As a deeply pretentious young man, I was obsessed with late Victoriana.
The gaslit streets of Conan Doyle's London,
the decadent world of Oscar Wilde.
And the shockingly beautiful and beautifully shocking artworks
of Aubrey Beardsley, a young artist who wielded outrage
and self-promotion as adroitly as his pen,
and his uncompromising attitude feels utterly modern.
A 23-year-old boy doing those in the Victorian era is astounding.
They're still kind of "whoa"!
The critics were complaining about Mr Beardsley's disgusting woman.
Really plumbed new depths of horror and depravity.
But I was also drawn to his romantically brief life -
dead at 25,
an artistic career of just six years,
cut short by tuberculosis.
He knew he didn't have long.
He consciously worked faster.
He was aware that if he had his life's work to do,
he had to do it quickly.
Who could resist a story like this?
The modern cult of Beardsley began here
at the Victoria And Albert Museum,
where, in May 1966, the first major retrospective
of his work caused a sensation.
But what isn't so well-known is that, after that landmark
exhibition opened here, the vice squad raided a nearby book shop
after complaints that it was selling copies of Beardsley's risque Salome
drawings for a shilling a pop.
But when quizzed by the coppers, the book-seller replied
that he could see nothing wrong with it, as the originals
were on display up the road.
The police then came here to the V&A to interview the director,
Sir Trenchard Cox, who assured them over a cup of tea
that Beardsley was art, and not pornography.
The police went quietly on their way.
Many of Beardsley's most explicit drawings were indeed on show,
but a few were held back.
And now I've come to take a peek at one of them.
This is The Impatient Adulterer, one of a series of drawings made
by Beardsley to illustrate the Satires of the Roman poet Juvenal.
Beardsley considered it rather a nice picture,
but the curator of the 1966 show deemed it too nasty to exhibit.
This was clearly too much for a swinging '60s audience
and perhaps it's still too much for us now.
It's a question that Beardsley's work continues to pose.
From decadent London to the tranquil south of France,
I'm going to follow in Beardsley's fevered footsteps to explore
the world of an artist every bit as strange,
perverse and elusive as his art.
I want to find out how, against such disabling odds, this extraordinary
young man achieved so much in so short a time.
Where better to begin than with Aubrey Beardsley's
first great work, created when he was just 19?
It's a scene from Act 2 of Siegfried by Richard Wagner,
Beardsley's favourite composer.
It's an extraordinary piece of work.
What we start to expect from Beardsley is great passages
of negative space, particularly white,
but it's also densely packed with detail.
And although it's a sort of bucolic landscape,
it's also completely occupied by sort of monstrous flowers.
There's something, as ever with Beardsley, unhealthy about it,
which I find very appealing! CHUCKLES
Beardsley himself must have been hugely proud of this picture
because he presented it as a gift to Edward Burne-Jones,
the artist who had perhaps inspired him more than any other
as he was growing up.
Young Aubrey's first significant encounter with the work
of Burne-Jones was here, at the Church of the Annunciation
in Brighton, the town where Beardsley was born in 1872.
INDISTINCT SPEECH
BELL TINKLES
Beardsley was very drawn to this stained-glass window,
here above the high altar.
It depicts the Annunciation and attendant angels,
and it was designed by Burne-Jones and executed by William Morris -
two of the leading English artists of the day.
And I can see how these willowy, androgynous figures influenced
Beardsley's own early work.
Gazing up at it in wonder, little could Beardsley have known
that within a few years Burne-Jones would affect the course
of his artistic career.
But I think there's a deeper reason for Beardsley's visits here.
Soon after his seventh birthday, he fell ill with a fever
and persistent cough. The doctor, fearing the worst,
detected an ominous creaking on the lungs.
It was tuberculosis.
TB, or consumption, was the great killer of late Victorian England.
There was no known cure, but often death came only after many years
of severe coughing, weight loss and haemorrhages.
The young priest in charge of the church, Father Chapman,
was also tubercular.
Aubrey became deeply impressed by the zeal with which Chapman
pursued his vocation in the face of disease.
Thanks be to God.
With the knowledge that he was then deemed incurable, Beardsley, I think
decided he would have to live his life with - as a friend put it -
"The fatal speed of those who are to die young."
At school in Brighton, Aubrey was too frail for sport and games,
but his talent for drawing was soon recognised by his housemaster,
who encouraged an interest in French art and literature.
Beardsley would continue to look overseas for inspiration
as his artistic skills developed.
But Aubrey had barely left school when his tuberculosis erupted
in a sudden attack.
When he was 17 and had his first major haemorrhage,
coughing up blood, it would have been clear that he had the adult
form of tuberculosis and he could expect to probably die quite young.
Now, if you look at Victorian representations of consumption
in particular, they're very focused on the death bed and the sick bed
as if consumptives are essentially dying people.
