English Art Nouveau

In England, the art nouveau movement was more concerned with graphic design and illustration rather than architecture and product design like in France. Its additional sources of inspiration were the Gothic art and the Victorian painting. The April 1893 introductory issue of The Studio was a strong momentum towards an international style as this issue reproduced the work of Aubrey Beardsley. An early issue of The Studioalso included work by Walter Crane and furniture and textiles produced by the Liberty and Company store. Walter Crane was a very early innovator in the application of Japanese ornamental pattern and Eastern interpretations to the design of surface pattern. But when he first attempted to bring the style to life, it was too early for it to take flight and so the movement only ignited a decade later.

Aubrey Beardsley, first cover for The Studio, 1893.

Beardsley’s career was launched when editor C. Lewis Hine featured
 his work on this cover and reproduced eleven of his illustrations in the inaugural issue.   

Aubrey Beardsley was the "enfant terrible" of art nouveau with his striking pen line, vibrant black and white work and shockingly exotic imagery. He was a very strange cult figure and intensely prolific for only five years seeing as he died at a very young age due to tuberculosis. He became famous at the age of twenty when his illustrations of the new additions of Marlory’s Morte d’ Arthur began to appear in monthly installments, augmenting a strong Kelmscott influence with strange and imaginative distortions of the human figure and powerful black shapes. “The Black Spots” referred to the composition of dominant black forms Japanese block prints and William Morris were synthesized into a new idiom. 

Aubrey Beardsley, full page illustration, Mort d’Arthur, 1893.

This image shows Beardsley’s emerging ability to compose contour line,
 textured areas, and black and white shapes into powerful compositions.
The contrast between geometric and organic shapes
reflects the influence of the Japanese print.

Beardsley’s unique line was reproduced using the process of photo engraving. This process was used exactly for the reason that it retained complete fidelity to the original art. Morris was so angry to see Beardsley’s addition of Morte d’ Arthur that he considered legal action. To Morris’s mind he vulgarized the design ideas of the Kelmscott style. He said that he replaced the formal, naturalistic borders with more stylized flat patterns. Walter Crane actually liked Beardsley’s Morte d’ Authur. He claimed that Beardsley had mixed the medieval spirit of Morris with a weird “Japanese-like spirit of deviltry and the grotesque” and Crane thought it fit only for the opium den. Despite Morris’s anger, Beardsley’s work enjoyed very enthusiastic responses. Beardsley’s work resulted in many commissions and he was named the art commissioner of The Yellow Book, which was a magazine that had bright yellow covers that became the symbol of something new and outrageous.

In 1894 Oscar Wilde’s Salome received widespread notoriety for the obvious erotic sensuality of Beardsley’s illustrations. Society was shocked by the celebration of evil, which reached its peak in Beardsley’s work for an edition of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Banned by English censors, it was widely circulated on the Continent.

In the last few years of his life, the flat patterns that Beardsley used to draw were yielded to a more naturalistic tonal quality. Dotted contours softened the decisive line of his earlier work. Even as he waned toward a tragically early death, Beardsley’s lightning influence penetrated the design and illustration of Europe and North America.

Aubrey Beardsley, illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, 1894.

John the Baptist and Salomé, who was given his head on a
platter by Herod after her dance, are remarkable symbolic figures.
The dynamic interplay between positive and negative shapes
has seldom been equaled.

Beardsley’s leading rival was Charles Ricketts who maintained a lifelong collaboration with his close friend Charles Shannon. Ricketts began as a wood engraver and received training as a compositor. Therefore his work was based on a thorough understanding of print production. While Beardsley tend to approach his work as illustrations to be inserted between pages of typography, Ricketts approached the book as a total entity, focusing on a harmony of the parts: binding, end sheets, title page, typography, ornaments and illustrations. After working as an engraver and designer for several printing firms, he established his own firm and studio.

In 1893 Ricketts first total book design appeared and in the following year he produced the masterly design for Oscar Wilde’s exotic and perplexing poem The Sphinx. He usually rejected the density of Kelmscott design. His page layout was lighter, his ornaments and bindings more open and geometric and his designs have a vivid luminosity. The complex, intertwining ornament of Celtic design and the flat, stylized figures painted on Greek Vases, which he studied in the British Museum, were major inspirations. From them, Rickett and Beardsley learnt how to indicate figures and clothing with minimal lines and flat shapes with no tonal modulation. In 1896 Ricketts launched the Vail press. He did not own the press neither did he do his own printing. He sent his printing to be printed at a firm where they met his exact requirements regarding typesetting and presswork.

Charles Ricketts, title page for the Sphinx, 1894.

Ricketts’s unconventional title page dominated by and illustration is
placed on the left rather than the right. The text is set in all capitals.