Art Nouveau: Aubrey Beardsley - The Master of the Line

It was a deliberate decision from Aubrey Vincent Beardsley to be the buffoon and harlequin of his age. He was aware that his demise will probably be due to consumption and so he hankered after immediate success.

From childhood he was prodigy, in music, literature and draftsmanship. He wrote his first play in 1885, at the age of 13. This was around the same time that his cartoons were featured in his school newspaper. He became a master of linear Art Nouveau. His line simultaneously strongly suggested a concrete subject matter and reminded us that it was abstract. He created hard contours with his lines. These contours seemed splintered and widely free in their diverging curves. By the time he followed advice given to him by Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Purvis de Chavannes in 1891 to take up art as a profession, he was fully conscious of the significance of his line.

Beardsley didn’t do any preliminary sketches. He made all his changes with pencil on the same sheet. These lines were than erased once the final piece has been drawn with Indian ink. His pieces were almost exclusively conceived for mechanical reproduction by means of a new method at the time called line engraving. This method’s demands were fully met by the linear character of Beardsley’s work.

Aubrey Beardsley had 6 years of major creative output. He opposed pictorial Impressionism just as much as any other Art Nouveau artist. He worked with lines that possessed the sharpness of a draftsman, dotted lines, sharply defined patches of solid black, and, as a method borrowed from Whistler, playfully alternated between black and white spaces. Beardsley relied on a minimum of means and limited himself to an exclusively two-dimensional art. This art remains oblivious to gravity and space, of nature and anatomy, of sculptural effects, and of light and shadow.

It was through the sound foundation formed by the inspiration of Burne-Jones and Morris, Japan and Whistler’s particular “Japanism” that Beardsley's line developed into that of a sensitive outline and strong characteristic stroke of penmanship. Other inspirations include the tautness of the outer and inner contours of Greek vase painting of the stage of Doutis, and the expressive silhouettes of Toulous-Lautrec. Beardsley soon transformed these heterogeneous elements into an entirely different and unique style filled with explosive force and flawless artistic taste.

He was the most controversial artist of the Art Nouveau era due to his dark and perverse images and their grotesque erotica. By nature he had intuitive knowledge of evil and secret things that reached back beyond the memory of a single generation. He found great joy in frightening people with this profound knowledge. “He cultivated the magic skill of transforming what might disgust people into something that is both fascinating and beautiful".

In 1984 Beardsley reached his peak in Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Never before has anyone seen anything quite like it and it irritated his critics who were disturbed by the mystical quality of his genius. In the same year the first issue of The Yellow Bookwas published. Beardsley filled the bound issues of this quarterly with shocking imagery. But after Oscar Wilde’s arrest in 1895 Beardsley’s contribution to this publication was immediately ceased.

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Beardsley was both a public character and an eccentric. He publically claimed that his single aim is the grotesque and that if he is not so, he is nothing. Throughout his short-lived career Aubrey was recurrently attacked by disease that would render him housebound and unable to work. He passed away at the tender age of 25 of tuberculosis, but not without a legacy.

His influence was wide-spread and did not only pertain to the arts, but even to the style of living. William Bradey in Chicago, Lèon Bakst in St. Petersburg and Marcus Behmer in Germany all gracefully admitted to be inspired by Beardsley. His influenced reached Paul Klee as well as Makintosh and the Macdonald sisters in Glasgow. Even Toulous-Lautrec in Paris showed interest in Beardsley’s work.

Reference

Books

Ulmer, R., Mucha, AM.1994. Alfons Mucha. Techen. Zurich

Internet:


Saylor Foundation. 2010. Aubrey Beardsley. http://www.saylor.org/site/
wpcontent/uploads/2011/06/Aubrey-Beardsley.pdf

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