BEARDSLEY, Aubrey Vincent

In the spring of 1892, Beardsley began a series of drawings in which the influence of Whistler and Japanese woodcuts was also apparent. By the summer of 1892, he produced such pen-and-ink drawings as Le D�bris d’un po�te (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), which marked the emergence of his mature style. Beardsley developed other styles, but that of this drawing is the key one and finds its fullest and most extraordinary expression in the 17 drawings he made for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (London and New York, 1894).

This illustration is from the book Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, published by J.M. Dent & Sons, London, 1894.

Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1415-1471) was an English writer, the author or compiler of Le Morte d’Arthur, the classic English-language chronicle of the Arthurian legend, published by William Caxton in 1485.

On his return to London, Beardsley found a new publisher, Leonard Smithers, who supported the unconventional and avant-garde projects with profits from erotica and pornography. With Smithers and the poet Arthur Symons, Beardsley launched a new magazine, The Savoy. The first issue appeared in July 1896 and, in addition to contributions from George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Max Beerbohm, and 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 changed to reflect his enthusiasm for French Rococo engravers.

On his return to London, Beardsley found a new publisher, Leonard Smithers, who supported the unconventional and avant-garde projects with profits from erotica and pornography. With Smithers and the poet Arthur Symons, Beardsley launched a new magazine, The Savoy. The first issue appeared in July 1896 and, in addition to contributions from George Bernard Shaw, W. B. Yeats, Max Beerbohm, and 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 changed to reflect his enthusiasm for French Rococo engravers. 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 year.

“Isolde” by Aubrey Beardsley is an illustration in the magazine Pan, volume 5, 1899. Pan (1895-1915) was a Berlin-based German arts magazine, published by the PAN co-operative of artists, poets and critics.

Beardsley offered a new understanding of the frame and pictorial plane, where the decorative line cutting across flat surfaces replace the three-dimensionality of reality.

In the spring of 1892, Beardsley began a series of drawings in which the influence of Whistler and Japanese woodcuts is also apparent and by the summer of 1892 was producing such pen-and-ink drawings as Le D�bris d’un po�te (‘The remains of a poet’), which mark the emergence of his mature style. The most remarkable feature of this is Beardsley’s ability to create extremely austere, beautifully organized compositions in which, with often minimal means, he nevertheless achieves vivid evocations of both physical and psychological facts. It is this tension between the picture as an autonomous visual structure and as a representation of some aspect of reality that makes him appear so modern. Le D�bris d’un po�te is probably a self-portrait referring to his hated clerking job, his literary ambitions, and his health.

In 1896, Beardsley completed eight large drawings illustrating Aristophanes’s bawdy Greek comedy Lysistrata. He used a development of the style of the Salome drawings, purified and refined and possibly influenced by Greek vase painting. Lysistrata was the last of his four major works of illustration, which are all the more astonishing for being so different from each other.

One of the eight drawings, the present black and white print, shows a woman wearing a flounced neglig�, slippers and a diaphanous dress that exposes her right breast. Her right hand shields her genitals, whilst with her left, she adorns a giant phallus with an olive branch. To the left stands a garlanded Priapic herm.

The collotype print in the Victoria and Albert Museum was made after Beardsley’s frontispiece illustration of 1896 to the Lysistrata of Aristophanes. It comes from the folio of reproductions made from Beardsley’s original drawings and published in about 1929. Utilising the expensive collotype process, these prints are much closer to the originals than the earlier line-block prints of the 1896 edition of the book or the various, mostly very poor reproductions included in subsequent pirated printings.

