Salisbury exhibit sets out a complex, fascinating Beaton worth knowing better

I started my journey with minimal expectations.  Still on sick leave, encouraged to walk a lot … while looking straight ahead on un-bended neck … and not do much more, the short journey to Salisbury and a ramble around the city's small museum seemed a fine idea for an outing.

Country Life magazine had recommended an exhibit there on Cecil Beaton.  Who, I am now ashamed to admit, featured in my awareness only as a massively camp, outrageously stylish gay man who did fashion photography in the 1930s.  This small but comprehensive show exposed my shocking ignorance.

Those years were just a fraction of a busy and eclectic life that reached to 1980.  A homosexual who had several compelling heterosexual affairs, most intriguingly with Greta Garbo.  A catty dilettante who played a serious role in WW2.  A photographer who was also a writer, clothing and costume designer (winning an Oscar for Gigi).  And a man who in his spare time was also a proficient painter, interior decorator and garden designer.

I went expecting Sebastian Flyte.  I got something closer to Leonardo.

The show explores Beaton's life in chronological order, and the further in you plunge through the galleries, the more you wonder at the complexity and artistic genius of the man.  The very first surprise hits when you learn of his solidly middle class background ... I just assumed he would have been the cousin of Lord Somebody-or-other ... and how early his precocious genius found him a place amongst the elite.  His early photographs of English society women are stunning for their clarity, use of light and the life he brings out in their faces.  That ability to be the mirror into his subject's souls lasts throughout his life.

He was just 26, but already a successful fashion photographer, when he leased a derelict country house in Wiltshire (thus starting the long-time local links that make this exhibit logical for Salisbury).  It became a party house for bright young things, and one of the highlights of the exhibit is the recreation of the circus-themed bedroom he had guests help decorate (above), with the similarly themed costume he wore to parties.  Though the surrounding displays are mostly just boards with text and photos, it combines to convey a mouth-watering feast of happy times.

The World War brought more difficult days and challenged Beaton to take life more seriously.  He avoided conversions in the style of St. Francis or Buddha, but still came out of the war a more serious, thoughtful and diversified man than the one who went in. 

From there, we follow his life as he develops multiple angles on a creative career, buys and decorates an exquisite country house, and goes through a series of fascinating relationships.  Linger over it, and this humble little exhibit will leave you thinking that Cecil Beaton was one of the greatest creative geniuses of the 20th century.  And someone you'd very much like to call "friend".

The Salisbury Museum is in an old manor house on the Cathedral Close, and your exhibition entry fee allows free entry to the museum for a year after.  The Beaton show is only open 'til 19 September, however.  So get moving!