The Beaton track

Cecil Beaton, The National Portrait Gallery (Until May 31)

Cecil Beaton's iconic photographs bequeath to us a unique vision of 20th century society. His span of work - 1920s to 1970s - includes the hedonistic Thirties, the aristocrats of Hollywood and the House of Windsor, and the princes of Sixties and Seventies pop.

This splendid exhibition features only 150 images, but cuts through a singular time-line of popular history. In the earliest, most lavish photos, Beaton's subjects are memorably decadent, frozen in high-camp constructs of fame. His self-portraits reveal that the same game was played on both sides of the lens.

Beaton's work always reflected trends in art and photography; his multiple images of Harold Pinter and TS Eliot recalled Man Ray's experiments. In contrast to his early decorativeness, though, the rarely seen war photographs mark a change in style, producing serious, realist portraits of military officers, politicians and royals.

He never resisted adding glamour to incongruous situations, and wartime serge and canvas offered new challenges. With Air Vice-Marshall Sir Arthur Conningham at his tent in the Egyptian desert (1942), Beaton drew on the webbing and the strong desert light, while Conningham posed like a bright young thing at a garden party. But a wounded girl in a Newcastle hospital made the covers of Illustrated London News and Life magazine through its honest simplicity.

Apart from the mystery and photogenic qualities of Beaton's subjects, the photographer's intuitive sense of design always added impact to his pictures. His sophisticated use of graphics is visible in the 1922 portrait of his sister Baba, posed in profile against wooden beading. Greta Garbo (1946) utilises vertical rows of tacks and a curving chairback to highlight that iconic oval face. Beaton loved mirrors, but for Marlene Dietrich in 1935 he cheated - posing her, head to head, with an similar mannequin.

After the war, Beaton returned to his passion for lavish costume design and sets (most notably for My Fair Lady), while his portraits became simpler - dramatically lit and highlighting the character in faces. His session with Marilyn Monroe in a New York hotel room was unusually personal, lazy and sensual, and evidence of the playful dynamic between them.

This first exhibition since Roy Strong's 1968 Beaton Portraits is not huge, but its timescale reminds you of Beaton's longevity as a documenter. In our sophisticated era of image-making, portrait photography (as revealed elsewhere in the gallery) tends to be literal and realistic. It is delicious to be briefly submerged in the luscious dreamworld of Beaton's early work, while also being reminded of his place in the history of our construction of fame.