Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Beardsley has been largely responsible in the direction art has followed in the 20th Century. It is widely agreed that Beardsley’s major contribution has been his adaptation of line and eclecticism of styles. His perception of the world around him and his interpretation and application of line was what set him apart from other artists of his time and influenced modern art indefinitely.
“ His output was phenomenal – poems, stories, articles and nearly five hundred published drawings in a career that lasted barely six years. His energy and originality were both conditioned by his awareness … as well as for his view of the world… ‘ I represent things as I see them,’ he wrote, ‘[and] I fear people appear differently to me than they do to others.’ ”
(Taylor-Martin, 2002)
The erotic elegance and sexual innuendo contained within his work has opened doors and removed moral barriers from art. The influence of his rejection of realism and observation, and movement towards art for its own sake has magnified in modern art and now remains a basic principle. Beardsley was the forefather of montage and merging of different styles. Many people believe that art fell away from realism because of the camera. They are however forgetting that Beardsley was instrumental in peoples’ attention being diverted from Victorian realism and being replaced with approachable and stylized art. Sturgis believes ‘His [Beardsley] best drawings in their elegance and economy of line might have been done yesterday’, referring to Beardsley’s universality and timelessness of his style (Taylor-Martin 2002).
“Beardsley is already a master of historical styles. From then on the key to his achievement is his capacity to become so intimate with a whole panoply of historical styles that he can regard the particulars of a Japanese print or a rococo book illustration as an expression of his own passionately fantastical nature. Beardsley’s for the history of art is fetishistic; but this is a dynamic, creative kind of fetishism. He is enraptured by the relative weights and densities of lines. He loves Japanese lines, medieval lines, rococo lines. And sometimes he lets his lines turn into disappearing act effects, by substituting dots and dashes. He lusts after a whole catalogue of curves and curls.”
(1999, Perl, J.)
Brigid Brophy, Erin Smith and Anna Gruetzner Robins, all share a similar view on Beardsley’s use of line which is comparable to Lord Leighton’s view that Beardsley was ‘the greatest master of line the world has ever known’.
Brophy who has written numerous books and articles on Beardsley expresses in ‘Black and White’ the tensions created and the relationships explored through Beardsley compositions and use of line.
“The tension that dominates all his compositions is entirely in the design and the medium… Out of the given style Beardsley sets his virtuoso line to pluck a pure, self-sufficient image. His sequences of drawings establish series of related images or conduct a single image through metamorphic variations. He is drawing not persons but personages; he is dramatizing not the relationships between personalities but the pure, geometric essence of relationship. He is out to capture sheer tension: tension contained within and summed up by, his always ambivalent images”
(Brophy, 1968, p12)
Erin Smith discusses in ‘The Art of Aubrey Beardsley: A Fin de Siecle Critique of Victorian Society” how Beardsley’s drawings criticized and mocked Victorian Society, and supported the break down of patriarchal ideals.
“Through his bizarre and symbolic style, Beardsley’s drawings blur gender lines and mock male superiority. They also play on Victorian anxieties about sexual expression and men’s fear of female superiority”
(Smith, 2002)
This compares to Brophy’s opinion; who believes that he was the only artist of his time who ‘was never sentimental’, she believes Beardsley to have ‘broken through the snobbery barrier’ and be acknowledge on the merit of his black and white illustrations rather than easel paintings (Brophy, 1968).
Brophy maintains that Beardsley upheld the poster as an argument against the notion that an artwork of worth must be something created in oil and hung on a wall. For this reason Beardsley discarded naturalism and realism and encompassed an art based on decorative composition and image making.
Smith believes that Beardsley’s work was largely concerned with social issues ‘particularly, the inequities and hypocrisies of Victorian society’ (Smith, 2002). She explores how Beardsley’s style grew from Art Nouveau and was closely linked to Symbolism and its rejection of realism in art. Smith articulates that the ultimate development of Art Nouveau occurred when symbolism was conveyed through
“The use of line which became melodious, agitated, undulating flowing, flaming… This aspect of Art Nouveau can be seen in the linear and symbolic qualities of Beardsley’s drawings. Other aspects of Art Nouveau which can be seen in Beardsley’s art include two dimensionality, decorative patterns and exotic influences.”
(Smith, 2002)
Comparatively Anna Gruetzner Robins in ‘Demystifying Aubrey Beardsley, focuses predominantly on the popularity of Japonisme and the influence which Japanese erotica had on Beardsley’s illustrations.
“The visual links with Beardsley’s art are undeniable. The Japanese effect of Beardsley’s exaggerated, stark, calligraphic style with its strong contrasts of black and white.”
(Gruetzener Robins, 1999, pp. 442)
She also discusses how Japanese erotic prints ‘shunga’ not only influenced Beardsley’s style but also his subject matter and portrayals of people. The majority of people who viewed Beardsley’s illustrations had previously never been exposed to such raw and open sexuality and reacted with disgust
“In their minds these images of lustful, masculine female bodies, and soft, effeminate male bodies with their hint of ‘deviant’ sexualities – lesbianism, homoeroticism and masturbation –were disgusting. What could not be stated was described as grotesque and revolting and the product of a ‘diseased imagination’.
(Gruetzner Robins, 1999, pp. 443)
Beardsley’s characters through out his illustrations contained a quality of animal like desire. Robins concludes her essay proposing that the images which Beardsley created flaunted the body and tested the boundaries of the permissible and acceptable in the Victorian society and served as
“a palimpset for changing sexual and cultural mores. If Beardsley is ‘wholly indispensable’ to ‘our full understanding of culture’, as Meier-Graefe thought then there is more work to be done on the way these fears, taboos and fantasies took visual form.”
(Gruetzner Robins, 1999, pp. 443)
The initial reign of Art Nouveau could be described as brief and it is commonly argued that by 1914 it was no longer fashionable. The same has been said about Beardsley and his illustrations. However as an international style in the early 20th century
“the style veered and changed directions; it became an abstract geometrical (Cubism) and functional style. In reality Art Nouveau never died, it only matured and evolved into styles that are popular today.” (Fraser Jenkins, 1998, pp. 49)
Beardsley’s illustrations and use of line have changed 20th century art and influenced a diverse range of artists and art styles. Beardsley received an unexpected emergence as ‘a poster boy for the flower children’ in the 1960’s. Pop artists borrowed and applied Beardsley’s use of line and flat areas of colour to their own art. And as Brophy points out ‘Beardsley’s disposition of white space which inspired the telling placing of Felix the cat on a mainly white screen’.
The Art Nouveau movement and Aubrey Beardsely have undeniably changed the direction of art.
‘Almost a century after the high watermark of the movement’s popularity, we realize its greatest contribution to the fine and practical arts was its lasting liberation of artists and designers from their long captivity by history and tradition that had shackled their creativity for hundreds of years.’
(Smith, 2002 )
