Sentenced
to an early death by a tuberculosis diagnosis aged seven, Aubrey Beardsley
lived life at manic speed, racing to create a sensational art that would bring
fame, or at least notoriety, in his few adult years. But — and this is a joy of
Tate Britain’s superb new retrospective — he also lingered in the slow lane,
creating in malicious, insinuating, languorously detailed illustrations a
procession of hermaphrodites, transvestites, effeminate men, vampish women.
Engrossingly weird, they leap off the page in sharp, supple black lines within
ornamental settings so obscurely suggestive that Beardsley’s own publisher
would hold his drawings upside-down to screen for obscenities. Decorative
innuendo is, nevertheless, everywhere. Swagged curtains and hanging tassel
resemble male genitalia in “The Comedy-Ballet of Marionettes”. Intricate swirls
on a butterfly gown twist like a whip in “The Black Cape”. Phallic candlesticks
thrust into the night in “The Eyes of Herod”. Against unsettling visual jokes,
bodies metamorphose — nipples become eyes, elaborate hair-dos sprout devils’
horns — and gender dissolves. In “Salome” King Herod enters as a drag queen,
and Oscar Wilde is a feminised beaming moon face. “The Scarlet Pastorale”
depicts an orgy of cross-dressing murderers in harlequin costume and masks.
The Beardsley moment has come
around again. Tate begins in 1892 with the little drawing “Incipit Vita Nova”,
depicting a rebellious, misshapen foetus scowling at his mother — a full-lipped
Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale, sardonically subverted. The show ends with 1960s
Beardsley pastiches of sullen, androgynous black and white figures staring out
from LP covers for Procol Harum and The Beatles. Whenever gender is being
redefined — in the 1890s of the aesthete dandy and New Woman, in 1960-70s
counterculture, and now today — Beardsley’s “hard quick voice”, as a
contemporary described it, rises. In between he seems to be forgotten: this is
the first major museum exhibition since 1966, and follows the catalogue
raisonné published in 2016.
Like
many wistful 1970s teenagers, I discovered — and hoarded — Beardsley in “The
Peacock Skirt” from “Salome”: the cover image of WHSmith’s best-selling
multi-sized notebooks. Ignorant of Wilde’s narrative, I did not consciously
register the erotic games — the predatory, sinister, looming Salome; her effete
prey, the adoring Young Syrian with frilly puff sleeves, heaped curls, knobbly
bare knees. The point is that the transgressive allure of Beardsley’s
calligraphic sweep is evocative beyond the descriptive. It was, as Kenneth
Clark wrote in 1976, “catmint to adolescents . . . [with an] intensity which
communicated itself through every fold and tightly drawn outline of an
ostensibly austere style”.
What was formally fresh,
Beardsley knew, was “my idea of the value of the line”, set starkly on white
paper so that figures are suspended, menacingly and mysteriously, in space. In
“The Climax”, Salome floats ecstatically above a pool of black ink, caressing
the Baptist’s severed head; her Pre-Raphaelite coiling locks twist upward, in
opposition to his downward-coursing blood. In “The Dancer’s Reward”, her pale,
elongated hand grabs a fistful of his blood-soaked hair, dripping to the floor
in rhythm with her drooping black robe.
“I am
nothing if I am not grotesque” Beardsley boasted. And, accused of creating
hideous figures, “‘I find that most people are ugly. The sensual face is
dominant, and it is this face that I have drawn from life.” The visages
included his own — softly girlish with a long fringe, in “Self-portrait as Art
Editor of the Yellow Book”; a cringing baby hiding from nightmares under white
sheets beneath a black canopy in “Self-portrait in Bed”, inscribed, “les
monstres ne sont pas en Afrique”.
Beardsley’s
brilliance was to hold an eerie, feverish sensuality within masterly, rigorous
decorative patterning. His luck was to hit an instant when these designs could
be exploited to reach mass audiences. The invention of photomechanical line
block printing — drawings transferred photographically to a zinc plate from
which countless copies could be made cheaply without losing clarity —
transformed book production. Beardsley adapted his style to suit the process,
which reproduced both the finest lines and areas of flat black. “Le Morte d’Arthur”
(1892), assimilating the influence of his mentor Burne-Jones’s medieval damsels
and William Morris’s embellishing borders to his own sinuous linearity and deep
liquid blacks, raised the status of book illustration. By “Salome” the
following year, Wilde was complaining that the artist, with his “silver hatchet
face”, overshadowed the author.
Wilde claimed to have made
Beardsley; he certainly unmade him. After Wilde’s 1895 conviction for gross
indecency — the writer carried in court a novel with a yellow cover,
mistakenly reported as Beardsley’s risqué magazine — Beardsley, touched with
scandal, could find no work. He fled to Dieppe, met publisher-pornographer
Leonard Smithers and, aged 23, retreated to history: refined filigree
illustrations for Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”, inspired by “dreadfully depraved”
18th-century French copperplate engravings, and lush watercolours for
Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile Gautier’s romantic novel of the 1830s defying
gender expectations.
