Aubrey's brief life
AUBERON WAUGH
Beardsley Brian Reade (Studio Vista 6 gns) Beardsley Stanley Weintraub (W. H. Allen 35s) The revival oiAubrey Beardsley's reputation between 1%5- and 1966 left most of our elderly art pundits behind. Sir Kenneth Clark generously. allowed Beardsley's influence on such darlings of the age as Kandinsky and Klee, but few of the thousands of people— many young—who poured into the Victoria and Albert Museum for the great Beardsley Exhibition of 1966 were interested in seeing a minor influence on these approved masters. One can doubt whether Kandinsky or Klee, let alone Munch or Mackintosh, could have drawn half the crowds.
Sir John Rothenstein discusses this phe- nomenon in his introduction to Brian Reade's Beardsley: 'The interest was surely due to the realisation that Beardsley was a far more con- siderable artist than had long been supposed.' One wonders who, in particular, was guilty of this long, erroneous supposition. Sir John Rothenstein, to choose a name at random, was Director of the Tate Gallery for twenty-six years. When he was appointed, in 1938, Beardsley was represented by only seven works, of which five were pretty minor drawings. The last one—Beardsley's drawing of Mrs. Whistler under the title 'Fat Woman'—had been acquired in 1931. A good chance for the young Director to reinstate his father's old friend.
Yet the sad truth remains that not so much as a doodle has been acquired by the Tate since 1931. No' doubt there are good reasons for this. If the Tate does- not mirror the fashions of its time, it mirrors nothing at all. Yet the choice of Sir John Rothenstein to introduce this volume is still a curious one. His tone, it is true, falls a long way short of any Mao-style recantation. Among many qualifying asides, he gives us this stupendously boring opinion : 'Beardsley is even today difficult precisely to place in the hierarchy of modern artists. Compared, -for instancc, with a Rodin or a Degas, he is a very minor figure .
We must not be too unkind to Sir John. In the hierarchy of modern art critics he occupies an honourable place; but for those who live outside his world, it was a joy to see so many art critics caught with their pants down by the impact of Mr Reade's 1966 exhibition at the V and A.
The book itself is admirably produced, and . the pictures are chosen with the judiciousness one would expect from Mr Reade. Any coffee table which does not sport it after Christmas should be avoided; the coffee will almost cer- tainly come from a tin. This is the first time that the obscene Lysistrata series of drawings have been released for general circulation. Probably the price was thought high enough to keep it from the more impressionable classes. Posterity may well decide that these phallic drawings are the best thing the artist ever did, and although I think posterity will be wrong, they certainly add to the fun. Soon after finishing the Lysistrata drawings, Beards- ley was converted to Catholicism, like so many of the `Decadents.' Later, on his death bed, he wrote a pathetic letter to his publisher, Leonard Smithers: Jesus is our Lord and Judge Menton Dear Friend I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata 4bad drawings. Show this to Pollitt and conjure him to do the same. By all that is holy—all obscene drawings.
In my death agony Aubrey Beardsley.
Smithers, of course, had much too great a respect for art, as well as for his own pocket, to do any such thing. Indeed, before the pub- lisher died 'penniless in 1907, he had been reduced to selling forgeries of Beardsley's death-bed letter as well. So it is thanks to him that we can now enjoy Beardsley's huge phalli and sprouting female genitalia.
Ths great argument for banning them again would be' "tostifle further speculation about Beardsley's sex life. Nothing whatever is known; he may have been impotent, incestuous, homosexual. He may have been a Lesbian fetishist with a castration complex. Mr Reade has his theories, and there is a whole queue of art historians waiting to tell us theirs; but nothing is known, and there surely comes a point at which other people's speculations lose interest. It is the voice of philistinism which tries to explain his ebullient imagination in pseudo-scientific clichés about sexual motiva- -tion. If any of Beardsley's excellence depends upon a castration complex, then this complex is something which should be taught to every art student in his first year. It is a virtue of Mr Stanley Weintraub's new biography that he wastes very little time indeed on such pointless speculation. Although the artist's essential career spanned only five years, from 1893 until his death at twenty-five in 1898, they were years that marked also the trial, imprisonment and release of Oscar Wilde, the birth and death of The Yellow Book and of The Savoy,' the full flowering and untimely death of the Aesthetic Movement. Mr Wein- traub's book is immensely readable and well- informed. An enormous amount of sensible research has clearly gone into it, and the only shame is that his publishers have chosen to overprice it so blatantly. Sixteen illustrations, collected in 'the middle of the book, add nothing to the text; the paper is cheap and the printing gains nothing from having been done in America. All of which is a great pity, as Mr Weintraub's labours deserved. better. BY way of extenuation, I.might add that the book has an agreeable smell, compounded of flout paste and margarine.
If Beardsley's popularity brings home any major truth, it might be to destroy the illusion of the Victorian Age as dull, complacent and intellectually inert. Far more than the present century, it was a period of intellectual and aesthetic ferment. Ideas which are stale today —and are still being produced as uncompro- misingly modern—were new then; we have added practically nothing to Darwin or Marx, Newman or Freud. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, through studying such books as Mr Wein- traub's life of Beardsley, we shall learn how dull and rigid in our views, how unadventurous and conventional we all are when compared with our Victorian grandfathers.
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