This volume masterfully brings together his portraits and snapshots of that heady epoch., Returning to Beaton's enchanted world is a tonic in a fear-ridden age, the catalogue, written by the exhibition's curator, Robin Muir, a delight., I'm devastated not to be able to experience Britain's National Portrait Gallery exhibition Cecil Beaton's Bright Young Things firsthand, but I am taking consolation in Robin Muir's handsome catalog (art directed with suitable elegance by Thomas Persson)., A web of names spins around every image, every interaction-Virginia Woolf, the actress Anna May Wong, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the author Daphne du Maurier. Legendary aesthete Cecil Beaton was both an esteemed member of the group and its unofficial photographer.
Power, Privilege and Glamour in 1920s London: inside the Glittering WORLD of the Bright Young Things, A dazzling group of young and unconventional aristocrats dubbed the Bright Young Things swirled at the centre of society in 1920s London. Beaton's photographs are complemented by a wide range of letters, drawings and ephemera and contextualised by artworks created by those in his circle, including Christopher Wood, Rex Whistler and Henry Lamb. Among this glittering cast are Beaton's socialite sisters Baba and Nancy Beaton, Stephen Tennant, the Mitfords, Siegfried Sassoon, Evelyn Waugh and Daphne Du Maurier. In a series of themed chapters, covering Beaton's first self-portraits and earliest sitters to his time at Cambridge and as principle society photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair, over 60 leading figures who sat for him are profiled and the dazzling parties, pageants and balls of the period are brought to life. More than a photographer, Beaton became a society fixture in his own right. Beaton quickly developed a reputation for his beautiful, often striking and fantastic photographs, which culminated in his portraits of Queen Elizabeth in 1939.
These 'Bright Young Things' captured the spirit of the roaring twenties and thirties as they cut a dramatic swathe through the epoch. Beaton used his camera, his ambition and his larger-than-life personality to mingle with a flamboyant and rebellious group of artists, writers, socialites and partygoers. His influence on portrait photography was profound and lives on today in the work of many contemporary photographers.
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