BOOKS
Don't sit on the same chair as Aubrey
Philip Hensher
AUBREY BEARDSLEY by Matthew Sturgis HarperCollins, £19.99, pp. 404 AUBREY BEARDSLEY by Stephen Calloway Victoria & Albert Museum, £25, pp. 224 AUBREY BEARDSLEY AND THE NINETIES by Peter Raby Collins & Brown, £10.99, pp. 128 Aubrey Beardsley's manner and style passed so quickly into the mainstream of art that it is now quite difficult to see why he so outraged his contemporaries.
Some of the ladies have not brought their faces with them [one critic wrote of a Beards- ley engraving], while the larger number of men have had their noses unscrewed and their foreheads duplicated . . . The belle of the occasion wears 40 pounds of black hair in an alligator-skin valise suspended from her ears, and has elbows in her swanlike throat . . . The general complexion is that of scrambled eggs.
But within a few years the elegant and simple solutions Beardsley was producing to the problems of graphic art would be reproduced, on a grander scale, all over Europe. His reputation spread incredibly quickly — one of the first articles Diaghilev printed in his pioneering journal Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art) was an admir- ing study of Beardsley. He is usually thought of as the archetypal fin-de-siecle artist, sickly and decadent. There is some- thing in this — Beardsley himself confessed that he suffered from 'severe attacks of Whistlerian tremens'. But on the whole it would be nearer the truth to regard him as one of the first modernists; a crucial influ- ence on Jugendstil and art nouveau, an artist who, by reducing everything to flat planes and unmodulated patterns, looks forward even to Matisse.
It is a small body of work, produced in the five years before Beardsley's death, at the age of 25; four major sets of book illus- trations, to Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Wilde's Salome, The Rape of the Lock and Lysistrata, and a miscellaneous group of drawings and prints. Though he is too much at the mercy of his own manner to be quite a great artist, his art is of consider- able significance and constant interest. The public vogue for him was briefer even than his career — he was well out of fashion by the time he died, tainted by association after the trial of Wilde and the public revulsion against the decadents surround- ing The Yellow Book — but his influence among artists, the true life of his art, never entirely disappeared.
It's important to understand that Beards- ley was an artist created by technology, and by the processes of mechanical reproduc- tion. His work was designed to be repro- duced as cheaply as possible, and to lose little by being printed. It's illuminating to compare his illustrations to Morte D'Arthur with what clearly inspired them, William Morris's Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer. When Morris was shown the Morte D'Arthur illustrations, he was thrown Self portrait, c. 1891 into a fury. 'A man,' he said, 'ought to do his own work.' The truth is that Morris's work is an expensive and rare piece of handcrafting, in accordance with the princi- ples of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Beardsley's is an industrial production, printed by the photo-mechanical line-block process.
But Beardsley made no compromises by allowing his work to be reproduced cheap- ly. Rather, he exploited the possibilities of cheap reproductive processes, just as Toulouse-Lautrec was doing at the same time, by revelling in the unmodulated fields of pure black or pure white which the engraver normally works against. One of his best pieces, of the audience at a perfor- mance of Tristan and Isolde, is almost entirely black; the heads and shoulders of the ladies emerge from a mass of darkness. And, conversely, he has no fear of the blank page; the late illustrations to Lysistra- ta are almost pure outline, with their thin, firm lines on great fields of white. They are oddly, but not inappropriately, reminiscent of the neo-classical work of John Flaxman.
Towards the end of his life, Beardsley was developing an interest in varieties of finish, and had started pricking out lines to suggest lace, even varying the solid black with cross-hatching and elaborately worked patterns; his drawings start to develop shading and depth. It was in this more complex manner that he produced his greatest work, The Rape of the Lock illus- trations. They made Whistler, who had always been contemptuous of Beardsley, change his mind in a spectacular manner. `Aubrey,' he announced, 'I have made a very great mistake; you are a very great artist. I mean it, I mean it.' I sometimes wonder whether Beardsley, if he had lived longer, would have gone on to rediscover mezzotint, which would have perfectly mar- ried his taste for rich blank blacks with the complex finishes he was beginning to explore. But what we have is a statement of audacious modernity and newness, created by simple and cheap methods of printing.
The modernity of Beardsley is confirmed by his frequently startling subject matter, which, in the case of the Lysistrata illustra- tions, was of such obscenity that they could not be shown until the 1960s, and, if sold, were cause for prosecution until after that. Though regarded by everyone who knew him as asexual — Wilde said, 'Don't sit on the same chair as Aubrey; it isn't compro- mising' — he had a frank appreciation of obscenity quite beyond his time. William Rothenstein gave a volume of Utamaro prints he had acquired in Paris to Beardsley, after finding that the indecency of the Japanese master made the possession of the volume an embarrass- ment. On next visiting Beardsley, Rothen- stein found that he had taken out the most blatant prints and hung them on his bed- room walls. He has never been better summed up than by the Times, which in a hostile review of the first issue of The Yellow Book — the archetypal statement of fin-de-siecle droopiness, of which Beardsley was for a few issues the art editor described him as a 'combination of English rowdiness with French lubricity'.
This rash of books on Beardsley is occa- sioned by the centenary of his death. They can all be recommended. Peter Raby's small book is quite a good introduction, a straightforward account of Beardsley's career with a few thought-provoking remarks about his influence on modern art and (more surprisingly) the modern the- atre. Stephen Calloway's elegant volume is the work of an art historian; he has some justified fun at the expense of some of the post-structuralist indignities heaped on Beardsley in recent years. He, by contrast, sticks firmly to influences and contempo- raries, amassing convincing evidence that, if Beardsley became the first of the mod- ernists, he did so by heaping up influences and borrowings, and steeping himself in the work of the great masters. It is well illus- trated, producing some rare and interesting pieces, and, perhaps surprisingly in examin- ing the work of an artist one normally thinks of as resolutely monochromatic, manages to suggest the beginnings of an interest in colour in Beardsley's work. The Lysistrata illustrations were at one stage to be printed in imperial purple; other later engravings were produced in green; and Beardsley always took a keen interest in the colour of his bindings — turquoise for the large Rape of the Lock, red for the miniature version. He hadn't solved the problem of colour printing — the purple Lysistrata print is a horrid sight — but this was surely the direction he would have pur- sued if he had lived longer, and it's good of Calloway to remind us of it.
The most ambitious of these volumes is Matthew Sturgis's excellent solid biogra- phy. It could do with a few more illustra- tions and is rather soberly written, but Sturgis is steeped in the period and has produced something reliable, interesting and convincing. It might appear a hard task to produce a 100,000-word biography of such a short-lived subject and on such well- trodden ground as The Yellow Book circle, but it enthusiastically avoids any hint of familiarity. I particularly commend the amusing account of Beardsley's second trip to Paris, a disgraceful affair in which his party seems to have avoided being locked up by the gendarmes by the merest whisker, several times. All three books can satisfac- torily join the most rewarding of studies of Beardsley, Brigid Brophy's inspiring Beard- sley and his World.
One question none of the biographies answers is why Beardsley has such a strange influence on his critics. Matthew Sturgis looks quite startlingly like his sub- ject, going by his photograph, and Stephen Calloway is a dandy on an 1890s scale; I remember once having him pointed out to me in the street wearing Richard James's famous apricot frock coat with the applique roses, a garment which Beardsley would surely have appreciated, and possibly even have had the nerve to wear.
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