By 1896,
Beardsley was visibly ill and haemorrhaging. His refusal to go gently into the
night was were the outrageously explicit, boldly simplified drawings for
“Lysistrata”. Huge totemic phalluses of men frustrated by their women
withholding sex until they bring an end to war fuse sources from Greek vases to
Japanese shunga prints. Beardsley revelled in the liberation of the women,
exuberantly propositioning one another.
In an immersive mise-en-scène of
galleries painted Beardsley hues — Yellow Book sunflower, Mauve Decade lilacs
and purples, the bright orange of Beardsley’s Pimlico home, imitating the
interiors of Huymans’ louche hero Des Esseintes — the curators marvellously
unfold how Beardsley packed into five years the experiments, staging posts and
development of a career that would span half a century for many artists, from
juvenilia to “late” freedom.
At 20,
he was confident in his own language: “I struck for myself an entirely new
method of drawing and composition, something suggestive of Japan, but not
really japonesque. The subjects were quite mad and a little indecent. Strange
hermaphroditic creatures wandering about in Pierrot costumes or modern dress;
quite a new world of my own creation.” That world, so individual and peculiar,
came to define an era on the threshold, at once looking back to Victorian
models and peering tentatively towards Modernism. Beardsley helped form art
nouveau, and intrigued Diaghilev and Bakst; young Picasso examined at his work
in the 1890s.
Beardsley himself did not
outlive the decade. “A yellow skeleton in waterproofs fighting an umbrella on
the steps of the chapel” was seen in Menton in winter 1898. Weeks later,
Beardsley, aged 25, was dead, although he had converted to Catholicism, was
buried in the Protestant cemetery there. His final request was that “all my
obscene drawings” be destroyed.
Why
Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings continue to shock and delight. By Jackie
Wullschläger. The Financial Times , March 6, 2020.
A woman
who is naked except for fancy stockings touches what the artist calls her
“coynte” while a winged cupid teases her bottom with a powder puff. A wizened
man admires a young man’s elephantine erection, the glans as big as his bald
head – all delineated in sharp black outlines and shadowed with inky pools
against expanses of white. These are a few of the many explosions of obscenity
that a slender, pale young man created in the room he checked into at the
Spread Eagle hotel in Epsom, Surrey, in June 1896.
The
drawings Aubrey Beardsley completed in this suburban hideaway were to
illustrate the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes. The works, that
can be perused at your leisure in Tate Britain’s forthcoming exhibition, had an
incalculable effect on the birth of modern art. Beardsley’s eroticism would
soon be emulated all over Europe by revolutionaries such as Klimt, Schiele and
Picasso, while James Joyce summed up his impact on modernism in a double entendre:
“Kunstfull”.
That
isn’t generally how this unique artist is remembered, though. Beardsley is
pigeonholed as a preciously eccentric purveyor of late-Victorian erotica.
Rediscovered in the 1960s, when both Victoriana and sex were fashionable, he
hovers in the subconscious of British art. His name sounds posh, which adds to
the air of whimsy, but he was born into an economically unstable
lower-middle-class family in Brighton in 1872 and left school aged 16.
Beardsley
was an insurance clerk before being discovered by Oscar Wilde’s first male
lover, Robert Ross. This led to an artistic collaboration with Wilde, but his
importance goes far beyond the aesthetic movement. He put sexuality at the
centre of modern art for the first time, spreading his influence across Europe
– to Vienna, Paris and Barcelona – 25 years before surrealism.
Then in
1895, a year before he settled in at the Spread Eagle, Beardsley’s world fell
apart. Wilde was arrested and charged with gross indecency. The author’s love
for Lord Alfred Douglas became a scandal and anyone associated with him was
suspected of sodomy. Beardsley, at the age of 22, had been chosen by Wilde to
illustrate the printed edition of his disturbing drama Salome. Following that
success, he became art editor, designer and illustrator of the Yellow Book, a
bestselling magazine that brought avant garde ideas into respectable homes. But
when Wilde fell, its publisher John Lane sacked him. Beardsley had only
recently been able to give up his day job. Now he was vilified and
poverty-stricken.
The poet
WB Yeats, a friend of Beardsley, remembered him looking into a mirror shortly
after being sacked and saying: “Yes, yes, I look like a sodomite ... but no, I
am not that.” The man in the mirror was an exquisite dandy: when Beardsley
became a star in 1890s London, he started wearing suits in subtly contrasting
shades of grey with yellow gloves over his ethereally thin figure. Yet there is
no evidence that he ever went to bed with anyone of any gender – except maybe,
biographers speculate, his sister, Mabel.
And here
Mabel is, naked in a back room at Tate Britain. To get a sneak peak at
Beardsley’s drawings, I’ve visited the museum’s Prints and Drawings Rooms. The
frontispiece he designed for the collected plays of a now-forgotten writer
rests on a wooden stand. Mabel Beardsley is the nude at the far left, with
layers of radiating hair that look like they belong in a psychedelic poster.
She is looking ecstatically at Wilde, who stands beside her dressed as the
ancient wine god Bacchus. In front of them is a goat-legged faun.
Sex is
Beardsley’s theme and, unprovable allegations aside, it seems to have existed
for him only on paper. That makes him an artist for our time. Long before the virtual
and fluid sexualities of the 21st century, Beardsley created an erotic fantasy
world of shifting identities and infinite variety. His art is one long act of
self-pleasuring that reached its consummation on Epsom High Street.
