fame at a very deep level and reflected that in his pictures. Beaton is one of Britain’s best-known photographers, but still little-known in Russia. It was important for us, though, to not only introduce him to the Russian viewer, but also to tell through the example of his works about the visual culture in which we are living, and to construct a bridge between the present day and the culture of the past.”
A scholarly illustrated catalogue in Russian and English (Fontanka publishers, London, 2020) has been produced for the exhibition. It has a foreword by Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky and texts by Darya Panayotti, Hugo Vickers, Cecil Beaton’s British biographer, and Olga Khoroshilova, a fashion historian. There are also brochures with a text by Darya Panayotti (State Hermitage publishing house, 2020).
The exhibition “Cecil Beaton: Celebrating Celebrity” has been organized by the State Hermitage in collaboration with the Hermitage Foundation UK.
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