But you can imagine how unhelpful that is
for someone who is living with this disease.
How do you build a life for yourself when your culture
doesn't have a sense of what that life would look like?
The shock of his haemorrhage transformed Beardsley into a young
man in a hurry, who now sought out every opportunity
to further his artistic development.
By this time, he was living with his mother and sister in London,
where he worked as a junior clerk at the Guardian Life Assurance Company.
It was office drudgery by day, incessant drawing by night.
Weekends saw Beardsley and his sister Mabel voraciously bingeing
on their favourite paintings by artists like Burne-Jones,
scouring museums, galleries, and even collections in private homes.
In July 1891, just before Beardsley turned 19, there was
a bit of an artistic epiphany for him.
He visited the house of Frederick Leyland
with his sister Mabel, and Leyland's house
probably had one of the most-important collection
of contemporary artists.
And here's a copy of a letter that Beardsley wrote to school friends
recounting this and this visit to Leyland's house.
And that shows Beardsley with his sister Mabel entering this house.
So it's going through the rooms with Leyland's employees
standing there stiffly. Yes, very stiffly.
Gorgeous.
It's a very evocative drawing. It is, yes.
Looks a little bit scruffy, but already has the cane of the dandies.
He listed all the paintings that he saw and put exclamation marks
on what he liked, and one of the pictures that he liked
was Proserpine by Rossetti.
Beardsley's imagination was really fired up, I think, by what he saw,
and he does quite a few drawings with Rossetti femme fatale types,
but always in a more subversive way.
Burne-Jones was probably one of the artists
who fascinated Beardsley the most at the time.
I think he was particularly interested in mythology
in Burne-Jones' works, but also in the drapery,
the ethereal quality of his paintings.
This sort of idea that you have a world of imagination.
And the compositions as well.
The elongated vertical format is something that is also
going to inspire Beardsley.
But Beardsley didn't just seek out paintings,
he shrewdly sought out the painters themselves.
Edward Burne-Jones had begun opening his London studio to the public,
and so, one Sunday afternoon, the 18-year-old Beardsley
went to call on the man he considered
the greatest living artist in Europe.
However, at the door they were told the studio was closed, and no-one
would be admitted without a special appointment.
They began to walk away when a voice called out after them,
"Pray, come back.
"I couldn't think of letting you go away without seeing the pictures."
It was Burne-Jones himself, who then ushered them in
and proceeded to give Beardsley and his sister
a private tour of his studio.
In an incredibly audacious move,
and one that must have been premeditated,
Beardsley then mentioned that he just happened by the merest chance
to have some of his drawings with him
contained in a small leather portfolio.
Burne-Jones began to look through them before delivering
a verdict that was to change Beardsley's life.
"Mm.
"All full of thought and poetry and imagination," he observed.
"Nature has given you every gift necessary to become a great artist.
"I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession,
"but in your case, I can do nothing else."
And that's how Beardsley presented Burne-Jones with this, the largest
and most intricately worked of his early pen drawings.
He was rightly flattered when Burne-Jones hung it in
pride of place in his drawing room.
But as well as being a gift, the picture now strikes me
as a declaration of arrival, which I'm coming to see
as characteristic of Beardsley's remarkable sense of confidence.
But we also see the beginning of the Beardsley brand because
here is one of the first, if not THE first, instances of the famous
Beardsley trademark, as he called it - the three-pronged signature.
But Siegfried also marked the end of Beardsley's early period.
He was rapidly moving away from the influence of the pre-Raphaelites
to head in an even more striking and original direction.
In the weeks following his encounter with Burne-Jones,
Beardsley settled into a very specific creative routine.
After finishing his day's work, he'd return to the family lodgings,
here, at 59 Charlwood Street, Pimlico.
At a small, plain table,
Beardsley would set out two French Ormolu candlesticks,
a sheaf of medium grade cartridge paper,
pen and ink.
And thereafter, often into the small hours, he'd lose himself
to a gallery of strange new creations,
which seemed to startle even Beardsley himself.
"I struck for myself an entirely
"new method of drawing and composition.
"The subjects were quite mad and a little indecent.
"Strange hermaphroditic creatures
"wandering about in Pierrot costumes, or modern dress.
"Quite a new world of my imagination."
These pictures strike me as graphic in both senses of the word.
They're explicit,
and they also have a clarity and simplicity of line.
They reflect a dramatic new influence on Beardsley's work.
Japanese art.
On his visit to the Leyland house that summer, Beardsley
had a revelation when he was shown into the Peacock Room, symbolic
of a widespread Japanese craze during the late Victorian period,
following the opening of trade links with the East.
His interest piqued,
Beardsley began to seek out examples of shunga wood-block prints.
He was beguiled not just by their fine lines and flat tones,
but also by their erotic and nightmarish aura.
