‘Cecil Beaton, The Art of the Scrapbook‘, is a book documenting the musings behind the legendary photographer, with newly revealed images of his own private sketchbook. Beaton’s personal scrapbooks contain clippings and images of society girls and magazine shoots. Having stated that ‘He lived by his eyes’, these books were a way to direct his creative energy and record ideas and inspirations. Beaton sold his archive of scrapbooks to Sotherby’s before his death in 1980, but it was not until 2010 that Martine Assouline directed a new coffee table book, with 8,000 scans, to be published.
The publisher, Assouline states that the book is; “Composed of his own prints and clippings from magazines, newspapers, and playbills, the pages are an instructive record of his creative process….To flip through the pages is to enter a fabulous and surreal party where Tallulah Bankhead rubs shoulders with a bust of Voltaire and a portrait of Stravinsky; where Beaton’s first trip on the Queen Mary coincides with Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Beaton’s scrapbooks allowed the artist to play with pictures he had taken (and perhaps those he wished he had) in the dreamspace of artifice that was always his favorite setting.”
Audrey Hepburn
Francis Bacon
Lucian Freud
Jackie Onassis
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles
