"Too, Too Vomitous"

While visitors at the new French Museum (see above) admired the portraits of beautiful women by a century of great French painters, another more specialized showing of lovely ladies was on view last week. The Delphic Studios showed photographs and water color drawings by the latest smartchart phenomenon, Cecil Beaton of London, under the auspices of Mrs. Marie Sterner, able Manhattan dealer, who found the exhibition not quite suitable for her own gallery. Photographer Beaton is one of those sensitive, talented, emotional and precocious young men who seem increasingly numerous in Britain, traditional mother of the bulldog breed. Long and lank, with luxuriant curling eyelashes, he gives an impression of terrific world weariness for a youth of 25. This impression is rapidly broken down by the exultant whoops with which he greets his friends and acquaintances in theatre lobbies and other public places. Broadwayfarers were still repeating last week a typical Beaton bonmot applied month ago to a famed, garish nightclub personality : "My dear, how too, too vomitous!" In his suite at the Ritz last week orchidaceous Mr. Beaton received reporters anxious to learn a few facts about a young man who has in the past three years sketched or photographed most of the famed beauties of Britain and the U. S., has written dozens of chatty articles for international smartcharts. Attired in orange-&-white pajamas, dressing gown of black-&-white corded silk, he readily admitted that he had been to Harrow and Cambridge, had been drawing and painting ever since he was seven, took up photography seriously at Cambridge where he had a studio. Photographer Beaton's father is "something in The City."*

After graduation Son Cecil worked in his father's office for three months, left with a promise that he would always make more with his pen and camera than he could at an office desk. To blunt questions as to what his father's name is, what he does in The City, Photographer Beaton blushed, "My father is Scotch," said he. "His business is wholesale--something to do with coal and lumber. Oh dear, this is frightfully embarrassing." When Cecil Beaton was ten, the Scotch-wholesaler father presented him with a 3A folding Kodak. Cecil has used it ever since--the same one. Pictures which he skillfully took with it interested the editor of the Sketch. He gave an exhibition, received commissions at $500 apiece (post-Depression price:' $300) to do society portraits, was imported to the U. S. by Publisher Conde Nast who recently gave him an exclusive contract for written articles, reproduction rights to all photographs. Mr. Nast made Photographer Beaton a present of a new, expensive camera, "which he grudgingly uses, still clinging to his Kodak whenever possible. Lately Cecil Beaton published an elegant pink-&-white quarto entitled The Book of Beauty, reproducing many of his more successful portraits of British and U. S. beauties, accompanied by brittle little pen-&-ink sketches and paragraphs. The Beaton method apparently is to make a highly nattering photograph of a lovely lady in an exotic attitude: lying on her back on the floor; peering from a bunch of balloons; reflected in a mirror. To this is added a not nearly so flattering drawing and a slightly malicious little essay. The motif of many of his photographs and all of his drawings is charmingly and stuffily Edwardian, the epoch which is presently amusing England's Bright Young People. Photographic effects which he loses by scratchy, amateurish retouching are regained by cleverly arranged profusions of artificial flora, drapery, gimcracks, for Photographer Beaton is admittedly inspired by the early fashion pictures of Lallie Charles in the Sketch and Tatler. Beauties immortalized by Photographer Beaton are apparently chosen for their news value, ranging from angular Margot Asquith, homely Poetess Edith Sitwell (posed as a corpse, clutching a bunch of lilies) and Novelist Virginia Woolf (who protested in the London Spectator at being Beatonified without permission) to such obvious subjects as Dancer Tilly Losch, Cinemactress Marion Davies, and Photographer Beaton's two pretty sisters, Baba and Nancy, London debutantes.

*"The City," technically the original City of London, is London's mile-square business and financial district.

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