This is a book that we know from a school friend of Beardsley's
that he knew well,
and it's called Tales From Old Japan.
And you can see echoes here, sort of quite clearly,
of these Japanese folk tales.
Yes, there's an immediate obvious influence,
by the use of the negative space,
the black and white, but then the grotesquery,
but he's immediately synthesised it into his own
Beardsley vision, hasn't he?
And wouldn't have been seen in quite this way, I think,
until the Japanese influence started to come in.
This aspect of Beardsley's work
has long been a source of inspiration for Chris Riddell,
one of today's most-imaginative book illustrators.
I think what's special about Beardsley is his idiosyncrasy.
If you see a Beardsley, you never forget it,
and I think maybe that's because he's so effective
in channelling his influences and making them his own.
And I remember being very struck by his characterisation,
the simplicity of his line. Figures sort of bleed off the page
and sort of spreads almost like a stain to the edges
of the picture play.
No-one composes pictures quite like Beardsley.
So this has always been one of my favourites -
Incipit Vita Nova: Here Begins The New Life.
Where do you think this rather angry foetus motif comes from?
That's fascinating, isn't it?
I think this is his step into a new visual language.
I like to think of this illustration as a farewell to Burne-Jones
and the Pre-Raphaelite profile.
There's something curdled about... Five o'clock shadow!
Oh, yes! And the foetus, I mean, it's interesting.
This is a German book of anatomy that Beardsley
would have encountered in his grandfather's study.
And you can see here these diagrams of a foetus we recognise.
What he's added, I think, is this sort of notion
of absolute sort of implacable fury.
This appears just at the time when Beardsley himself is making
a transition into a new style.
He begins a new life.
Absolutely. So he's talking about himself.
And then the foetus recurs,
so he obviously enjoyed using this as a device.
This amazing picture of a birth from the calf of a leg.
What on Earth is going on there?
We can see here a wonderful sort of Beardsley composition.
This has got a very Japanese quality to it
and yet it is, erm, all Beardsley's own.
It's a blood spatter pattern,
like a crime scene.
That's what it is. Yes. Yes.
And then with sort of areas of rather exquisite beauty
in the detail of the flowers.
And then you get this extraordinary detail, which is the sort of
scissors. The sort of almost medical instrument pointing up
towards the mother, which is sort of, again,
a little sinister detail.
And Beardsley is very good, I think, at just throwing us off kilter.
By all accounts, he worked very quickly, in some senses, in terms
of laying down the ink, but was very decisive.
And so he must have had great sort of hand-eye coordination
and a very steady hand, I think,
when applying this sort of black ink - and almost with
no correction, which I think is remarkable.
Beardsley's bold new style was matched
by an increasing commercial ambition.
Although he was beginning to sell his works privately
for between five and ten shillings a drawing,
Beardsley decided it was time to besiege the publishers,
as he put it, in order to reach a bigger market.
Once again, Beardsley showed remarkable savvy
for someone who was still just 19.
He was, in today's parlance, excellent at networking.
And his big break was just around the corner.
Frederick Evans, the proprietor of Beardsley's favourite book shop,
had heard that the publisher JM Dent was seeking an illustrator
for an edition of Sir Thomas Malory's chivalric romance,
Le Morte d'Arthur.
One day, Evans urged Dent to come along to the book shop to see some
examples of Beardsley's work.
And as they look through them, who should walk in
but Beardsley himself on his lunchtime browse.
Evans pointed him out. "There's your man," he said.
Dent found Beardsley weird and emaciated,
but sensed, as he wrote later,
"A new breath of life in English black and white drawing,"
and he asked Beardsley to provide
a specimen illustration for his approval.
Rightly sensing that angry foetuses might not be quite what Dent
was looking for, Beardsley switched back to his earlier style.
Over the next few days, he worked tirelessly on a drawing depicting
the climax of the Morte d'Arthur -
The Achieving Of The Sangreal.
And then...he held his breath.
Any reservations Dent might have had
vanished the moment he saw the picture.
He declared it a masterpiece, and commissioned Beardsley at once.
Beardsley immediately handed in his resignation at
the Guardian Life Insurance Office.
That was that. He was an artist.
And, from now on, he was determined to live by his pen.
The sheer scale of the commission was daunting,
but, rather than forcing Beardsley to take a stylistic step back,
Le Morte d'Arthur would actually capture
his continuing artistic evolution.
I've come to look at a rare original copy
with one of the world's leading Beardsley scholars.
KNOCKS ON DOOR
Hello. Hello. Come in. Thank you very much.
What we've got here are the Morte d'Arthur.
The two volumes.
He was asked to make over 400 designs for this book.
All the way through, it has an amazing array of full pages,
borders, chapter headings.
It's a staggering piece of work for a basically untried artist.
It's absolutely stunning, isn't it?
Probably one of the most elaborate illustrations in the whole book
was used as the frontispiece.
And it shows King Arthur having encountered the dragon
that he's laying rather nonchalantly in front of.
But you can see that, in this bit, he has crammed as much complicated
detail as he possibly can.
It's a statement of intent, isn't it, I think, in a way?
This is - there couldn't be anything more clean-limbed and wholesome than
the story of Arthur and the Grail.
All the way through, he starts introducing odd characters that had
nothing to do with Mallory and the Knights, and the Middle Ages.
You know, he starts putting Pan and fauns in.
Quite funny, but deeply subversive.
Pagan in the most Christian of texts? Yes - exactly, exactly.
And I suspect half the time, you know, he's just actually
introducing elements almost for the fun of it, almost to...be confusing.
I think Dent, the publisher, was delighted because people talked
about the book. That's all that matters. It's what matters.
And you can see in the early stages, you know,
they're incredibly elaborate.
You know, he's really throwing his all into it.
By the time he's getting on through the book, he's actually having to do
six or ten drawings in a night in order to keep up with the deadline.
And he finds ways, in fact, of actually putting slightly less
intricate effort into it.
And he begins to, sort of, introduce this more-simplified pen technique,
even, which obviously allowed him to fulfil the commission.
This is one of my favourites.
I remember this very well from my teenage years.
Guinevere becoming a nun.
But what I always loved is just this incredible, stark blackness.
Mm. This is what he called his "black blot".
Your eye invents all the detail.
There's a sort of flatness to them, isn't there? Yes. Yeah.
I mean, absolutely, like Japanese prints that have no shadows,
no perspective.
And this also coincides with something of a revolution
in the printing process.
Er, absolutely. I can show you...
Here's an old-fashioned wood-engraved block,
just a block of boxwood.
An artist would have made a design, and then, a different man,
a craftsman, would have sat patiently carving away at the block.
So, the old way of reproducing is essentially a copy of a copy?
Someone else's hand is interpreting the artist's work? Absolutely.
Beardsley exploited this extraordinary new technique.
It was called zinc-lined blocks.
So, basically, the original drawing is photographed and induced
onto a zinc plate.
This is the new, cutting-edge technology.
This could be done quickly and cheaply.
But more importantly for Beardsley -
what you see here is Beardsley's exact line.
It's not interpreted by a wood engraver.
And Beardsley's whole career is actually predicated on the fact that
this new process allows his drawings to be rapidly reproduced.
At just 20,
Beardsley had become a new, very modern kind of artist.
The printing technique created a direct connection between Beardsley
and his audience.
The illustrations you held in your hand weren't copies of originals
hanging in galleries or private collections,
but the finished artwork itself.
But the Morte d'Arthur hadn't even been published when,
with characteristic urgency,
Beardsley made his next move.
He was bewitched by London's avant garde, the circle of decadence
and aesthetes of whom Oscar Wilde was the acknowledged king.
With his frail body and fevered imaginings,
Beardsley must have thought he would find kindred spirits here.
And in early 1893, he saw a way in to this exclusive group.
A new magazine called The Studio was taking shape.
Its publishers wanted it to reflect the latest artistic trends,
and were looking for a new face to give them a sensational send-off.
Beardsley was the perfect choice.
One never forgets one's first review.
"Success de Scandale", Times Educational Supplement, 1988.
For Beardsley, it was this.
As well as designing the striking cover,
the publishers chose no less than seven of Beasley's drawings
to accompany their keynote article,
"A New Illustrator: Aubrey Beardsley."
The article celebrated the presence among us of an artist
whose work is quite as remarkable in its execution as in its invention.
It sealed Beardsley's reputation overnight.
And it provided him with the springboard to seize
the commission of a lifetime.
He'd been tipped off that an illustrated version of Oscar Wilde's
banned biblical play, Salome, was to be published.
Beardsley knew he had the credentials to make
an unsolicited pitch.
With canny acumen - remember, he was still only 20 years old -
he made this drawing.
Beardsley employed all his most Japanesque conventions in depicting
the climax of Wilde's play, where Salome kisses the severed head
of John the Baptist.
Would Wilde see it? Would he like it?
Would he take the bait?
CORK POPS, LAUGHTER
But of course he did.
Beardsley's drawing had cast its spell.
Salome was his.
By August 1893, Aubrey Beardsley had more than just his
21st birthday to celebrate.
Wilde's ringing endorsement proved to be his passport to fame.
Beardsley became a regular sight on the giddy social circuit.
New friends, including the artists Max Beerbohm...
..William Rothenstein...
..and Walter Sickert...
..captured his pale, attenuated figure, immaculately attired,
thanks to his £50 fee from Salome's publisher, John Lane.
GONG CLANGS
Throwing himself into the commission with what he called a
"mystico-Oriental style,"
Beardsley conjured some of the defining images of the decade.
It's a powerful image, isn't it?
