Aubrey Beardsley

“ Fate had given him a prematurity of power that was in accurate ratio to the appointed brevity of his life, and, in the exercise and the development of his genius, Aubrey Beardsley never rested. He worked on always, with a kind of desperate courage, and with a degree of force and enthusiasm that is given only to the doomed man. ”

“ Every comet is hurling onward to its death: destruction is its only end: and upon each line and tracery of the work of Aubrey Beardsley is the taint of decay.
To deny the genius of the man were vain—he had elements in his character that made him akin to Keats, Shelley, Burns, Byron, Chopin and Stephen Crane. ”

“ While hardly satisfying those for whom any work of art guilty of "subject" becomes worthless, this immunity from the conventions of the illustrator will secure for Beardsley a larger share of esteem among artists pure and simple than has ever fallen to William Blake, who appeals more to men of letters than to the artist or virtuoso. The uncritical profess to find many terrible meanings in Aubrey Beardsley's drawings; and he will probably never be freed from the charge of symbolism. ”

“ Beardsley has contributed a frontispiece à propos of 'Scaramouch in Naxos' in which one or two well-known faces of the day are to be recognised—an error or taste which is to be regretted."
The subjects of Beardsley's two portraits were Mr. Wilde and Sir Augustus Harris; the latter Beardsley considered his debtor by virtue of his having taken half a crown at Covent Garden Theatre without providing him with a seat.
Aubrey Beardsley was born on August 21, 1872, and died on March 16, 1898. During his short life he carried the art of Black and White further than any man since Albert Dürer. ”

“ Certainly sex is not dead in her, but it is perverted below the brute. Her passion would be so intense and fierce that even as she caressed her lover, with arm about his neck, she would feel softly for his jugular, mindful the while of the stiletto hidden in her hair. And this is the picture that fired the brain of Aubrey Beardsley, and caused him to fix his ambition on becoming the Apostle of the Ugly.
To liken Beardsley to Botticelli, however, seems indeed a sin. The master was an artist, but Beardsley only gave chalk talks. His work is often crude, rude and raw. ”

“ Artists and critics have already dwelt on the beauty of Aubrey Beardsley's line, which in his early work too often resolved itself into mere caligraphy; but the mature and perfect illustrations to "Salomé" and "The Rape of the Lock" evince a mastery unsurpassed by any artist in any age or country. No one ever carried a simple line to its inevitable end with such sureness and firmness [32] of purpose. And this is one of the lessons which even an accomplished draughtsman may learn from his drawings, in any age when scraggy execution masquerades under impressionism. ”

“ The strong creative brain of Aubrey Beardsley, indeed, in his unfinished picaresque romance, Under the Hill, which I have already mentioned, produced something new, but it was not a novel; while it is John Davidson’s poetry that counts, not his novels, which remain unread nowadays on the shelf.
Indeed, if the name of a good English novel by any one of them is demanded, it will be singularly difficult to suggest a satisfactory title. One can even go further, and state that they did not even have one amongst them who has handed on to us a vivid picture of their own lives in the form of fiction. ”

“ Now much of Beardsley’s work shows the éblouissement of the burgess on arriving at Montmartre for the first time—a weakness he shared with some of his contemporaries. This must be conceded in praising a great artist for a line which he never drew, after you have taken the immortal Zero’s advice and divested yourself of the scruples.
p. 150‘I would rather be an Academician than an artist,’ said Aubrey Beardsley to me one day. ‘It takes thirty-nine men to make an Academician, and only one to make an artist.’ In that sneer lay all his weakness and his strength. ”

“ Though he died, a great artist, in his first youth, and at the very opening of life, as life is usually reckoned, Fate did not deal with him unfairly, did not take him, as she has taken others, with a kind of brutal treachery, before the fulfilment of all the work that was in him. From his early boyhood, Aubrey Beardsley had known quite well that his life would inevitably be a short one, and it was to this knowledge, partly, that we owe the great range of his achievement in art. ”

“ Mediævalism for the middle classes always ensures an appreciative audience. Oddly enough, Morris was said to be annoyed by the sincerest form of flattery. Perhaps he felt that every school of art comes to an end with the birth of the founder, and that Beardsley was only exercising himself in an alien field of which Morris himself owned the tithe. At all events it is not unlikely that Beardsley aroused in the great poet and decorator the same suspicion that he had undoubtedly done in Watts.
The "Morte d'Arthur" may be said, for convenience, to close Aubrey Beardsley's first period ”

“ Though white is lighter than any yellow, it has not the same active and stimulating quality. The drawing of the masquers is merely one of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's fancies and has no particular signification. We see a plump and merry lady laughing boisterously whilst she seems to be followed by a man who gazes intently upon the beauties of her shoulder. It is not to be classed amongst the finest of Mr. Beardsley's designs, but it shows some of his qualities, especially his extreme economy of means. ”

“ Pessimism is always barren; a pessimism which needs continual conscious cultivation is merely ridiculous. Aubrey Beardsley was saved from being merely ridiculous by that conscience of the hand to which I have alluded. He might have been Mr. Shaw’s model for the character of Dubedat, the invalid artist of The Doctor’s Dilemma, who had every fault but treason to the truth of line and the “might of design.” Indeed, only a real passion for his art could have enabled him to compress so much achievement into so short a space of time. At the beginning of the Nineties he was unknown ”

“ In the closing years of the 19th century Aubrey Beardsley became the creator of an entirely novel style of decorative illustration. Drawing inspiration from all sources of European and Japanese art, he produced, by the force of a vivid personality and extraordinary technical skill, a result which was highly original and impressive. To a genuine liking for analysis of repulsive and vicious types of humanity he added an exquisite sense of line, balance and mass ”