Aubrey Beardsley’s distinctive black and white drawings for Oscar Wilde’s Salom�, published in 1894, brought him extraordinary notoriety whilst still in his early twenties. His work for the periodical The Yellow Book confirmed his position as the most innovative illustrator of the day, but as a result of the hostile moralistic outcry that followed the arrest and trial of Oscar Wilde in early 1895, John Lane and other publishers panicked and dropped Beardsley. After that, almost the only publisher who would use his drawings was Leonard Smithers. Smithers was a brilliant but shady character who operated on the fringes of the rare book trade, issuing small, clandestine editions of risqu� books with the boast: ‘I will publish the things the others are afraid to touch’. Smithers encouraged Beardsley’s already growing interest in French, Latin and Greek texts of this kind and commissioned drawings to illustrate the Satires of the late Roman poet Juvenal and, most famously, Aristophanes’s bawdy satirical play Lysistrata.

This is an illustration to “Salome” by Oscar Wilde, published in “The Studio,” Vol. 1, No.1, 1893.

In 1907, John Lane issued a portfolio of designs that Aubrey Beardsley created in 1894 for the first British edition of Salome. Oscar Wilde’s play had been written in French in 1891 then translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas. Several of the images Beardsley submitted were judged to be too erotic to publish and either altered or omitted. All were, however, included in the 1907 set. The present image of Salom� preparing to kiss the severed head of John the Baptist appeared in the 1894 book opposite page 64.

Aubrey Beardsley’s distinctive black and white drawings for Oscar Wilde’s Salom�, published in 1894, brought him extraordinary notoriety whilst still in his early twenties. His work for the periodical The Yellow Book confirmed his position as the most innovative illustrator of the day, but as a result of the hostile moralistic outcry that followed the arrest and trial of Oscar Wilde in early 1895, John Lane and other publishers panicked and dropped Beardsley. After that, almost the only publisher who would use his drawings was Leonard Smithers.

This line block print depicts Salome, enveloped in a long black robe adorned with roses and with a clasp made of roses and extravagantly curled hair. She is in front of a high circular table on which lies the severed and bloody head of John the Baptist (Jokanaan). Salome grasps some of his hair in her right hand, so the head is tilted back and gazes down upon it. There is a pair of slippers, presumably Salome’s, in the lower right-hand corner of the image.

The print is plate XIV from “A Portfolio of Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings illustrating Salome by Oscar Wilde.” First printed in 1894, this print is from the second edition, published by John Lane, 1907, London.

In this tour de force of pen and ink work, Beardsley illustrates an early scene in Alexander Pope’s satirical masterpiece The Rape of the Lock, in which the heroine, Belinda, primps in her boudoir. Reflecting the poem’s emphasis on contrived rather than natural beauty, the drawing is densely layered with artifice. A view of an idyllic garden with a cupola-topped pavilion is glimpsed not through a window as it would first seem but on a folding screen. Bejewelled bottles litter the table, emblems of Belinda’s vanity.

The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic narrative poem written by Alexander Pope. One of the most commonly cited examples of high burlesque, it was first published in two cantos (1712); a revised edition in five cantos followed in 1714. The final form of the poem appeared in 1717. The poem was much translated and contributed to the growing popularity of mock-heroic in Europe.

This drawing in black ink depicts a stylised image showing men and women, many with elaborate coiffures, seated in an opera house. On the balcony, there are three seated women and two standing men. A programme that has fallen onto the floor lettered ‘TRISTAN AND ISOLDE’ is visible in the bottom right corner.

Beardsley had an obsessive interest in Wagner and avidly attended the London performances of the works. This depiction of the Wagnerian audience rather than the action of the opera, identified by the fallen programme as Tristan and Isolde, is one of the greatest masterpieces of Beardsley’s mani�re noire. This illustration was reproduced as no. III in ‘Four Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley’ in ‘The Yellow Book’, vol. III, October 1894, London.

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 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. When on 5 April 1895, Wilde was arrested on a criminal charge of committing indecent acts, the subsequent scandal also brought down Beardsley. He was sacked from the Yellow Book on 19 April 1895 by its publisher John Lane, who had also published Salome, and he temporarily fled to France.

The picture shows the cover of the first issue of The Yellow Book, 1894.