Richard Meyer. . ."Secret Histories of Art"

Last spring, I was awarded a faculty travel grant by the Center for Feminist Research at USC to study photographs and collages by Cecil Beaton in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. My research on Beaton forms one chapter of a book entitled Secret Histories of Art which focuses on private, underground, or otherwise restricted visual imagery produced in the United States and England between 1920 and 1965.

In August 2002, I spent a week in London, during which time I pursued sustained research on Beaton in the Print Room of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the Print Room (which is open to the public free of charge), visitors may study any object from the museum’s vast collection of works on paper (including photographs, drawings, posters, and ephemera). The visual and archival highlight of my trip was the opportunity to view first-hand a Beaton photocollage entitled Brides, Bodybuilders, and Ladies in Edwardian Dress, and a Gentleman in the Apartment of Monsieur Charles de Beistegui (see image). Beaton created the collage for a private scrapbook which was never exhibited during his lifetime. By placing this private collage within the context of Beaton’s public work as a fashion and society photographer, my research will trace the links among interior decoration, anti-modernism, and male homosexuality in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Drawing on this research, I delivered a lecture entitled “Cecil Beaton and the Bad Dream of Modernism” in October 2002 in the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Columbia University. My current plan is to expand the lecture and publish it as an article prior to its inclusion as a chapter in Secret Histories of Art. I wish to thank the Center for Feminist Research for its generous support of my work and, more broadly, for its ongoing commitment to the critical study of gender and sexuality.