I can... It takes me straight back to my...I don't know,
I was 12 or something, when I first saw these images,
and I would stare at that face and think it's smiling,
but it's so cruel. Yes.
You know? And that one, as well, the demonic...
It's just amazing tracery of delicate lines, and all these weird,
unhealthy blooms. Yes!
There's so much to look at. Yes!
Even though it's simple and clear and clean, there's actually a lot -
every candle has a little story.
There's a little phallic symbol underneath it.
A little creature holding up that one.
Well, the fascinating thing is, this is the censored version.
Oh? You're joking. This is the original. Oh, you're right. Here.
Even with pubic hair, which, as we know, the Victorians really
didn't like at all.
Goodness me.
And our old friend, the foetus,
making a return. Yes! HE LAUGHS
Beardsley completely ignoring the diktats of the text.
Within his drawings for Salome, Beardsley introduces the
unmistakable figure of Oscar Wilde himself.
And yet, there seems to be a very fine line
between homage and ridicule.
So, this is The Woman In The Moon.
And we have a very clear...
Oscar. Yeah. ..Oscar here.
John Lane, the publisher, took fright at it being called
The Man In The Moon, in case there was a sort of a litigious dimension,
changed the title to The Woman In The Moon.
But then, I remember thinking when I saw that as a teenager that,
as a caricature of Wilde, it's even crueller calling it that,
cos it appears to be a, sort of, blousy lady.
Yes. Very fleshy-faced.
It is a peculiar thing that he would do to someone older
and more, you know, greater than he at the time.
It would... Most people would say, "This is the great Oscar Wilde,"
and he thought that himself.
And he would presume to do that.
He sort of has a sort of crush, or some kind of hero worship.
Very rapidly he turns it into a satire, or...
Bites the hand. ..bites the hand.
We sometimes forget how young he was.
What he actually has is all the pretentiousness of a man of 21,
and all the ingratitude. Yes.
Whether or not Wilde took offence from Beardsley's parody,
he also seems to have taken inspiration from him.
Wilde was influenced by Beardsley to the extent that he saw
in Beardsley someone with an absolutely cold eye,
the absolute eye of an artist, who refused to be sentimental.
And if you look at Wilde's work after Salome...
..he learnt, in meeting Beardsley, that you could get rid of every
element that appears kindly.
So, for example, Lady Windermere's Fan has melodrama
and sentimentality in it.
But after Beardsley, he writes The Importance Of Being Earnest,
which is crystalline in its absolute perfection,
and has no hint of melodrama, and no hint of sentimentality.
In that sense, it's much closer to Beardsley
than what he'd been doing before.
And maybe he saw in this young man - he thought,
"You know, you can go that far."
There's a wonderful quote.
A friend catches him scurrying through London in the winter
without a coat. He says, "I don't need one. I am always burning."
And I think it means, both physically and artistically,
he's on fire.
Salome caused precisely the sensation Beardsley had anticipated.
His scandalous drawings easily upstaging Wilde's text
and forcing a wedge between them.
But Beardsley, never one to play safe,
was already plotting his next move.
As 1894 dawned, he hurried round to the offices of the Bodley Head
to see his publisher, John Lane.
Beardsley proposed a radical idea -
a bold, new quarterly magazine in which all that was daring in art
and literature could appear, and with a clear demarcation
between the two - pictures independent of stories,
and stories independent of pictures.
He even proposed a title, The Yellow Book -
knowing it would call to mind the popular and illicit French novels of
the day, bound in yellow wrappers.
Seeing the potential this illicit glare of yellow might have,
Lane agreed to back the venture at once, with Beardsley serving
as art editor.
But Beardsley had one stipulation.
Perhaps fearing that Wilde would dominate the new venture,
Beardsley insisted the Wilde be kept out of The Yellow Book.
His confidence that he no longer needed Wilde was vindicated by
The Yellow Book's instant success,
selling out its first run of 5,000 copies in under a week.
The Tate holds some of the original designs that Beardsley produced
for his new magazine.
This is Beardsley's drawing for the very first number
of The Yellow Book.
These masked revellers have more than a hint of
Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge.
But in Beardsley's hands,
they become by turns erotic and sinister.
His cat-like figure here, with his - or her - sensual lips
and almost drugged expression
seems replete with possibilities.
Not all of them benign.
This picture, known simply as The Fat Woman, was also intended
for the first number of The Yellow Book.
I love its bold composition.
The hair, the hat, the feather are almost abstract shapes.
And then, the stark simplicity of this black wine bottle
against the great expanse of white tablecloth.
Looking back through editions of The Yellow Book,
I'm surprised by just how many of Beardsley's drawings
were of female figures.
Was he, I wonder, identifying with another group
of late Victorian troublemakers?