“ Millamant held a slight tray of slippers, Minette some tender gloves, La Popelinière, mistress of the robes, was ready with a frock of yellow and yellow. La Zambinella bore the jewels, Florizel some flowers, Amadour a box of various pins, and Vadius a box of sweets. Her doves, ever in attendance, walked about the room that was panelled with the gallant paintings of Jean Baptiste Dorat, and some dwarfs and doubtful creatures sat here and there, lolling out their tongues, pinching each other, and behaving oddly enough. ”

“ Aubrey Beardsley. His work shows a delicate sense of line, and a bold decorative use of solid blacks, as well as an extraordinarily weird fancy and grotesque imagination, which seems occasionally inclined to run in a morbid direction. Although, as in the case of most artists, one can trace certain influences which have helped in the formation of their style, there can be no doubt of his individuality and power. The designs for the work by which Mr. Beardsley became first known, I believe, the "Morte d'Arthur," alone are sufficient to show this. ”

“ Looking at his drawings, one always feels in the presence of something alive, something containing deep human interest; and the reason is that, while Beardsley seldom aimed at realistic rendering of the human form, he was a superb realist in another respect, this being that his workmanship always proved itself adequate for the expression of the most subtle emotions, and for the embodiment of the artist’s unique personality.’5
4 Aubrey Beardsley, by Robert Ross, pp. ”

“ Beardsley has accepted the convention of nature itself, turning it to his own uses, extracting from it his own symbols, but no longer rejecting it for a convention entirely of his own making. And thus in his last work, done under the very shadow of death, we find new possibilities for an art, conceived as pure line, conducted through mere pattern, which, after many hesitations, has resolved finally upon the great compromise, that compromise which the greatest artists have made, between the mind's outline and the outline of visible things. ”

“ I To begin with Aubrey Beardsley has many advantages, for it brings us at once not only to the type of mentality most representative of the period, but also to the man whose creative power was probably the greatest factor of the period, to the boy who changed, as has been said, the black and white art of the world, and to the artist, from whose work we can most easily deduce the leading contemporary characteristics. The art of these men was in a way abnormal, while the men themselves who produced it were exotics ”

“ The indescribable cold lewdness and cruelty of "Salome" quickened the prejudice and strengthened the dislike of the ordinary English reader for its author. And when the drama was translated into English and published with the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, it was disparaged and condemned by all the leaders of literary opinion. The colossal popularity of the play, which Mr. Robert Ross proves so triumphantly, came from Germany and Russia and is to be attributed in part to the contempt educated Germans and Russians feel for the hypocritical vagaries of English prudery. ”

“ His peculiar gait has been very happily rendered in a portrait of him by Mr Walter Sickert; he also sat to M. Blanche, the well-known French portrait painter; the portrait by himself is tinged with caricature.
To estimate the art of Aubrey Beardsley is not difficult. That his drawings must excite discussion at all times is only a proof of their [31] lasting worth. They can never be dismissed with unkindly comment, nor shelved into the limbo of art criticism which waits for many blameless and depressing productions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ”

“ At this time also the influence of Aubrey Beardsley made itself strongly felt, not merely as a matter of style, but, by the use of simple line or mass of solid black, as an almost perfect type of the work most suitable to the needs of process. Wider experience of printing requirements, and finer workmanship in the actual making of the blocks, in Paris, Vienna, New York and London, soon brought the half-tone process into great vogue. The spread of education has enormously increased the demand for ephemeral literature, more especially that which lends itself to pictorial illustration ”

“ The conventional draughtsman, any Academy student, will draw a line which shows quite accurately the curve of a human body, but all his science of drawing will not make you feel that line, will not make that line pathetic, as in the little, drooping body which a satyr and a Pierrot are laying in a puff-powder coffin, in the tail-piece to "Salomé." (Ill. 28.)
And then, it must never be forgotten, Beardsley was a decorative artist, and not anything else. From almost the very first he accepted convention; he set himself to see things as pattern. ”

“ He drew nothing but monsters—men eight feet tall with microscopic heads, women with arms as long as their entire bodies. The revolt against the moral law came later—the selection of hideously obscene subjects, the painful obsession with sex. Then came the sick boy's discoveries that after all beauty was no more in the weird ugliness he had celebrated than it was in the smug conventions of sentimental Victorian painting. A few weeks before his death Aubrey Beardsley found the immortal abiding place of beauty. ”

“ Art cant and studio jargon do not explain his work. It is really only the presence or absence of beauty in his drawing, and his wonderful powers of technique which need trouble his admirers or detractors. Nor are we confronted with any conjecture as to what Aubrey Beardsley might have done—he has left a series of achievements. While his early death caused deep sorrow among his personal friends, there need be no sorrow for an "inheritor of unfulfilled renown." Old age is no more a necessary complement to the realization of genius than premature death. ”

“ He said he cared not a sou for recognition. I agreed that the act of creation was its own reward.
His moroseness might have alienated me if I had regarded myself as a nobody. But ah! had n't both John Lane and Aubrey Beardsley suggested that I should write an essay for the great new venture that was afoot—“The Yellow Book”? And had n’t Henry Harland, as editor, accepted my essay? And was n't it to be in the very first number? At Oxford I was still in statu pupillari. In London I regarded myself as very much indeed a graduate now—one whom no Soames could ruffle. ”

“ Henry McCarter, too, executed as they are in pure line, are especially valuable to the student of the pen. In respect both of the design and treatment of decorative subjects, the work of the late Aubrey Beardsley is more individual than that of any other modern draughtsman. That of our own clever and eccentric Bradley, while very clearly confessing its obligations, has yet a distinctive character of its own. The work of the two latter draughts men, however, is not to be recommended to the unsophisticated beginner for imitation, for it is likely to be more harmful than otherwise. ”