His most
famous illustration for Wilde’s Salome is actually called The Climax. In this
intense symbolist design, Salome has persuaded her stepfather, Herod, to have
John the Baptist’s head cut off in return for gratifying his lust with an
erotic dance. She can now satiate her own lust for the Baptist – or at least
his lips. She floats in the air, seemingly with orgasmic joy, as black blood
pours from the fetishised dead head she embraces.
Does
that seem an over-explicit interpretation of this great fin de siècle image?
Well, you should see his rejected designs for Salome. Several scenes were
deemed too dirty by the publisher and he was asked to replace them with milder
versions. In his original drawing of The Toilet of Salome, a pageboy stands
naked holding a tray of tea things. Another near-nude youth sits with his hand
between his legs, masturbating as he gazes at the tray-carrier. Meanwhile,
Salome also masturbates.
Sex is
all in the head. That is Beardsley’s message, and the basis of the strange game
he played with Victorian censorship. The reason Salome first appeared in
English as a book, rather than on stage, was because it was refused a licence
by the Lord Chamberlain. Beardsley’s drawings mock the censor by dancing a fine
line between innocence and depravity. The publisher accepted his vision of
Salome’s love of a severed head, but rejected his drawing of her sitting with
her back to us in a dressing gown that’s open. What was the problem? She holds
a conductor’s baton.
Before
he got sacked from the Yellow Book, Beardsley filled the widely read magazine
with similar suggestiveness. His illustration A Night Piece shows a woman in a
long black dress and gloves and a thin black ribbon round her white throat
walking down a dark city street – she is, in Victorian parlance, a woman of the
night. In another picture, called L’Éducation Sentimentale, a young woman is
listening attentively to her older friend. Both have tough, pinched faces. It’s
not a sentimental but a sexual education set in a brothel.
Beardsley
pictured his audience as young women. On the cover he designed for the Yellow
Book’s publicity leaflet, his imagined female reader studies the latest volumes
outside a bookshop. She looks rapt, for Beardsley depicts reading itself as the
most subversive of pleasures. In his revised version of The Toilet of Salome,
she has Émile Zola’s novel Nana on her bookshelves – a “dirty French novel”, as
Lou Reed would later put it. The Yellow Book was yellow to evoke the typical
covers of sexy French fiction. Wilde wrote Salome in French, intoxicated by the
writings of Flaubert, Huysmans and Baudelaire. Beardsley was equally au fait,
regularly taking the boat train to Paris. French artists loved him back:
Toulouse-Lautrec ordered three copies of his illustrated Salome.
When
Beardsley checked in to the Spread Eagle hotel, he’d just come back from
Brussels, another capital of fin de siècle culture. There he probably
encountered the explicit art of Félicien Rops, including his 1878 gouache Pornocrates,
in which a pig is held on a leash by a naked woman wearing a blindfold and
black stockings. On the way back from the Belgian capital, Beardsley fell
seriously ill. It was to get out of London’s smog that he fled to Epsom. He had
known since he was diagnosed with tuberculosis when he was seven years old that
his lifespan would be limited. In the two years following his stay in Epsom, he
would travel to France in search of better health, dying at Menton on the
Riviera in 1898, aged 25.
As his
young life entered its premature twilight, he found sensual solace in
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, a play about love defeating death – or, in Greek,
Eros defeating Thanatos. Aristophanes wrote it during a murderous war between
Athens and Sparta that seemed to have no end. He imagines the women of both
cities refusing to have sex with their husbands to stop the war. Beardsley
turns this sex strike into an orgiastic triumph of lust over despair. Even as
they listen to a speech, his Greek women can’t stop fondling each other. A
Spartan woman gleefully taunts her lust-crippled husband with her body. Men
gather in a mass display of monumental members.
We tend
to analyse erotic art in terms of power, but for Beardsley it was quite simply
a matter of life and death.
Too
filthy to print – Aubrey Beardsley and his explosions of obscenity. By Jonathan Jones. The Guardian , February 28,
2020.
Aubrey
Beardsley (1872-1898) and his sister Mabel (1871-1916) were close as children,
a relationship that lasted until he died. Most likely, their connection
initially formed when their mother, Ellen, was forced by family circumstances
to work. While she went to various people’s homes to give piano lessons, the
sister and brother, only a year apart in age, were in each other’s company
daily. At the age of seven Aubrey had his first tubercular haemorrhage and was
sent to the more salubrious climate of Hurstpierpoint, where he attended four
terms at Hamilton Lodge school. Of his fourteen letters home between Christmas
1879 and October 1880, a dozen inquired about Mabel or sent his love, and two
were written directly to his sister, relating things he did at Hamilton Lodge.
Reunited at home, the children’s activities together resumed. Aubrey drew the
two of them boating, wading in a creek and walking in a park—his sister
proportionally taller and proprietarily holding his hand. At home they would
create that staple of Victorian children, a puppet theatre, and act in plays,
songs and charades for which Aubrey drew playbills. It is no surprise, then, as
evidenced by his letters, that Aubrey grew up regarding Mabel as his closest
friend and intellectual equal and that his view of women was largely formed by
the time they spent together as youngsters. Beardsley replays their
relationship and his own feminist attitude in his drawings of women.
