Making faces BOOKS
ROY STRONG Madam, do you ever regret plucking out your eyebrows in 1923 and replacing them with a cosmetic line an inch above where they should be? Does it worry you when your hairdresser offers to tease your bangs, or do you think it smart to flaunt a nest of lacquered straw a foot above your head and pound the parquet in your stilettos? And you, sir, in remotest Cheltenham, with hair brushed sleekly flat, are you conscious of how strange you look with draped blazer and flapping Oxford bags, or do you take consolation from the fact that in fifteen years' time your successors will be tottering along the promenade in flared jackets and bell-bottoms, wearing clothes of a cut by then provided only by provincial followers of John Stephen? One of the consolations of getting older is one's awareness of changes in style;. one of the drawbacks is how easy, how desperately easy, it is for us to jell ourselves in „time. Study any crowd of people lumbered together on the underground and you can usually guess by their appearance when was their finest hour, whether it was Queen Char- lotte's ball in ,1932 or the Hammersmith Palais one.fain-sodden night in 1947. thii is one of the reasons, but not the .only one, and not by any means the most impor- tant one, why The Best of Beaton (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 84s) is such a delicious confec- tion.Here, within the panorama of remembered time, is this country's greatest photographer re- cording and distilling the stylistic essences of the periods through which he has lived: From the early -'twenties ,to -Ale present,. Beaton's photographs are not- only works of art* or` records of the physical transmutation of the great,, but refinements of the essential ii1=, houette and gesture, mood and physical • • presence of an age. Pho'tography confirms that- the period face, . painter's studio, from being an aberration of the paintees studio, does exist, embodying a succession of- startling changes in facial composition. One can only marvel at the adaptability of the human face, basiCally not perhaps more in; teresting than other parts of- the body, a lump of bone and flesh which happens to hOld together four out of the five senses. Beaton launches us on our journey with the Marquesa de Casa Maury, ravishing, classic, 1928, with slightly stooped, hunched shoulders and neck thrust forward so that her eyes can peer soul- fully upwards. A glistening, wilting orchid with a hint of sadness, eyes one minute half-closed in heavy-lidded languor, the next blazing with sensuous arrogance. Strangely, this ideal of womanhood seems less connected with an age of emancipation and votes for women than in direct line of descent from the Burne-Jones- Beardsleyesque half-devil, half-angel femme fatale.
In 1937, New York model Helen Bennett doesn't wilt like a blossom any more. Like Hitler's goose-stepping troops, she is taut and angular, with steely eyes and hard glossy lips, hair drawn up on to the crown of her head, not one out of place. She wears her smashing John Fredericks hat is, though it were sculpted in sheet metal. And, if we skip thirty years to Twiggy and Penelope Tree, we pass from ideal beauty epitomised in the mature femme du monde to the worship of a combination of the innocence and insouciance of a teenage nymphet: long lank hair, lips painted out and eyes extended by a fantastic maquillage in paint of a crudity which will, in retrospect, appear positively clownish.
The male face has undergone a more pro- longed and subtler development, accelerated in recent years. We open with Gary Cooper, slim, debonair, in a well-cut casual suit, with hair brushed down away from his forehead, an extrovert face with humorous eyes, the ideal anyone for tennis (or anything else) man. The photographs of Marlon Brando are a water- shed in the replacement of this ideal image of masculinity. Still in a suit, he is posed holding a book (he can read), features very smooth, but he is now slumped untidily in the chair, clothes crumpled, hair ruffled and eyes promis- ing some dark, uncertain entanglement. Move on a decade and a half and there are Nureyev and Jagger, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the 'sixties: hair long and wavy but art- fully unkempt; no ears; skin no longer ironed smooth like wax but pitted; features coarse yet tempered with a wanton prettiness. A bit diffi- cult to swallow in the Athenaeum at the moment, but in its turn destined to become the establishment image of-1990.
Painters have obviously exercised a power- ful influence on Beaton. His sister Baba in 1922 is -le ,composition.-fin f the manner o Nicholson; Ottoline Morrell, farouche and flamboyant, flaunts her jagged profile in front of a boldly patterned 'twenties hanging like an Augustus John gipsy; an aircraft wreck in the Second World War evokes the work of Paul Nash; the Wyndham Quin sisters are a straight Sargent pastiche and the Sitwells must have been game to parody any artist for Beaton at the click of a shutter. I wish, out of sheer personal fascination, that there had been more of the grand between-the-wars English aristo- cratic portraits, for Beaton filled a vital role when academic painting was appallingly dreary.
Marlene Dietrich in 1935
Visiting country houses, the great series of por- traits by Lely and-Kneller down to Romney and Lawrence continue off the walls in Beaton photographs. In these, too, he shows his love and appreciation of England's past, recalling in his aristocratic fantasies the neoclassicism of Reynolds, the romance of Gainsborough or the dottiness of Devis. And his vision of the Queen Mother, afloat in tiaras and glittering crinolines, will surely go down as one of the most remarkable artist-royal sitter relationships in the creation of an official image. After the tarnished period of the abdication, it was of crucial importance to re-establish the visual vocabulary of monarchy. Beaton's fusion of revamped Winterhalter with Novello Ruritania in service of the crown was an artistic master- touch of the utmost brilliance.
The examples of Beaton's fashion, photo- graphy mostly belong to the 'thirties. There are weird set-pieces with Dali in mind. In whitened sepulchres women loom up like phantoms; they lift vast bouquets of flowers that dwarf them; a gloved hand covers a face in shock or grief, while another figure lifts both arms heavenwards. Or they float dreamily in lustrous transparent tulle against a Rex Whistler-Oliver Messel never-never land of plaster rococo bric-a-brac and fey Watteau- esque landscape backcloths. The Second World War, shattered this vision of untouched remote loveliness for ever, anticipated by Beaton even before its outbreak when he posed models amidst the rubble and debris of destruction. In fact, he reached this new-fangled reality through his -romanticism, a progression from back- grounds of Piranesi romantic ruins for society beauties to actually going out and placing his fashion models in the bombed sites of the City.
The book is so jammed with celebrities that any choice must he an arbitrary one.,Thens is Dietrich in 1935, in an amazing hat, gesturing towards an erotic art nouveau vase, twenty- fiVe, yearshefore anyone mould have thought. of it as anything beyond regrettable junk. Belje- malk (always a good subject) lolls on a stone bench beneath his beloved Imperial College like a- tramp expecting a soup ticket to be pressed into his hand, while Augustus John and Dorelia emerge from the greenery like startled.- animals. As a society document, Lady Anglesey and her daughter Caroline, all peaked hat, epaulettes and knitted stockings, would take some beating for the effects of the Second World War on the English aristocracy. The Chaidinesque still life of .the hall at 10 Down- ing Street in 1940, a group of folded overcoats and homburg hats on a two-tiered table, is more eloquent of the pressures of war than many of the intense, peering-up-from-the-desk por- traits of the leaders themselves. And surely Edith Sitwell will go down as one of the great faces of this century.
I do have one moan. It is annoying that the dating of the pictures is arbitrary. Even approximate dates. would have helped. The photograph of Churchill in the war section, to cite a single instance, must have been taken considerably later. There are informative notes by the artist, often witty and pithy in their summing up of his sitters, and a handsome tribute in the introduction by Truman Capote, who is photographed at the beginning of the book flying through the air, limbs akimbo and shirt knotted, like a chorus boy from a Latin American musical. Your reviewer is treated with greater reverence. If you turn to page 213 you will see him categorised tinder Charivari along with two cats, Pavlova's death-mask and Barbra Streisand, photographed like a startled fish in a bowl of beruffed Jacobean grandees. Rather a splendid way to be thought of by posterity.
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