ART
Scarfe on Beardsley
FIRST I would like to say that I think Aubrey Beardsley, whose magnificent exhibition opened at the Victoria and Albert last week, to have been a brilliantly original mind and to say that I do not see his parallel today.
Aubrey Beardsley seems at first glance to be a designer. An excellent, fastidious artist who in- stinctively knows the shape of the human figure, the way in which cloth folds and falls around forms. He knows exactly how to catch the eye with a swooping line or a daring black and how to create a feeling of menace with these methods of technique.
In general his drawings are very small, very precise. His outlines are of a constant weight. He employs almost every texture possible within the scope of black and white. His drawings have no lightness or darkness, therefore his objects throw no shadows; they seem to be airless and there is no feeling of space. Even in those illustrations that have a landscape behind the figures, trees which he draws to a smaller scale because they are in the distance, seem to exist on the same frontal plane as the rest of the picture. That is because he has valued them not as objects in the distance but as a black or grey colour value in relation to the other parts of his design. I long for some release within these drawings; their precision is suffocating and his attempts to make a physical object into an abstract figure are some- times contrived in a fascinating, but at the same time pointless, way.
Good drawing and painting contains a mar- shalling of facts, a design, a simplification of parts, in order to give the whole a clarity and as immediate an effect as possible. But there is a point where style- takes over completely and the artist becomes a slave to it, instead of it serv- ing him. This is the fate of many artists; they create a style, a technique or language, within which they can express their own world—and suddenly find that it has become a limitation and a bore. Of course, by the act of putting line to paper, artists commit themselves to using a tech- nique. But in someone like Beardsley it is almost as though it is an act of masochism to impose a set of rules and limitationt; the need perhaps to have a master. However, great works of art seem to succeed despite or because of this yoke. The early Italian painters Piero della Francesca and Botticelli, for example, broke the bounds of their self-imposed prison to universal expression. It takes courage to break these bonds and throw oneself in at the deep end again.
Sad though Beardsley's early death was, it seems that we had seen all that was possible with- in the range of his mannered expression. Perhaps he would have had the courage eventually to free himself. Certainly all those drawings that he executed outside this style, that is sketches from life in pencil, pen drawings and even the occasional oil painting, have little quality at all. They certainly do not match his precocious talent elsewhere. Also it seems extraordinary that an artist who cannot draw the human figure from life can transform himself into a superb draughtsman, executing anatomically correct figures when working in a certain mannered style.
Everything that Beardsley drew was self- congratulatory. A beautiful drawing of decora- tive fantasy on the theme of Siegfried makes no concessions towards the subject. It looks like a theatrical set for Siegfried in the 1890s. What I mean is that it carries no emotion for the Sieg. fried theme. His conscious effects to convey emotion were surface deep. Black bulbous shapes encasing the skull, foetal figures sent to frighten us and sexy ladies sent to titillate us. But none of these seems to work on the level he intended.
Beardsley's world of corruption was fascinating and revealing. He had a preoccupation with death. His unconscious world was one of self- indulgence. He had a positive need to express 'those activities of the human being which are regarded as decadent. This decadence is part of the permanent human condition and present at all times; therefore it is a fallacy that creative artists of this type appear only at the decline of a society. The decadence 'that Beardsley depicted was his assessment of this human condition and not of the society around him at a particular time. 0;0 Whether those who are to die young inherently know it and it is the cause of their continual thoughts on the theme of death, I doubt. It is certainly not true that all artists who have a pre- occupation with death die young. Goya died in his eighties.
What is so interesting about Beardsley is that despite narrow limitations, he managed to con- vey a large sweep of ideas, and it almost seems a coincidence that he was drawing similar ideas pictorially to those he was expressing un- consciously. He had no need to introduce satur- nine symbols, fauns and corrupt cupids. His lesbians and homosexuals were more excusable, but I have the feeling that he could have por- trayed all this in a more subtle and less obvious way. I believe Beardsley was a devil donning a devil's mask.
GERALD SCARFE
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