In the exhibition, the drawings are displayed in a row as they were sequenced in the illustrated version of the play.Įnter Herodias, 1893, by Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley took a story set in ancient Judea and presented its characters as fashion plates of a kind unknown to the catwalk. The play was published before it was performed, and Beardsley’s masters - Wilde and the play’s publisher - seem not to have been looking, so the artist felt free. Wilde’s tragedy Salomé, from 1894, keeps the basic New Testament storyline but drains religion from it and replaces it with sex. It’s a baseline peek into Beardsley’s fertile mind. He comes and goes when heroes are most troubled psychologically. The Questing Beast is a monster, but he’s more a fevered dream. It’s apocalyptic, and it’s no surprise that Beardsley loved Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcuts from 1497, which have the same steep format and dense lines. He captures the grim, troubled Arthur, entangled and groggy. The Questing Beast is packed with lots of lines, some short, some long, some intersecting, like an aerial view of Los Angeles freeways.īeardsley has a sense of moment, and the moments are often nervous ones. The Lady with the Rose, from 1897, has more straight lines. The Battle of the Beaux and the Belles, from 1896, is a curlicue riot. Beardsley was tall, gawky, weedy, and beak-nosed, but he’s the young Apollo of line, sometimes relentlessly straight, often curvy, sometimes spindly. It’s a labor-intensive drawing, to say the least, with a million moving parts. (Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Scofield Thayer) Right: The Lady with the Rose Verso, 1897, by Aubrey Beardsley. (The Henry Barber Trust, the Barber Institute of Fine Art, The University of Birmingham) Left: The Battle of the Beaux and the Belles, c. Beardsley takes its spirit and juices it with a little LSD. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland appeared in 1865. Beardsley’s work always gets curiouser and curiouser. No one has a good look, but you can’t stop staring. He awoke to a fetid pool - some fountain of youth - and a beast that’s both scary and ornamental. In the forest, seeking the Fountain of Youth for Guinevere - she’d found a gray strand in her hair and freaked - he fell asleep and had a bad dream.
Arthur meets the beast soon after he’s had a fling with his stepsister. Forget about “Camelot.” The Arthurian legends are filled with as much blood, gore, and raw, opportunistic sex as heroism and romance. It’s faithful to the text, the myth of King Arthur, but only in its fashion.
How King Arthur Saw the Questing Beast, from 1893, is a good start. He makes his confections one part ugly, one part beautiful, one part tension, and one part ambiguity, dribbled with his own secret sex sauce. It’s didactic, too, though what it’s teaching is often double-edged and rarely wholesome. His art, as weird and personal as it is, is narrative. It’s not “art for art’s sake.” He was an illustrator. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Beardsley’s look is sometimes languid. He saw a very young artist, leaving his teens, with amorphous talent, ambition, and vision. Ink and wash on paper.īeardsley is sui generis as much as anyone could be, but the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones gave him crucial guidance.
How Arthur saw the Questing Beast, 1893 by Aubrey Beardsley. A musical prodigy, he was performing in high-end British vaudeville by the age of seven. It was probably Beardsley’s father who gave him tuberculosis. A ruinous breach-of-promise-to-marry lawsuit, brought by a jilted flame, cleaned his coffers. His parents started as vaguely upper-middle-class, but his father lost their money. This one is gorgeous.īeardsley was a pioneer of art nouveau style and invented a new vocabulary of sinuous line and sly eroticism. The colors have a touch of copper and are ever so slightly metallic.
The wall colors are deep blues, oranges, and greens, deep but not that muted. Lighting is low - it’s a drawings show - and spooky, as is much of Beardsley’s art. Beardsley’s drawings weren’t the finished product - the printed sheet was - but it’s a delight to see his foundational work, as faithful as the reproduction process was. There are some books and posters in the show as well as the periodicals he illustrated. He was prolific, so covering him takes seven galleries with over a hundred drawings and a space for a film. The show is chronological and covers all of Beardsley’s book and periodical projects. Photo-etching and platinum print on paper. Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley, 1893, by Frederick Evans.