I think what Beardsley was doing with inventing this kind of
Beardsley woman was he was taking fears that existed at the time
about the... what was called "the new woman,"
which was a new generation of women
who were beginning to demand a lot of the freedoms that their brothers
took for granted.
So, they were riding bicycles, they were taking jobs.
So, they had... Typewriting. That sort of thing.
They had a little bit of financial independence.
They had latchkeys, they smoked cigarettes and read racy novels.
And of course, all this provoked a moral panic at the time with people
who really thought, "My goodness, where will this end?"
Of course, they were sort of proto-feminists.
So, Beardsley took what was actually a type at the time,
and he realised what anxiety it was provoking.
He gave it a little twist and made her a little bit more sinister.
But I think that his creation of this extraordinary female figure
was much more about him finding a way of expressing himself.
For me, I think Beardsley is interested in transgression.
Whether that transgression is a woman out at night by herself
choosing her own book, or whether it's something much more extreme.
But it all came to bit of a head with volume three of
The Yellow Book,
which shows a woman looking at her reflection in a looking glass,
and she's putting her make-up on.
This provoked a critic from The World to refer to Mr Beardsley's
"disgusting woman",
and another critic said that it really plumbed new depths of
horror and depravity.
But there is a theory that, because her dressing table mirror
is lit by these two lamps here, which are a little replicas
of street lamps... Street lamps, yes.
Now, see, the idea - well, as a girl, I was always told to put
my make-up on by the light I would appear in.
So, if you're going to be home during the day,
you put it on by daylight.
So, the idea that she's putting it on by the light of street lamps
can only mean that she was planning to spend her evening
walking the streets.
That's quite a subtle code. They got it. Yes.
THEY LAUGH
I was taught the same thing.
Beardsley took fiendish delight in the attacks on The Yellow Book.
"Have you heard of the storm that raged?"
he wrote to the novelist Henry James.
"Most of the thunderbolts fell on my head.
"However, I enjoyed the excitement immensely."
As a mark of celebrity status, you couldn't beat the pages
of Punch magazine,
which now took delight in lampooning Beardsley's drawings,
like this one.
With their own spoof versions...
..signed with names like Danbury Beardless
and Daubaway Weirdsly.
Ever ready to embrace new trends and reach as wide an audience
as possible, Beardsley now fixed his antennae on a rapidly developing
new medium that he realised would introduce him
to the man in the street.
On his infrequent visits to Paris,
Beardsley had noticed how French poster design by the likes of
Toulouse-Lautrec and others had transformed the streets into
veritable open-air galleries.
And now, he hoped to create a similar splash of colour
on the streets of London.
"Advertisement," pronounced Beardsley,
"is an absolute necessity of modern life."
Could he be referring to himself?
Beardsley's posters startled pedestrians and,
like his illustrations, divided the critics,
which I think would have delighted him.
Here, I think he continues to suggest the independent
liberated woman of the 1890s.
And yet, no matter what the product, they're still teasingly sensual.
This one, believe it or not, is advertising children's books.
And this one, tempting the pedestrian through a beaded curtain
was said by one reviewer to cause cab horses to shy
at the sight of her.
Throughout 1894, Beardsley seemed unstoppable.
Then in early November, a sudden haemorrhage signalled the grim
recurrence of tuberculosis.
It was a severe attack,
quite possibly exacerbated by his heavy workload.
Doctors ordered his immediate removal to a clinic
in the countryside.
And it wasn't until early in the New Year that Beardsley felt well
enough to properly pick up his pen again -
only for a very different crisis to erupt.
The arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel on 5th April 1895,
for acts of gross indecency, burst the decadent bubble forever.
Beardsley was swiftly, and quite unfairly,
caught up in the scandal.
Leaving the hotel in the company of two detectives,
Wilde was seen to be holding a French novel
bound in yellow wrappers.
Believing it to be THE Yellow Book,
people rapidly took matters into their own hands.
A crowd assembled here on Vigo Street outside the offices
of the Bodley Head and began to pelt these windows
with mud and cobblestones.
It was an attack on decadent art and all that was deemed immoral.
It was clear from the actions of the angry mob out here -
a "passable little riot", as one commentator called it -
that Wilde's polluting influence was seen to spread like a disease
through the pages of The Yellow Book and, by association,
through Beardsley himself.
Almost overnight, he seemed to face an uncertain future.
Wilde's imprisonment in May 1895
sent shock waves through artistic London.
One critic accused Beardsley of being sexless and unclean.
Beardsley had just finished designing this cover for Volume V
of The Yellow Book, when he learned that his publisher, John Lane,
had fired him.
He'd finally been living the life of his fantasies,
only to be brutally woken up.
His career was now, quite likely, over.
But you don't get to achieve all that Aubrey Beardsley had done
by knowing when to give up.
It's said that, as the Wilde scandal exploded,
600 gentlemen took the boat train to France.
Many were destined for Dieppe -
then something of an artists' colony.