The
women’s movement was escalating during the 1890s. After Florence Nightingale
returned from the Crimea in 1856, middle-class women began demanding the right
to take a university education and earn a degree, to learn a profession, make a
salary and be acknowledged as intellectually capable—in other words, to be
equal to men. When Beardsley began his career in London in 1892, these issues
were being vigorously debated in popular journals and newspapers. Although the
right to vote on the same terms as men would not be won until 1928, by the
1890s women had begun to go to bookstores alone and eat in restaurants with
female friends, gain more than a primary school education, and control their
own money. Moreover, the custom of a married woman chaperoning a young woman
when a young man visited faded (A Nocturne of Chopin, intended for The Yellow
Book; A Repetition of ‘Tristan und Isolde’, for The Savoy), although, according
to debates in magazines, most young women still did not possess latchkeys to
their homes, and when they walked out with a man, a sibling or a servant
accompanied them.
Beardsley’s
drawings of women show them breaking the rules of decorum in painting and
illustration that had been set by academic painters before Victoria became
Queen and during her reign by the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Instead of combing
abundant hair, idly gazing into a mirror, holding a book with its spine
directed towards genitalia or standing naked, bodies on view, Beardsley’s women
take tea or coffee with a friend in a restaurant (Black Coffee), read books
whose spines do not direct the eye to genitalia (Le Morte D’Arthur, Book XVIII,
chapter xiv; poster for Children’s Books; front wrapper, Leonard Smithers’s
Catalogue of Rare Books, No. 6), play a musical instrument other than (the
prescribed) piano (Le Morte D’Arthur, Book I, chapter xxvii, Book IV, chapter
xix); walk alone or with a female friend at night (A Night Piece; Les
Passades), become highly regarded actresses (Madame Rejane; Mrs Patrick
Campbell; Miss Winifred Emery); attend theatre with a young man without a
chaperone (Evelina at the Theatre) or with a clearly subordinate male following
her (Lady Gold’s Escort). Moreover, most drawings of his women for Le Morte
D’Arthur, 103 of 358 for the book, are alone and shown while reading a book or
a scroll, advancing on a path, tending bushes, carrying flowers, meditating,
praying, officiating in prayer or directly gazing at the viewer. None of them
drift along with a vacant expression or suggest subordination to another person.
In these ways the young artist countered typical views of women in book
illustrations and paintings. Although for a time they became collectively and
popularly, if somewhat derogatorily, known as The Beardsley Woman, Beardsley
reveals each one to be an independent, free to choose activities and pursue
them as she decides.
Beardsley’s
view of education for women is equally well defined. By herself, The Beardsley
Woman walks briskly to bookstores (poster for The Pseudonym and Autonym
Libraries). More than a few women prepare to choose or have already selected
books (front cover design for The Yellow Book, Vol. 2; front cover design
intended for The Yellow Book; prospectus for The Savoy Magazine). Others grasp
the chosen book, boldly taking the formerly forbidden fruit of male composition
and study (poster for Children’s Books; Bookplate of the Artist (Mr. Pollitt’s
Bookplate)). Beardsley thus emphasizes the value of books as he supports
educating women. Going as far as he could to contradict the standard picture of
young unmarried women without having his drawings refused for publication by
middle-class magazines, the artist portrays women like his sister Mabel,
leading her life without a father or a husband dictating where she will go,
with whom and at what time, or the content of her books.
Another
way Beardsley diverges from his English contemporaries is his rendering of
sexuality. When she is nude, The Beardsley Woman, young or old, stands tall and
dignified (Le Morte D’Arthur, Book I, chapter xi; Bookplate of the Artist (Mr.
Pollitt’s Bookplate); Lysistrata Haranguing the Athenian Women, for
Lysistrata). He overtly hints at sexual liaisons between women and men (front
cover for The Yellow Book, Vol. I) as well as acts of sadism and masochism
(Juvenal scourging a Woman; Earl Lavender). Intimations of women masturbating
appear in major texts (border for the List of Pictures for Salome; Salome on
Settle, or Maîtresse d’Orchestre; poster for The Spinster’s Scrip; Lysistrata
Shielding her Coynte and The Athenian Women in Distress, for Lysistrata). And
perhaps ignored or missed are his suggestions of sexual encounters between
women (title page for The Yellow Book Vol. I; poster for The Spinster’s Scrip;
Choosing the New Hat for The Savoy, No. 2). These depictions of women clearly
reveal Beardsley’s sympathy for women who decided to cut through the net of
social mores that restricted them.
To read
his letters is to relive his dependence upon hearing Mabel’s views of his ideas
and their close friendship, a bond that extended throughout his life. Offered a
place at Cambridge, for financial reasons Mabel was forced to refuse. Instead,
she began teaching, and her income enabled the family to live in better
circumstances in London. When an aunt died, with her bequest Mabel and Aubrey
leased a house together. She ultimately became an actress. Successful in
playing roles in plays for companies that toured England and other countries,
she likely satisfied an urge to travel independently. Nevertheless, Mabel was
with Aubrey when he died in Dieppe, on 16 March 1898, predeceasing her by
eighteen years.
