Page 48 - Studio International - June 1966

The purity of Aubrey Beardsley

by Robert Melville

The motif stamped in gold on the cover of Robert glance at the elegant course they have pursued. The motif
Schmutzler's history of Art Nouveau is a curvilinear con- is so anonymous that it could have been drawn by almost
figuration which brings to mind the thread-like tendrils any adherent of the international Art Nouveau move-
of a convolvulus : after taking an extended regular curve, ment, and so simple that it could be the first elementary
the 'tendrils' loop or coil into slight returns, closed off by demonstration in an Art Nouveau design course. But as
tiny leaf forms, and appear to be casting an approving soon as one discovers that it was designed by Aubrey
Beardsley—for the binding of a book of verses by Ernest
Dowson—its simplicity becomes equivocal. One thinks of
it as a snippet from his famous drawing of Salome, pub-
lished in the first issue of The Studio, where it is multiplied
to form a gauze of stray whisps from Salome's hair and
brings to mind that mannered sixteenth-century French
type-face, whose swelling curves and flourishes assumed
for the hero of A Rebours a 'satanic' appearance, highly
suitable for a special edition of Barbey d'Aurevilly's Les
Diaboliques. In Beardsley's own time, it was an effect of
decadence and perversity in the style itself that shocked
the public.
Beardsley could turn anything into ornament. The
smoke from the candle in his design for the cover of the
first number of The Yellow Book would have served, with-
out the slightest modification, as the working drawing
for an Art Nouveau brooch, and this extreme stylization,
which was an aspect of his cold and disciplined exhibi-
tionism, enabled him to invent a shapely outline for the
blood pouring from the Baptist's head in the Salome
drawing.
He seldom treated scenes of violence and depravity, but
the Salome drawing is evidence enough that this was not
due to squeamishness. He could, in fact, be said to have
turned the art of drawing into a dangerous enterprise;
but his temperament inclined him towards a sort of
circumspect effrontery. His rejection of the conventional
moral code of the period was profound and inflexible.
There was no timidity in his nature. Whatever the pres-
sures, he couldn't be frightened into conformity. When
Oscar Wilde was sent to prison, the publishers of The
Yellow Book dispensed with Beardsley's services, but
within a year he was involved with a new magazine, The
Savoy, and he prepared a cover for the first issue which
contained a deliciously insulting reference to The Yellow
Book. Against a formal park setting, which included a
pavilion with Doric pillars and a statue of Pan, Venus in
an early nineteenth-century riding habit is conspicuously
armed with a hunting-crop, calculated to remind readers
of The Savoy that sexual flagellation was considered on the
Continent to be a peculiarly English vice. Cupid is beside
her, naked under a greatcoat, staring at a copy of The
Yellow Book lying in the grass. He is not actually pissing
on it, but has opened his greatcoat with the evident inten-
tion of doing so.
Beardsley often had difficulty in circumventing the self-
protective vigilance of his editors. It's interesting in this
connexion to compare the rejected drawing of Salome's
Toilette, made for the Oscar Wilde book, with the one
that replaced it. Both drawings are seemly enough from
our point of view, but in the one that was rejected,
Salome is partly unrobed and two of her attendants are
naked. Presumably nudity in itself would not necessarily
put a drawing beyond the Victorian pale, and it must
From Oscar Wilde's Salome. This drawing, and all the drawings on these two pages, were have been the pretty little curl of pubic hair just visible
reproduced in the first issue of The Studio in April 1893, with an article A new illustrator:
Aubrey Beardsley by Joseph Pennell. The article is reprinted in full on page 228. on the seated girl and the ambiguous sex of the standing