WOMAN SPEAKS IN FRENCH
There, Beardsley and his fellow aesthetes recovered and regrouped.
They responded to their recent tribulations with a fresh
wave of creativity.
And before long, Beardsley was invited to set up a new magazine.
WOMAN GIGGLES
Beardsley seized on the plan.
Here was a chance to reverse his fortunes, and also perhaps to
showcase a new style in his drawing.
Across a cafe table, he devised the magazine's manifesto,
hoping to appeal to the tastes of the intelligent.
Beardsley even came up with a name - The Savoy,
like the recently-opened hotel, something lavish and modern,
All well and good, but Beardsley needed a new publisher.
Enter Leonard Smithers, an enterprising but somewhat
disreputable figure whose proud boast was that he would publish
anything the others were afraid to touch.
A sign in his book shop window proclaimed, "Smut is cheap today."
Beardsley has lost none of his desire to provoke and burn bridges.
His original cover for the first issue of The Savoy depicted a cherub
vengefully urinating on a copy of The Yellow Book.
Even Smithers insisted it was changed.
In September 1895, with his new publication on the way,
the Wilde scandal dying down a little,
Beardsley felt able to return to London from his self-imposed exile.
But his prospects looked altogether more dim.
Undeterred, he started writing and illustrating a novel,
Under The Hill.
A fantasy replete with orgies and bestiality.
And he adopted a new, more ornate drawing style inspired
by 18th-century French prints.
And I rather think that, at the centre of the story,
he placed himself.
Beardsley's original manuscript, The Abbe Fanfreluche,
was called the Abbe Aubrey.
And it's tempting to imagine this as some sort of
extravagant self-portrait.
What it actually resembles most is a, kind of,
17th-century swagger portrait.
This amazing figure almost filling the frame like
an effulgent butterfly.
With this sensually-lipped arrogance, his tiny hand contained
in the muffler there.
And this aggressively masculine stance is instead replaced
by a completely smooth lower portion.
As is so often the case with Beardsley's pictures,
the central figure is strangely androgynous, rather denatured.
I wonder whether his experience as a man,
whose prospects for...straight...life,
a straight future in the strictest sense - marriage and children -
it's not something he can really expect, even if he wanted it.
And there's no sign that he did. There's no sign that he had
romantic relationships with anyone of any gender.
But I wonder whether being slightly detached from those expectations,
and being able to defy a lot of the policing of sexuality and gender,
and masculinity at that time, perhaps gave him an opportunity
to think about, "Well, who am I? What am I? Who are my friends?
"Who are the people I care about? Who cares about me?
"Do the labels matter to me" in the same way that they are
a matter of life and death for other people around him?
Beardsley now cultivated a new friendship that may have been an
attempt to address both his personal and financial uncertainties.
He'd become fascinated by a study of homosexuality, or unisexualite,
by a wealthy writer called Marc-Andre Raffalovich.
Beardsley decided to pay him a visit.
But was he attracted by Raffalovich's ideas,
or his money?
When they met, Beardsley explained that he was, as he put it,
"in a fix" and appealed to Raffalovich for advice.
As an art patron with a large private income,
the incentives for Beardsley were obvious.
Raffalovich began buying his work, showering him with gifts of
flowers and books, and chocolates.
They even adopted pet names.
Beardsley signing himself "Telemach" and addressing
Raffalovich as "Mentor".
Raffalovich was then attempting to reconcile
his homosexuality with a growing Catholic belief.
Religious motifs began to appear more frequently
in Beardsley's work.
And he provided this drawing of a hermaphrodite for Raffalovich's
latest volume of poems.
It's hard not to read something very calculating in
Beardsley's sudden attachment to Raffalovich, both his financial
benefactor and spiritual mentor.
Was Beardsley playing him, embracing
Catholicism merely to ingratiate himself?
Perhaps.
But I think whether it was tactical or not, this burgeoning friendship
reflected a genuine confusion within Beardsley about his sexuality,
and also had the very real effect of reawakening a spiritual
need within him.
Beardsley's personal torment seems to have reached a peak
just before his 24th birthday.
In July 1896,
he spent six weeks here in Epsom at the Spread Eagle Hotel, recovering
from yet another severe tuberculosis attack.
Yet this was where he also conjured up his last great work, a series
of graphic images that, once seen, are very hard to forget.
And here are the resulting drawings.
Eight highly explicit illustrations
for a privately printed edition of Aristophanes' bawdy comedy
Lysistrata, in which women refuse their warring husbands sex
until a peace treaty is signed.
With these pictures
Beardsley is exhibiting yet another change of style, this time drawing
on Greek vase painting, which he'd studied in the British Museum.
Depicting figures with giant stylised phalluses,
as sported by ancient Greek actors.
These are amongst the very first of Beardsley's drawings that I ever
encountered, which drew me to him like a moth to a flame.
