AUBREY BEARDSLEY at the TATE BRITAIN on the 20th August 2020

 

AUBREY BEARDSLEY at the TATE BRITAIN on the 20^th August 2020

 

Aubrey Beardsley was born in Brighton in 1872.  Beardsley lived his life with an awareness that he would not live long for he suffered from tuberculosis which was at that time incurable.  Beardsley was not the only artist to have contracted the illness.  Poets and composers like John Keats, Frederic Chopin and Carl Maria von Weber all died from TB.  The German novelist Thomas Mann wrote a study of the treatment of TB in his novel Die Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).  Beardsley seems to have been determined to perfect his art which was reduced to the simplest materials and means, black ink on paper (there are some few exceptions where he uses colour).  His work is condensed, reduced in size and scale, yet Beardsley’s imagination was expansive, his creativity seemingly inexhaustible, playful, and boundless.  Significantly, there is no trace of self-pity to be found in Beardsley’s art.  Beardsley seems comfortable with a feature of his life that might have crushed weaker people, the foreknowledge that he would not live to grow old.

Tate Britain’s exhibition is inherently and predictably biographical, telling the story of Beardsley’s life in chronological order yet also dwelling on early influences and later legacy.  After some early successes when he published some drawings in the school magazine, for instance, Beardsley began work on his first major commission.  This was composed of drawings for the Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Mallory (1892) for the publishing house J.M.Dent & Company.  This was a substantial series of prints.  The sample drawing that clinched the deal was The Achieving of the Sangreal (1892).  Dent declared it ‘a masterpiece’ and it was used as the frontispiece for Volume II.  Beardsley’s early influences included the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer.  Beardsley references Durer’s work St Jerome in his Study (1513-14) in his print How la Beale Isoud Wrote to Sir Tristram (1893). 

 

This early work demonstrates the first attempt by Beardsley to find an authentic and personal style.

Like many artists of the time, Beardsley was also interested in Japanese prints.  These had begun to be appreciated in the west from the 1860s onwards when Japan began opening to the west both politically and economically.  The exhibition traces Beardsley’s interest in Japan and references the work of Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798-1861) and his work A Maiden dancing at the Dojoji Temple (before 1861, woodblock print on paper).  Flat decorative patterns, reduced perspective and stylised imagery typify Kuniyoshi’s work, traits which are all present in Beardsley’s prints.  Of course, Beardsley work is also reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.  Isoud, for instance, strongly resembles Jane Morris.  In fact, it had been the Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones who recommended Beardsley to the Westminster School of Art.  Beardsley and his sister Mabel had sought out Burne-Jones.  Eventually brother and sister acquired a house in Pimlico and lived together (leading to malicious gossip without evidence that Beardsley had given his sister a child which she conceived and then aborted.  This was the kind of ugly slander that followed Beardsley around throughout his life and posthumously too.).  Burne-Jones later complained that Beardsley had shown ingratitude, comments possibly summoned by Beardsley’s association with Oscar Wilde.

Gradually Beardsley was becoming part of the Aesthetic Movement which had been initiated by the Irish writer, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).  The Aesthetic Movement had been a reaction to the prevailing orthodoxy of naturalism, it gave birth to the fin de siècle theory of aestheticism or ‘art for art’s sake’.  Beardsley’s and Wilde’s destinies were intricately bound together.  Some of Beardsley’s best work were his illustrations for Wilde’s play Salome (1893).  For instance, Beardsley’s illustration The Dancers Reward (1893) where Salome gazes into the listless, dying eyes of Iokannan.  Somehow the two figures seem to merge.  In, The Climax (1895).  Salome floats in mid-air, gazing into Iokannan’s (John the Baptist’s) eyes, declaring "J'ai baisé ta bouche Iokanaan, j'ai baisé ta bouche" ("I have kissed your mouth, Jokannan, I have kissed your mouth.")  Iokannan’s blood drips down into the waters below, nourishing a lily which shoots upwards, symbolising his purity.  Intriguingly, Beardsley often draws a signature caricature of Wilde and leaves it for the viewer to find hidden among the details of the image he has summoned up.  The decadent and erotic themes of Beardsley’s art are echoed in Wilde’s Portrait of Dorian Gray and J.K.Huysman’s A Rebours (Against Nature, 1884).  Huysman’s novel had been a reaction to the pervasive doctrine of naturalism in literature which had been pioneered by, among others, the French novelist Emile Zola.  It is referenced in Wilde’s novel and reference to it was brought up at Wilde’s trial. 

Wilde’s fall from grace had a decisive effect on Beardsley’s life.  Although it appears that Beardsley both tolerated and sympathised with alternative lifestyles, he was not a follower of Wilde but merely a member of his circle.  This did not matter because Beardsley was soon to be convicted, guilt by association, and the sentence?  Beardsley lost his job as art editor of The Yellow Book, a journal which typified the fin de siècle, in other words, the last decade of the nineteenth century with its twin doctrines, aestheticism and decadence.  These movements were synonymous with Wilde and Beardsley.  Although many great names of literature such as W.B.Yeats, Henry James and George Gissing, had written for The Yellow Book, it was Beardsley’s drawings that had summarised the journal and its cultural impact. 

Even more salacious were Beardsley’s privately printed edition of illustrations for Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata.  Works like The Examination of the Herald and The Laecedomonian Ambassadors (1896) underline Beardsley’s outrageous imagination.  In the former work, the herald has an unfeasibly large phallus while the magistrate has a correspondingly scrawny and tiny one.  Presumably, the works would have upset public morality, but they are extraordinary in terms of their defiance of convention and their outrageous imagination.  Beardsley was ahead of his time, but the burden of TB meant that he was of his time.  Beardsley moved to the French riviera in 1897 and died there a year later after converting to Catholicism.

The exhibition examines Beardsley’s legacy.  For instance, Klaus Voorman’s line drawing and photo collage for The Beatles 1967 album Revolver, inspired by Beardsley’s line drawings.  Beardsley is an exciting artist who clearly belonged to the psychedelic era and still deserves our attention.  This exhibition is an excellent introduction to his work, best viewed alongside Mark Gatiss’s excellent BBC documentary, Scandal and Beauty.

 

Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, August 2020