Aubrey Beardsley
Thesis: Aubrey Beardsley gained popularity and stood out as a designer because of his sexual and grotesque subject matter in his illustrations. Despite the controversy and criticism that his artwork received, his designs and unique use of line influenced the look of Art Nouveau and the history of graphic design.
Aubrey Beardsley was born in the province of Brighton, England. He was brought up there, in genteel poverty, by his mother. By the age of seven, Beardsley was exceptionally literate and something of a musical prodigy and by ten. Evidence can show he had already had his talent for drawing. He later moved from Brighton to London in 1988 when he left school. On January 1st, Beardsley became an insurance clerk at the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance Company in the city the following year. At the age of only twenty, Beardsley gave up working ask a clerk when he was commissioned by the publisher J.M. Dent to make drawings for reproduction by the new photomechanical line-block process. In 1892 Beardsley began a series of his drawing early drawings, including the Morte d’Arthur, Bon Mots of Smith and Sherldan
Beardsley got his inspiration from many previous early works, drawings, and music works and those of the early1890s. In the spring of 1892, Beardsley began a series of drawings in which James McNeill Whistler and Japanese woodcuts influence. This is made apparent by some of his works by the summer of 1892. Most of these works are pen-and-ink drawings. Le Débris d’ un poète Julius Meier-Graefe observed that: `In one day Beardsley could be Baroque, Empire, James McNeil Whistler, Pre-Raphaelite or Japanese woodcuts. As Le Débris d’ un poète Julius Meier-Graefe called them, his seven styles are usually regarded as an acentric but highly individual way of working. But this visual eclecticism has its roots in English Aesthetic circles of the 1860s. By the early 1890s, an amalgamation of different styles and historical periods was regarded as a hallmark of modernity in New English circles. The photomechanical line- block process reproduced Beardsley’s drawings for Salome and Le Morte Darthur, and his binding designs were stamped on cloth covers by a single metal matrix. This was in deliberate competition with the elaborate, expensive, and rare handmade books of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press.
By the age of 17, Beardsley was already working on an enormous commission given to him in late 1892 by the publisher J. M. Dent, which enabled him to leave his job: the illustrations for Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur [sic], which was published in monthly parts and was completed in November 1893. The publication of the Bon-Mots of smith and Sheridan artists gave indications of his great gifts. Until then, that is, until he was about nineteen or twenty years of age, he had produced only a few drawings of any particular.
Early in 1894, Beardsley was appointed art editor of what he described as ‘a new literary and artistic quarterly,’ the Yellow Book, which aimed to publish artists and writers who ‘cannot get their best stuff accepted in the conventional magazine.’ The first issue appeared in April 1894 and, as had Salome, drew howls of rage from the press. This was as a response to the sexual and social provocativeness of Beardsley’s work and, as the illustrator of Salome, he was in this respect linked with Wilde, that other great provocateur of the time. On 5 April 1895, Wilde was arrested on a criminal charge of committing indecent acts. The subsequent scandal brought down Beardsley too.
Beardsley Collaboration with Oscar Wilde gave rise to Wilde Salome. Despite the controversy and criticism that this artwork received, it influenced the look of Art Nouveau and the history of graphic design. As Holbrook Jackson writes, the Salome drawings seem to sneer at Oscar Wilde rather than to interpret his play. Beardsley designs overpower the text not because they are greater but also inappropriate, sometimes even impertinent. The irrelevancy in the drawings brought a disagreement between Beardsley and wilder. For all the indecorum of their details, the pictures were conceived with severity, though. A pagan frankness about the images of the sexually confident women and the frustrated emulate men very different from the salacious voyeurism pervading the work of [FeÂlicien] Rops and another late nineteenth-century eroticism. Simon Wilson, calling Lysistrata Boyd, gives an in-depth analysis of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894) and Beardsley’s correlating illustrations. The essay argues that there is a ‘queer disproportion’ in Beardsley’s illustrations, which has hitherto been looked over. It focuses mostly on understanding the play and any underlying themes of homosexuality
The hostile reaction to Beardsley’s images of independent, sexually aware women first
seen at the New English Art Club was made public and more widely known in 1894, with
Wilde’s Salome and The Yellow Book’s publication. Almost immediately, Punch, the
barometer of middle-class attitude, lampooned Beardsley in a series of cartoons expressing
moral indignation about his drawings. Later in 1894, as Gertner Zatlin relates, the equally
conservative Westminster Gazette, which had led a campaign against the showing of
Degas’s L’Absinthe in London during the previous year, published a satiric racist account
about the purchase of a poster by Beardsley depicting a `joss’ (pidgin English for a Chinese
household divinity). Both the Franco-phobic fears of the conservative press discussed by
Haville Desmarais, in fascinating detail and their equally racist phobias about a
manifestation of the other, are subtexts for their unease and unexpressed fears. In their
minds, these images of lustful, masculine female bodies and soft, effeminate male bodies
with their hint of `deviant’ sexualities ± lesbianism, homoeroticism and masturbation ±
were disgusting. What could not be stated was described as grotesque and revolting and
the product of a `diseased imagination.’7 Only Beardsley’s line, which had a `muscular
tension and virile force,’ redeemed these images of female `deviancy.’