Aubrey
Beardsley ‘s Feminism – an illustrated essay. By Linda Gertner Zatlin.
Yale Books Blog, May 6, 2016.
Aubrey
Beardsley followed the Pre-Raphaelite Movement as a unique artist, drawing on
many sources of inspiration to create his masterful black-and-white ink
drawings. Beardsley painted only two known oil paintings in his lifetime,
concentrating all of his talent and eager discipline towards his compositions
filled with designs, patterns of decoration, caricatures, flowers, dots and
bold curvaceous lines. He knew at a very young age that he would slowly die of
tuberculosis, an incurable disease at the time. His clear and uncomplicated
forms offset his wild subject matter of creatures of fantasy and caricatures of
decadence. Some critics believe that Beardsley, like the Pre-Raphaelites,
simply looks back to the past for inspiration. Originally following the
Pre-Raphaelite's medieval and early Renaissance styles and then turning towards
Baroque and Rococo influences. However, his attention to contemporary culture
shines through all of his work, in style and subject, giving his distinct
personal interpretation of Victorian life and culture.
Beardsley's
direct interaction with Sir Edward Burne-Jones provided an important connection
between the Pre-Raphaelites and Beardsley. Beardsley was still young and
impressionable when he first met Burne-Jones, who encouraged him to pick up oil
painting and medieval subject matter. The Le Morte d'Arthur drawings display
Burne-Jones's early inspiration of subject matter for Beardsley. Burne-Jones'
stained glass work could have also influenced Beardsley since his hometown
church in Brighton, St. Michael and All Saints where he grew up, featured
stained glass panels by Burne-Jones including The Flight into Egypt. Even
Burne-Jones oil painting Portrait of a Girl in a green dress could be seen as
an influence upon Beardsley's unique artistic medium choice. The extremely pale
face stands in sharp contrast to her dark green dress and the completely black
background of the painting.
The Le
Morte D'Arthur illustrations and many of Beardsley's other illustrations
reflect an obvious association between Beardsley and William Morris. Morris'
textile designs were gaining quick popularity in the late Victorian Period and
Beardsley would have most definitely been aware of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Morris' Peacock design echoes in both the peacock chapter heading for Morte
d'Arthur and in the cover design for Oscar Wilde's Salome. Although Beardsley
eventually became more influenced by James McNeill Whistler and Japanese
inspirations, the schematic designs of William Morris never completely exit his
later work. One still sees reminiscesment effects of Morris' design in Pas les
Dieux in which large flowers fill the overhanging fabric of the bed. Whistler
and Japanese art, especially Japanese prints, influenced Beardsley's
compositions by encouraging a flat spatial plane and a sparse use of detail.
Although the influences of Burne-Jones, Morris and Whistler have been studied
at length, there are many other important contemporary inspirations on Beardsley's
works.
Book
illustrations created the opportunity for artists to concentrate on literary
subject matter that excited and motivated their visual art. Illustrations, as a
medium of visual art, reached a broader audience than did paintings and
sculpture. Stories, plays and poetry, accompanied by their illustrations, could
be printed and reprinted to spread all over England, Europe and even into
America. Famous to the mid-nineteenth century, Pre-Raphaelite artists such as
Sir John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
illustrated the medieval subjects of Moxon Tennyson. Holman Hunt's illustration
of Oriana[The Dead Oriana] places the woman's dead body horizontally across the
front of the composition. The weary lover bends over, collapsing into the dead
body's face for a tragic final kiss. The man's ship sits in the background of
the illustration as a small reminder of the narrative of the poem, but the
moment of sorrow stands in the foreground of the piece. Beardsley delineates A Platonic
Lament from Salome with a compositional layout similar to Holman Hunt's
illustration. The dead man lies horizontal with the andogynous male figure
leaning in to touch the corpse's head. Beardsley selects to illustrate only
minimal aspects of the background in this scene, including a latticework of
flowers, a neatly trimmed tree and a caricatured cloud. Besides these few
elements, the background is bare. Beyond their dissimilar literary contexts,
these two works compositionally put focus on very similar moments. Both Holman
Hunt and Beardsley depict instances in which lust or love comes face to face
with death.
Some of
the perverse and fantastical pictures that Beardsley created to accompany Oscar
Wilde's version of the play Salome reflect an influence of the illustrations of
the Pre-Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Illustrations by Rossetti for his
sister, Christina's poem, "Goblin Market", play with the medium of
illustration to incorporate the sensations of magic and enchantment of the
poem. The illustration Golden Head by Golden Head depicts the two female
figures intertwined in sleep and perhaps in dream. The figures take up most of
the composition and are surrounded only by a flower-patterned curtain. In the
left corner of the composition, Rossetti draws a full moon with an illusion of
the goblins marching through the valley with baskets of fruit upon their heads.
Although not described in the poem, D. G. Rossetti places the goblins in the
moon to remind the reader of the omnipresence of the evil creatures that will
always be with the girls now that Laura has tasted their fruit. Analogously,
Beardsley illustrates The Woman in the Moon as the frontispiece for Salome as a
reminder of the magic and fantasy of the play. The male figures stand close to
each other with one man standing on the other's garment. The fabric falls
smoothly upon nothing, giving the figures no ground to stand on and no tangible
space to occupy. Just as in Golden Head by Golden Head, the two figures appear
connected in their spatial context that can only be defined by their encounters
with the moon. In Woman in the Moon, thin lines create a hairline, eyes, a
nose, a mouth and a flower. The moon looks towards the two people who stands at
eye-level, starring back at the moon. In Wilde's play, the moon takes on an
important personification, reflecting the characters' attitudes and predicting
their fates. Compositionally, both Rossetti and Beardsley successfully portrait
outlandish realities by placing their coupled figures claustrophobically close
to enchanted moons.
Although
Beardsley's illustrations share similar compositional layouts with the book
illustrations of the Pre-Raphaelites, Beardsley's consistent lack of shading
indicates other influences upon his style. The invention of photography greatly
changed the way people perceived reality and the arts. The black-and-white
photograph technology of the nineteenth century did not allow for colors and to
some extent emphasized sharp contras, de-emphasizing shades of gray. More important,
the application of photography to reproducing drawings used for book
illustration, permitted and encouraged large areas of black and white.
Beardsley's works do not attempt to create shading as opposed to the
cross-hatching used in Pre-Raphaelite illustrations. Beardsley sticks to the
black and white and sometimes dots to add a little delicacy to his sharp visual
scheme.
Photography
also created the ability to recapture reality almost effortlessly compared to
recreating reality through artistic drawings or paintings. With the invention
of photography, the artist of the late nineteenth-century now possessed the
freedom to create things that reflect their personal vision rather than
consuming their time obsessively trying to capture reality. Beardsley stated
that his work was "realistic" but understood his reality to be
different from most other people. He states, "Strange as it may seem I
really draw folks as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into
certain lines and angles" (Snodgrass p.39). Without color or shading,
Beardsley's lines and angles stand out as the dominant force of style in his
work.
Beardsley's
black ink drawings reflect a stylistic choice to minimize clutter and
unnecessary details in his works. It therefore seems curious that he would
include some of the extremely decadent details of the furniture in his drawings
such as seen in Belinda in Bed and The Battle of the Beaux and the Belles from
the "Rape of the Lock" illustrations. Belinda in Bed features a female
dressed in a oversized frilly nightgown outfit that covers her arms, shoulders
and head but not her breasts. Belinda sits propped up in the middle of a
gigantic pillow that lies against a gaudy headboard. Behind the headboard,
swirling patterns of garlands reflect equally garish decoration of the room. In
The Battle of the Beaux and the Belles, an angry female marches across the
center of the illustration, knocking over a chair with her huge skirt. The
chair's shape and dotted detailed pattern is reminiscent of the Furniture that
gave Victorian style a bad a name. Since the use of lavish and extravagant
details is featured in some but certainly not all of Beardsley's works, one
must understand the furniture as a satire of the extreme and over-the-top
Victorian culture.
The
intense attention to women's fashion also stands out as a conscious choice by
Beardsley to make decadent fashion a major motif of his paintings. The art
historian, Joan Nunn describes the fashionable trends of the 1870s to the
1900s, stating that "the earlier bid for simplicity and freedom was
overwhelmed by a profusion of puffs, ruchings, fringes, ribbons, drapery,
flounces with additional headings and edgings, and strange combinations of
materials and colours" (source). Beardsley accompanies actual fashion
designs from magazines into some of his illustrations and mostly composes his
female figures clothing combining a number of elements described by Nunn.
Beardsley's
illustration for Le Morte d'Arthur, La Beale Isoud at Joyous Gard, features the
woman's dress as the central subject. The female wearing the long cape-like
dress stands off to the left side, hiding behind a schematic grouping of
bushes. Black ink completely fills in the grass lawn and the trees orderly line
the background in a stripe-like fashion. These surroundings draw no attention
towards the space but rather leave the viewer to ponder the enormous and long
cape. The long cloth extends past the bottom edge of the canvas, as if to
create an illusion that the cape could extend forever. Little acorns or flowers
cover the fabric as eye-catching representations of nature that ironically
decorates the dress as opposed to filling the landscape natural to them. The
cape covers the female's entire body except for her left hand that sticks out
exposing a large tassel fastened to her wrist. The tassel and the cape both
look to be extremely heavy and burdensome upon the frail female figure.
The
Black Cape for the Salome series is another example in which fashion dictates
Beardsley's entire composition. The dress overwhelms the female figure, leaving
the viewer unable to properly distinguish where and how the female stands under
the dramatic curves of fabric. One hand reaches down in an attempt to open the
layered fabric of the skirt, but is unable to control her own outfit. Black ink
fills the entire dress except for a few dotted flower motifs along the bottom
skirt and upon the shoulder puffs. Her shoulder puffs are extremely exaggerated
with six layers of fabric covering each other like scales on a snake or wings
of a butterfly. Salome's thinly delineated profile sits under a large bulky
hat-piece that rests uncomfortably on her head. Upon close inspection the hat
piece appears to have an ear and mask. The exaggerated dress design and masked
headpiece create the possibility that this outfit is a fanciful butterfly
costume. A Beardsley scholar, Milly Heyd discusses the use of butterfly in
other Beardsley works and the use of a butterfly as Whistler's signature.