I wonder why.
They have lost none of their boldness or impact.
The very definition of "in your face".
But there's an added poignancy of him sitting here.
And that comes from reading the letters that Beardsley wrote at
this period, mostly to Smithers and Raffalovich.
I read them for the first time
only recently, and was surprised how frank and unabashed they are.
To Smithers,
there is licentious banter and smutty asides.
"..photograph or a model of my prick...
"..how widely spread is the doubt as to my sex.
"The cause of it, by the way, was not venereal."
And here, he tries to make light of his illness.
"The doctor has given me a wondrous medicine which makes my shit
"black and head ache.
"Ammonia, potassium, belladonna and chloroform
"are among its simplest ingredients."
But to Raffalovich, he talks piously of priests and saints
and confides how really depressed and frightened
he is about his condition.
Looking at these pictures again and reading his letters, I get
a very real sense of Beardsley sitting here alone in this hotel
room, wrestling with his art and his faith.
Smithers and Raffalovich perched like an angel and a devil on each
shoulder, tempting him this way and that,
towards the darkness and the light.
Over the coming months, the haemorrhages became more frequent
and intense and Beardsley made plans to leave England.
"Oh, how tired I am hearing my lung creak all day,"
he wrote to Raffalovich, "like a badly made pair of boots."
In April 1897, accompanied by his mother,
Beardsley set off for the French Riviera.
He was bound for Menton, one of its chief health resorts
where he'd taken rooms here at the Hotel Cosmopolitan.
The proximity to the mountains and the sea gave him a brief
and misleading sense of restored energy.
Beardsley began a new project, telling Smithers with typical
frankness that the coming year would bring either
death or masterpieces.
To illustrate Ben Johnson's satirical play, Volpone,
Beardsley embarked on a series of decorative initials, using pencil
and wash, but this tonal work was far more exacting
than his line drawings.
The physical exertion took its toll on his frail body.
He could only manage three to four hours a day.
One day, near the seafront, an acquaintance noted how he saw,
for a second, a yellow skeleton fighting an umbrella on the steps
of a chapel, and suddenly recognised it
to be Beardsley himself.
Now a practising Catholic, seeking out a place of worship,
Beardsley had chanced upon this little chapel which he began
to attend regularly.
As death tightened its grip on his lungs,
Beardsley clung, with ever-deeper conviction, to his faith
and his rosary beads.
As he sat here,
I can imagine his mind reaching back to those days in Brighton
when he first sought out the Church of the Annunciation
with its altar window,
seeing through it all the possibilities of life,
a mere 12 years back,
and now a lifetime ago.
At the end of January 1898, Beardsley was confined to his bed
with persistent bleeding.
Beardsley had asked his mother to fetch his drawing materials,
but the strain was too much. Ellen returned to find him with his face
turned to the wall and his gold-nibbed pen embedded
in the floorboards where he'd thrown it in despair.
As the weeks dragged on, Beardsley's sister Mabel came
over from England to help keep vigil by his bedside.
Beardsley then seemingly scrawled one last note to Leonard Smithers,
and it's a desperate final missive.
"Jesus is our Lord and judge.
"Dear friend, I implore you to destroy all copies
"of Lysistrata and bad drawings.
"By all that is holy,
"all obscene drawings.
"Aubrey Beardsley, in my death agony."
Is this, I wonder, a deathbed confession,
a penitent wrestling with their conscience,
surrendering their art to embrace their faith?
Is this Beardsley's attempt to reconcile those two great spheres
of his life that he always kept separate?
Or was it, in fact, his mother who wrote the note, in an effort
to save her son's posthumous reputation?
Believing his publisher had agreed to his last wish,
Aubrey Beardsley died on 16th March 1898.
He was 25.
He never tried to hide his illness.
He never denied it.
He knew he didn't have long.
Therefore, it must be work, work, work.
He's not like illustrators of his own period.
He has his own personal language that really does stand
the test of time.
He was keen to make sure that people understood what we now
call his brand.
This idea of what you do and the image you project as being, sort
of, a seamless entity.
You have to recognise his courage and his single-mindedness
is of an order that is very rare.
He raised the bar as to what was possible in terms of simplicity
and purity of line and composition,
but also of impurity of subject matter.
I have a confession to make.
I have been here once before.
But back then, I was a morbid 21-year-old, armed only
with an Interrail ticket and a centre parting, and on something
of a pilgrimage.
Standing here more than 30 years later, I'm more than ever
in awe of this tragic man's genius.
Aubrey Beardsley seemed to live several lifetimes in his brief span,
restlessly innovative, propelled
by his own sense of romantic doom,
playful, prodigious and perverse,
almost to the end.
But Beardsley remains more than the poster boy for bedroom decadence.
He was a very great artist, and his mastery of line
and extraordinary imagination shines still.