It may be argued that Beardsley was the most significant figure to emerge in English art in the last decade of the 19th century. In his first maturity from 1892 to 1894, he created a modern style that was wholly personal and, as he himself put it, ‘fresh and original.’ The content of Beardsley’s art was as startling as its style. His ostensible subjects were drawn from Classical literature and history, the Bible, and the social world of his own time. Still, his pictures express eternal human truths, given a grotesque force by Beardsley’s power own fevered psyche. In his lifetime and immediately after, his work became widely known and admired abroad and formed an influential part of the current of Art Nouveau and international.
Not were Beardsley’s illustrations ignored in a critical commentary on Wilde Salome play. Still, Beardsley’s intent was generally interpreted as impishly malicious, intended to broadcast Wilde’s criminal and socially vilified sexuality, a move in which Wilde and his publishers must have been complicit with.
A reading informed by a contradictory and absurd misunderstanding of Wilde’s life as a series of increasingly blatant homosexual exposures countenanced by Victorian society may well be argued as false. Until the crusading efforts of the half-deranged Marquess of Queensberry led to the catastrophic ‘revelation’ of what apparently had, according to this understanding of Wilde’s life, been plainly in sight for some time. However, another explanation for these drawings is available: Brian Reade cautions that ‘Beardsley had a habit of caricaturing his friends and acquaintances without real malice. And the notion he satirized the play and despised Wilde at the date of these drawings cannot be confirmed – especially as his earliest and gratuitous illustration to “J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan”. . . shows that originally he was fascinated by it.’ 13 Although the relationship between Wilde and Beardsley later soured, Beardsley’s admiration of Salome was such that he once hoped to be the drama’s English translator as well as its illustrator.14 Beardsley’s Salome illustrations are not evidently a satire or parody of the play or its author, but instead can be regarded as an offering, in pictorial terms, an interpretative reflection, not necessarily critical, on Wilde’s play. In Beardsley’s copy of the original French edition, Wilde wrote: ‘For Aubrey: for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance. Oscar.’ 15 Beardsley’s drawings can be read as offering his own return ‘inscription’ to Wilde, giving visibility to the play’s aspect that seems invisible to other viewers/readers. Havelock Ellis contained the first part of Beardsley’s ‘romantic novel’ Under the Hill, which, although never finished, remains a minor masterpiece of its period. At this time Beardsley’s style had changed to reflect his enthusiasm for French Rococo engravers, and his new manner proved particularly appropriate to his next major book illustrations, for Alexander Pope’s poem The Rape of the Lock, drawn in early 1896 and published by Smithers in a sumptuous edition in the summer of that same year. In the weeks before his death from tuberculosis on 16 March 1898, at the age of only twenty-five, Aubrey Beardsley began to divide his work as an illustrator into `good’ and `bad’ books. In his final letter, he `implored’ his publisher Leonard Smith `to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings. His friend Max Beer Bohm described his life as brief, tragic, and brilliant; Beardsley attained worldwide renown. His influence on an artist working on black and white in the United States in Europe are enormous.
References
Annotated Bibliography
Boyd, J. (2008). Staging the Page: Visibility and Invisibility in Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film, 35(1), 17–47. https://doi.org/10.7227/NCTF.35.1.4
Boyd gives an in-depth analysis of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894) and Beardsley’s correlating illustrations. The essay argues that there is a ‘queer disproportion’ in Beardsley’s illustrations, which has hitherto been looked over. It focuses mostly on understanding the play and any underlying themes of homosexuality.
Gallatin, A. (1949). Aubrey Beardsley. The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 10(2), 81- 84. doi:10.2307/26400475
Gallatin briefly reflects on Aubrey Beardsley’s artwork throughout the span of his career. The author speaks fondly of Beardsley and points out all of the artist’s most memorable works and skills. The article recalls the high points of Beardsley’s career as an artist and how it has proven to be influential, rather than offering critique or harsh analysis.
Gilbert, E. L. (1983). ‘Tumult of Images’: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome. Victorian Studies, 26(2), 133.
Elliot L. Gilbert reviews Oscar Wilde’s play, Salome, and Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations. He analyzes the artistic partnership between Wilde and Beardsley. Gilbert also argues that the combination of the two works is relevant, despite claims stating otherwise.
Gruetzner Robins, A. (1999). Demystifying Aubrey Beardsley. Art History, 22(3), 440–444. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.00166
Timpano, N. J. (2017). “His Wretched Hand”: Aubrey Beardsley, the Grotesque Body, and Viennese Modern Art. Art History, 40(3), 554–581. https://doi- org.argo.library.okstate.edu/10.1111/1467-8365.12275
Timpano analyzes Beardsley’s grotesque depiction of the human body and how the public responded to those images. The author compares his artwork with other artists, Gustav Klimt, and Julius Klinger. He also discusses the role of the human body in modern Viennese art.
Wilson, S., & Barton, L. (2003). Beardsley, Aubrey. Grove Art Online. Retrieved 4 Oct. 2020, from https://www-oxfordartonline-com.argo.library.okstate.edu/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000007109.
Wilson and Barton provide Aubrey Beardsley’s biographical information and a timeline of his career as an artist.
Wootton, D. (1998). An Unwholesome Standard. Art Book, 5(4), 8. https://doi- org.argo.library.okstate.edu/10.1111/1467-8357.00109
Wootton explores two different sides of Aubrey Beardsley and how they influenced his work. He compares his early sexual and highly controversial works with the work he created in his later years, which was much more wholesome. He discusses Beardsley’s religious beliefs and how they completely changed his artwork.
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