Cecil Beaton, The Art of the Scrapbook

In these pages, reproduced here for the very first time, the inner vision of the man behind the camera takes center stage. Composed of his own prints and of 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. The precursor to the “mood board,” 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.