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Description: In collaboration with Sotheby's, the Chris Beetles Gallery hosts a major retrospective of the photographic career of Cecil Beaton. Featuring a selection of around 70 prints, of major 20th-century figures, including members of the Royal Family, Gilbert & George and Marilyn Monroe.
Trains: Tube: Green Park/Piccadilly Circus 
Phone: 0207839 7551
Website: www.chrisbeetles.com
Email: gallery@chrisbeetles.com
Play on image: Harold Pinter, 1962, is an unusually experimental portrait, created by layering four negatives in the dark room
Shining example: the background collision of reflective surfaces for a portrait of the photographer’s sister Baba from 1925
Bright Young Things: Zita and Teresa Jungman (1926) moved in elite circles following their mother’s second marriage into the Guinness family
We never seem to tire of the glamour of Cecil Beaton’s sparkling black and white portraits of high-society Bright Young Things during the inter-war years, rich socialites with no idea of life on the opposite side of town, who donned shimmering dresses and hats and posed against the photographer’s handmade backdrops in the drawing rooms of aristocratic homes. Nor do his glamorous portraits of Forties and Fifties Hollywood stars wane, or the intense studies he made of artists and writers in Fifties Paris and Sixties London.
The choice of Beaton’s work to open the newly expanded Chris Beetles Gallery in Mayfair, a venue dedicated to classic photography, reflects that genre’s healthy status in today’s strained market. Prices zigzag around the rooms, from the eternal vintage Monroe (1956) with a rose between her teeth at £8,500 to a modern print from the same era at £1,400. A carefully chosen selection, drawn from Sotheby’s archives and the vintage print collection of Beaton’s long-time assistant and printer, Geoffrey Sawyer, includes many previously unseen images, some from familiar shoots. The photographer would surely love the gallery’s salon chairs, upholstered with his trademark design of pink roses.
Beaton’s archives have been thoroughly trawled and the exhibition includes reminders of his signature style and his surprising aberrations — including the child clutching a doll in a hospital bed during the war (a cover for Life magazine) and his almost Constructivist abstract of the Nordic Pavilion at the 1962 Venice Biennale. They sit incongruously among Monroe, Julie Andrews, Garbo, Giacometti, Collette and Lucien Freud. Also in 1962, Beaton produced a modernist multiple of Harold Pinter fidgeting with his glasses but the most surprising inclusion is a vintage print of “Gilbert and George, 1974” (£7,500) in intimate embrace in the doorway underneath Beaton’s Kensington home. It suggests an illicit meeting, and is quite unlike their subsequent, detached public image.
Probably the best-known portraits involve Beaton’s fantasy sets featuring his sisters, Baba and Nancy, and neighbours such as the Sitwells, Asquiths and Astors. Their glittering outfits shot against reflective backdrops, under strong lights, would raise technical problems even today. Part of the appeal of his oeuvre is its celebrity element, and as today, that can detract from the technical and photographic skills behind them. But Beaton was never overshadowed by mere fame or sumptuousness.
Until 16 May. Information: 020 7839 7551, www.chrisbeetles.com.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
