Cecil Beaton was a multihyphenate guy — photographer, set designer and Academy Award-winning costumer. But the Englishman was also quite the avid scrapbooker, as evidenced by the release of Assouline’s “Beaton: The Art of the Scrapbook,” which will bow at a party on Monday at The Pierre hotel. Forty-two of his scrapbooks, archived by Sotheby’s London, have been condensed into an impressively rich 392-page monograph. “The connection between his own work and what he picked out in the scrapbooks,” says James Danziger, who published his own Beaton biography in 1977 and wrote the introduction, “is that they’re both really about the impact of the subject on you.”
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Make that “subjects,” plural, because his scrapbooks featured a miscellany of material, clipped from glossy magazines, playbills and daily newspapers from the Thirties to the Sixties. There are images of Gloria Swanson and Sophia Loren mixed in with Christmas cards from the royal family and anatomical illustrations of blood vessels. A photograph of Frida Kahlo faces a scene from the 1937 film “Conquest.” News of the Kennedy assassination follows shots of the Beatles. Unlike Beaton’s diaries, which were published in 2003, the author notes that these scrapbooks reveal a more flattering side of the man. “The diaries were more acerbic; Beaton could be sharp-tongued,” he explains. “But in the scrapbooks, we see all the positive attributes of someone who was a visual person. It’s all about admiring art, style and people. It’s about pleasant recollections.”
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And as for these once-personal and private scrapbooks going public, what would Beaton have thought? “Anybody who takes the time and trouble to make scrapbooks like those would be happy that they lived on after them,” Danziger continues. “At some point, you expect them to make their way out.”