Imperial War Museum 12 noon December
There is a wonderful exhibition until the end of this month at the Imperial War Museum of all places - not one of my favourite places I am bound to say. But it is beautifully set in an otherwise ugly part of south London, near Lambeth North underground station.
Cecil Beaton was renowned in the US the Academy Award winning designer of the movies Gigi and My Fair Lady. And we in the opera world were grateful to him for his Turandot at the Met, which was subsequently reproduced with some changes at Covent Garden where I saw it with Birgit Nilsson and James McCracken in 1967.
The exhibition at the Imperial War Museum does more than chronicle his remarkable work as an official photographer in World War 2 - we also see his life as an artist before and after the war and thus get a more complete picture of Beaton the man and the transforming nature of his work in 1940-45.
We also see the contribution his visit to China made to his Turandot designs!
There is not much time to see this before it closes on January 1 - but try to see it of you are in London. I think you will enjoy it - a side to an exotic figure in the history of British fashion and social life that you may not have known about.
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