–The Garden Museum in Lambeth, London, has opened an exhibit called “Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party.” This was described in a recent article in The Observer by Vanessa Thorpe:
…The strong horticultural influence on Beaton’s work is recognised now in an exhibition, Cecil’s Beaton’s Garden Party, running at Lambeth’s Garden Museum from [14 May], and it celebrates the importance of both the dilapidated properties that the great photographer and designer renovated in south-west England.
The advanced degree of dereliction of, first, Ashcombe House, and then Reddish House, were in fact strong selling points for any self-respecting Bright Young Thing of Beaton’s generation, and the gardens quickly became romantic stage sets for his social gatherings.
The most renowned of Beaton’s fancy dress entertainments was a fête champêtre of 1937, for which he designed the majority of the costumes. Garlands of net flowers bedecked the gowns, while a trademark trail of ivy ran down the front panel of the pale pink satin dress which is now on display in Lambeth, made for the actor Wendy Hiller. Other guests wore Dalí-inspired rabbit masks and coats smothered with roses or, perhaps, a shepherdess costume. The aim was to look as if the disguise had been thrown together quickly, but with great aplomb. So foil was better than real silver, and cellophane, newly invented, was better still…
The article concludes with this:
…Beaton’s near-contemporary, the novelist Evelyn Waugh, who as a schoolboy had bullied him from the safety of the year above, also viewed the English aristocracy with the fascinated amusement that came with a little distance. Waugh’s response was to create Brideshead Revisited, while Beaton orchestrated his flamboyant, masked parties and revelled in the counterfeit splendour of the theatre. Both men managed to seed an enduring vision of the indolent rich that still holds sway. It was certainly there, for instance, in the fancy dress debaucheries of the hit film Saltburn.
Among the standouts of the Garden Museum show are the dress Fonteyn wore in the ballet Marguerite and Armand with Rudolf Nureyev. The well-known publicity stills from 1963 show the prima ballerina in a white tutu with a garland of white flowers in her hair. But the actual stage costume is black net with dark velvet bodice topped with silk roses on the shoulders.
In an exhibition like this the scenery clearly matters, so Emma House asked the Beaton enthusiast Luke Edward Hall to decorate the display rooms with 1940s-style, freehand sketches of lavish canopies of flowers. In one corner visitors will also meet Hall’s full-length outline of the casually elegant Beaton, looking on, paint palette in hand, admiring his own work.
The exhibit continues through 21 September. Details are available at this link.
–On the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Anthony Eden’s premiership, The Oldie has reposted what was the final interview of his wife, the former Clarissa Churchill. This was conducted by Hugo Vickers in 202o, the year before she died. Here is the opening paragraph:
At the age of 98, Lady Avon was awarded a distinguished prize by the Oldie Magazine – The Oldie Who has seen it all Before and Worse Award.
She was surely the last intimate survivor from the world of Winston Churchill, Evelyn Waugh, Lord Berners, Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, Nicolas Nabokov, Edith Sitwell and Orson Welles. I could list dozens more. When she was young, she had the exceptional advantages of being beautiful, extremely intelligent and well read. Being a Churchill, by name if not by temperament, and niece to Winston, she grew up surrounded by the most interesting men and women of the day. She studied philosophy in Oxford, was tutored by Isaiah Berlin, A.J. Ayer and Lord David Cecil. She worked for Alexander Korda, and George Weidenfeld in the worlds of film and publishing…
The entire article is available here.
—The Harvard Crimson, for no particular reason, has reposted the text of a review of Christopher Sykes’ biography of Evelyn Waugh. The review is dated 4 February 1976 and is written by Paul K. Rowe. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Virginia Woolf once divided writers into two categories: those she would have liked to have dinner with, and those with whom she would have preferred not to. Now that Christopher Skes has written what will remain for the foreseeable future the definitive biography of Evelyn Waugh, it is clear that Waugh falls into the disinvited category. The man was a social sadist; he drove a war cripple into psychoanalysis in the course of a single weekend by verbal brutalization. Waugh knew it himself. “Without supernatural aid,” he said, “I would hardly be a human being.”
Sykes’ book is an unusually stereoscopic one, scrupling not at all about boundaries between “biography” and “criticism.” His book belongs to a genre which, he recognizes, is currently out of fashion–the critical biography. “A convention has grown up,” he notes in the kind of obiter dictum that grows more frequent as the book progresses, “that biography and literary criticism are separate activities which must never be associated.” The biography, certainly, is all there. But I, at least, would have liked even more lit crit than Sykes provides. There is precious little serious comment on Waugh, and when Sykes does turn to the nuts and bolts of criticism he proves himself both competent and perceptive.
Sykes tends to tell his story from inside; he knew Waugh well and, was, indeed, among his closest friends in the later years. He figures, under various disguises, in several of Waugh’s novels. On the whole this problematic relationship between author and subject is exploited only for good reasons. Sykes’s indentifications of the real identities of Waugh’s characters (and almost all his books have a large dose of roman a clef in them) are much more convincing as he makes it clear that he knew them all personally. The only area of restraint caused by his close relationship is Waugh’s marriage, a subject on which he sheds almost no light, aside from denying that Laura Waugh was a “doormat.”…
The entire review can be accessed at this link.
