Victorian secret

Beardsley's art personified fin-de-siècle decadence

by Michael Bronski

AUBREY BEARDSLEY: A BIOGRAPHY, by Matthew Sturgis. Overlook Press, 404 pages, $29.

It was no accident that the work of Victorian illustrator Aubrey Beardsley had a popular and critical revival in the mid 1960s. The sexual revolution, the emergence of a camp sensibility in the mainstream, and the popularization of mass-marketed posters and buttons turned the idiosyncratic and then-obscure genius into a highly recognizable pop artist. The dangerous voluptuousness of his drawings -- such as his illustrations for a 1895 private edition of Lysistrata, which featured erect phalluses and adamantly sexual women -- resonated utterly with the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. But what might have been 15 minutes of fame blossomed into a full-fledged re-evaluation that continues today.

If the pop culture of the 1960s brought Beardsley artistic and social acceptance, it was certainly not unanimous: even in those years, his work seemed shocking. In August 1966, Scotland Yard confiscated 200 reproductions of Beardsley drawings from a prominent London shop, citing the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 and acting on the complaint of a passerby. Beardsley defenders gleefully noted that the originals of these drawings had been on display at the staid Victoria and Albert Museum, just miles from the shop, for the previous two months. If this extraordinary social contradiction could exist in swinging, shagging mod London, what chance could Beardsley have had for recognition in the 1890s?

Matthew Sturgis's perceptive and well-written biography illuminates that age as it details the artist's life -- a life that reads like a not-quite-parody of turn-of-the-century decadent literature. Born in 1872 to a middle-class family with few prospects, Beardsley was, by the time he was seven, already showing signs of the tuberculosis that was to cause his death at 25. He began sketching and drawing at an early age, and even as a child he was driven to distinction -- at the age of seven he asked his mother if he would have a stained-glass window or a bust after his death, "for I may be a great man someday." After a few years in public schools, Beardsley began making his moves. In 1891 he called, unannounced, on Edward Burne-Jones, the most famous of the Pre-Raphaelites. Impressed with the young man's work, the artist urged him to go to art school and furnished him with social and professional connections, including Oscar Wilde. Even before his unique artistic vision was fully realized, Beardsley drew attention -- his 1892 illustrations, in the style of Burne-Jones, for Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur won great acclaim. A year later, when he was 21, the first sign of the mature artist emerged with his illustrations for the publication of Oscar Wilde's Salome (which had just been banned from the stage by Lord Chamberlain).

These compelling, blatantly sexual black-and-white drawings defined a defiant new social and artistic milieu. Beardsley raised eyebrows as well as ire: his notoriety spread rapidly, and in 1894 he became the art editor of the infamous Yellow Book, a high-toned literary magazine with a self-imposed mandate to shock. By 1895, he was at the height of his career; in fact, the caricaturist and writer Max Beerbohm declared the time "the Beardsley period." But with Oscar Wilde's arrest for sodomy that same year, Beardsley's world -- and the entire artistic subculture to which he belonged -- came under attack and crumbled. The Beardsley style was so associated with Wilde that his work became identified with sexual license, homosexuality, and general moral decay, and he was fired from the Yellow Book.

During this time, Beardsley flirted with converting to Roman Catholicism but continued to associate with primarily homosexual literary and social circles (even though he apparently remained chaste). The next two years brought more fame -- his illustrations for Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock were deemed less offensive and praised by critics -- but they also brought ill health, and he died of internal hemorrhaging in January 1898. This gothic mixture of outlaw sexuality, outrageous art, ominous religious piety (Romish beliefs were still highly suspect), and early painful death made Beardsley a poster boy for life beyond the Wilde side.

Sturgis's account of all this is entertaining and soundly researched. It is a vast improvement over Miriam J. Benkovitz's 1981 Aubrey Beardsley: An Account of His Life, which was, until now, considered the standard work on the subject. But for all its fine qualities -- and there are many -- the book leaves us wanting more analysis both of the art itself and of Beardsley's place in this world. The cultural crisis that was anticipated by Burne-Jones, provoked by Wilde and Beardsley, and continued (even after the crackdown that followed Wilde's trial) by Ronald Firbank and Baron Corvo was enormous. It was a revolt against the natural and the normal, a beatification of beauty over mundane practicality, an exploration of forbidden sexual desire, and a elevation of the imagination over regimented mass production. The theme of homosexuality (no matter what Beardsley's own sexual practices were) does run through this biography, and Sturgis does pinpoint how Beardsley's representations of female sexuality threatened mainstream values -- his women were elegant but steaming, even when they were just sitting in a chair reading a book. Yet Sturgis makes few connections to the overwhelmingly homosexual and gender-bending sensibility that this artistic movement promoted. Brigid Brophy's 1976 Beardsley and His World covers some of this ground and gives us a far better sense of the enormous cultural and social impact that these artists had.

Even with its flaws, however, Sturgis's biography is a sound portrait of a great artist. Better than that, it instills in us a sense of the overriding political and cultural tensions that have ruled our lives for more than a century.

Michael Bronski is the author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (St. Martin's Press). He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com.