According to Heyd, the butterfly symbolizes independence and also has been
defined by the Oxford dictionary as a term used to describe "a vain
gaudily attired person" (122). Beardsley perhaps creates a complex image
of Salome in which she attempts to dress to reflect her independence yet her
attempt is in vain, as she ends up appearing ridiculously at the mercy of her
unmerciful dress.
Heyd
describes the claustrophobic and controlling nature of the dress in The Black
Cape: "Costume becomes a method of controlling the feminine personage, imprisoning
it by means of yet another layer imposed on an already layered fashion"
(120). Beardsley created the smothering outfit in The Black Cape without any
reference or description of such an outfit in the play. In contemporary
versions of the same subject by other artists, Salome wears transparent
garments that allow for her naked body to be exposed to the viewer. Gustave
Moreau's Salome of 1876 and Pierre Bonnaud's Salome both depict a sexually
charged female using her striking body to get what she wants. Conversely,
Beardsley's Salome's body is hidden under a "burlesque of nineties vogues
in dress...It could have offended no one except a reader who expected the
illustrations to have some connection to the text" (Weintraub, 72).
Beardsley's inventive illustration of Salome demonstrates his acute interest in
the powerful, reckless and extravagant Victorian fashion.
Beardsley's
own interpretation of the classic Cinderella story, appearing in The Yellow
Book of July 1894, clearly personifies the powerful role that fashion has
within a society. Beardsley changes the ending of the story to turn happy
children's fairytale into a murderous mess of fashion and jealousy. Beardsley's
version thus addresses the reader,
You must
have heard of the Princess C. with her slim feet and shining slippers. She was
beloved by the prince who married her but she died soon afterwards poisoned
according to Dr. Gerschovius by her elder sister Arabella, with powdered glass.
It was ground I suspect from those very slippers she danced in at the famous
ball, for the slippers of Cinderella have never been found since. [Quoted Heyd
123]
This
literary source, combined with the close inspection of La Beale Isoud at Joyous
Gard and The Black Cape, suggests that Beardsley believed that Victorian
fashion was a dangerous and powerful means to control and constrict women.
Beardsley
explicates the momentous role of cosmetics in Victorian culture through his
many depictions of "toilettes" or dressing tables. Similar to the
focus on women's fashion, Beardsley's toilette scenes resonate the wildly vain
Victorian culture of beautification. In Volume III of The Yellow Book, the
drawing La Dame aux Camélias (or Girl at her Toilet) features a girl's head
sticking out of the top of an exaggeratedly puffy coat with swamping sleeves
and a tail that falls down to her knees. Beneath the coat, the girl wears a
fancy patterned dress. She stares into a mirror that is only visible on the
very edge of the drawing. The mirror rests upon the girl's dressing table,
accompanied by two candlesticks and at least eleven different small boxes.
Beardsley drew the girl's toilet in great detail even though the floor of the
room in which she stands is not even delineated. According to one Beardsley
scholar, these small boxes all had distinct purposes,
each no
doubt represented its particular perfume...This little box contains Circassian
Rose Opiate for the teeth. Another, powder, scented Wood Violet or Mar?chal...
diamond- or cane-cut; silver-mounted vessels containing hair-washes, pomades;
restorers of all kinds; smelling-bottles; pin-trays in ruby, opaline, amberina;
fan-cases, silk-covered, silk-lined.
The
different boxes represented in Beardsley's toilette depictions do not reflect
any direct artistic influence but rather exemplifies Beardsley's intense
attention to the Victorian consumer culture around him.
All
these specific boxes represent contemporary trends in makeup and hair in
Victorian England. Although these trends could be considered excessive luxury
items, they play a very specific role in giving hope to women who wish to
improve their looks or women in fear of the transience of their natural beauty.
The Beardsley toilette images mock a consumer culture in which technology can
be mass-produced to feed the upper and middle classes' aesthetic interests. Max
Beerbohm made a strong commentary in his "A Defence of Cosmetics"
(text) in 1894 in which he justifies the excitement around cosmetics as a new
chance for the female face to be beautiful. Mocking romanticism, Beerbohm
claims, "Too long has the face been degraded from its rank as a thing of
beauty to a mere vulgar index of character or emotion...I have no quarrel with
physiognomy... But it has tended to degrade the face aesthetically" (117).
The woman described by Beerbohm is more of an object to be viewed than a person
to be understood. Beerbohm states that with makeup, "we shall gaze at a
women merely because she is beautiful, not stare into her face anxiously, as
into the face of a barometer"(117). Like the fashionable clothing of the
late-nineteenth century, the burst of growth in the makeup industry allowed for
women to cover their natural selves under a mask. The more the female covers
herself away physically with clothing, makeup and accessories, the more she
becomes a commodity or an object of the male gaze.
The
mirrors in Beardsley's toilette scenes generally appear on the edges of the
drawings so that the viewer is unable to see the reflections. Heyd hypothesizes
that Beardsley does this because he does not "wish to show the lady (or
society) her true face. Thus, suggesting or perhaps questioning our capacity to
look at ourselves in the mirror"(128). The reflections of the mirrors seem
ironically insignificant in these toilette scenes. The drawings focus on
showing the considerable efforts and processes of the Victorian women in trying
to become beautiful with the use of artificial products.
