CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/6/2020

'Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things' is NEW from National Portrait Gallery, London

Before Warhol and his Superstars, there was British photographer Cecil Beaton and the Bright Young Things—a notorious band of irreverent, glamorous and seemingly carefree artists and aristocrats of 1920s and 30s London that gathered around his delirious orbit, awaiting their moment before his lens. The child of a suburban, middle-class family with aspirations for much, much more, Beaton began by photographing his sisters and his mother in flamboyantly theatrical settings, starting in 1914, eventually becoming the primary society photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair. Though he ran with arch socialites like Edith Sitwell, Anna May Wong, Oliver Messel and Stephen Tennant, his sisters remained consistent muses throughout his life, climbing, with his assistance, to the upper echelons of the social circuit. Pictured here is his sister "Baba," costumed by Beaton as Heloïse for the Pageant of Great Lovers charity ball, in 1927—just a few short years before World War II would end this brief period of privileged, uninhibited play.