The
toilet scene reaches its most powerful state in Beardsley's poem "The
Ballad of a Barber." The poem describes the ludicrous amount of success
and power that the fictional hairdresser, Carrousel has upon his society.
Carrousel cuts the hair of the royalty, and by the time the reader meets him in
this poem, has perfected his skills down to a systematic scientific art.
Such was
his art he could with ease
Curl wit
into the dullest face;
Or to a
goddess of old Greece
Add a
new wonder and a grace.
All
powders, paints, and subtle dyes,
And
costliest scents that men distil,
And rare
pomades, forgot their price
And
marvelled at his splendid skill.
The
curling irons in his hand
Almost
grew quick enough to speak,
The
razor was a magic wand
That
understood the softest cheek.
At this
point in the poem, Carrousel encounters a young girl whose hair turns out to
more than he can handle:
Three
times the barber curled a lock,
And
thrice he straightened it again;
And
twice the irons scorched her frock,
And
twice he stumbled in her train.
His
fingers lost their cunning quite,
His
ivory combs obeyed no more;
Something
or other dimmed his sight,
And
moved mysteriously the floor.
He leant
upon the toilet table,
His
fingers fumbled in his breast;
He felt
as foolish as a fable,
And
feeble as a pointless jest.
Frustrated
by his failure to tame nature, Carrousel is suddenly taken over by a strong and
mysterious urge:
He
snatched a bottle of Cologne,
And
broke the neck between his hands;
He felt
as if he was alone,
And
mighty as a king's commands.
The
Princess gave a little scream,
Carrousel's
cut was sharp and deep;
He left
her softly as a dream
That
leaves a sleeper to his sleep.
He left
the room on pointed feet;
Smiling
that things had gone so well.
They
hanged him in Meridian Street.
You pray
in vain for Carrousel.
Carrousel's
murder of the beautiful Princess asserts the ultimate male authority over the
female body. The King's own daughter appears as an almost inanimate object to
be both played with and killed without any say in the matter. The murder also
represents the decadent's fear of nature and the natural. Third, because Beardsley's
constant health problems kept him in a state of waiting for his own death, he
could have seen his power over the arts as similar to Carrousel's -- a delicate
power that would be completely shattered at any time with his own premature
death.
In the two
Toilette of Salome illustrations, Beardsley places a shelf of books in the
foreground of the work. The viewer may easily read the books' titles, hinting
at their importance. The grouping of French books in the second version of this
illustration includes Zola's Nana, The Golden Ass, Manon Lescault, Marquis de
Sade, and Les Fetes Galantes. Heyde believes that these different sources
connect to some of the personal fear and paranoia of Beardsley's life (133). In
addition, by placing these very specific books into his illustration Beardsley
pronounces that, "life should imitate art and that the ideal is to live
life 'against nature'"(132). The artist interacts with his contemporary
audience by placing other forms of social thought into his work as an instructional
or referential addition. He also includes them to shock a middle-class audience
by citing works favored by the Aesthetes and Decadents.
The
fin-d-siècle in Victorian culture was an extremely decadent period, not only in
the fine arts, but in the popular culture. Aubrey Beardsley rises to the
surface of this culture, first imitating elements of contemporary
Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Burne-Jones and Rossetti, and finally finding
his own unique style of art and interesting interpretation of Victorian
culture. Beardsley died in March of 1898, at the young age of twenty-five. He
would have perhaps been shocked and pleased at his great influence on the art
of the twentieth century. A fine example of his immediate influence can be
recognized in the designs of the Glasgow Four. This group of designers and
architects included Charles Rennie Mackintosh, James McNair, Magaret and Fances
MacDonald. Mackintosh repeatedly used motifs of thinly outlined female heads
and flowers in his furniture designs that unfurl the similarities between his
works Beardsley's pieces such as The Woman in the Moon. In 1900, Mackintosh and
his wife Margaret were commissioned to design the Ingram Street Tea Rooms. The
two artists included very large frescoes for the Tea Rooms including Margaret's
The Queen May which is also commonly displayed in its gesso cartoon form that
was created for the fresco. A female head rises out of a tear shaped bubble
that is reminiscent of a puffy Victorian skirt. Thin clean lines and small
jewel-like flowers decorate the female's surroundings without given her any
space or time. This female figure not only mimics the shape of Beardsley's
figure inThe Peacock Skirt, but also mimics the Victorian woman's aura as seen
through the eyes of Beardsley. The woman stands inanimate, without emotion or
personality, hidden behind fabric and rouge as an object of decoration and pure
aesthetic pleasure.
Aubrey
Beardsley, The Pre-Raphaelites, and Victorian Culture. By Julie Flygare.
Aubrey
Beardsley – The Art of Being a Dandy | Tate
Watch
curator Stephen Calloway and performer Holly James Johnston sit down to tea to
discuss dandyism, drag and decadence, as revealed by the life of Aubrey.
Tate Britain
Exhibition Guide
