Aubrey Beardsley: Six Years That Redrew the Line
Nine days before he died, from a hotel room on the French Riviera, a twenty-five-year-old wrote to his publisher: "I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings." Leonard Smithers ignored him and went on selling reproductions, and forgeries besides. It was the last decision in a career that had lasted roughly six years, produced some of the most instantly recognizable images in British art, and given a decade its nickname. The 1890s in London are still called the Beardsley period.
Brighton, and a Diagnosis at Seven
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley was born in Brighton, Sussex, on 21 August 1872, to Vincent Paul Beardsley, the son of a Clerkenwell jeweller who had no profession of his own on account of tuberculosis, and Ellen Agnus Pitt, from a respected Brighton military family. The family's money went first; by 1883 they had moved to London, where his father worked irregularly for a telegraph company and as a brewery clerk. At seven Aubrey contracted the tuberculosis that would kill him eighteen years later. He and his elder sister Mabel appeared in 1884 as infant musical phenomena, performing at public concerts — the family's precocity monetized early, as families in genteel decline often do.
He attended Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School from January 1885 for four years, publishing his first poems, drawings and cartoons in the school magazine. Then the ordinary fate closed in: a clerkship in an architect's office, and after that a desk at the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance Company.
Burne-Jones, and a Decision
In July 1891 Beardsley called on Edward Burne-Jones with a portfolio. Burne-Jones, along with Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, told him to become an artist. In 1892 he studied at the Westminster School of Art under Professor Fred Brown — essentially the whole of his formal training — and travelled to Paris, where he found Toulouse-Lautrec's posters and Japanese prints. The ukiyo-e woodblock was the decisive encounter. From it he took flat black masses, radical asymmetry, and the treatment of fabric as pure pattern; the stylized mouths and drapery in a drawing like The Dancer's Reward of 1893 come directly out of it.
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Take the IQ test →Le Morte Darthur
The publisher J. M. Dent commissioned him to illustrate Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. The project ran through 1893 and 1894 and required 353 drawings, an industrial quantity of work for a self-taught invalid in his early twenties. He got through it partly by amusing himself, smuggling in, as the Tate has catalogued, satyrs, mermaids, caricatures and the odd concealed phallus. In April 1893 Joseph Pennell wrote him up in The Studio, and a clerk who had been at an insurance desk two years earlier became famous.
Salome and The Yellow Book
In 1893 and 1894 John Lane commissioned him to illustrate Oscar Wilde's Salome. The drawings were, in the Tate's phrase, notorious for their weird and morbid attractiveness, and they remain the images most people carry in their heads when the 1890s are mentioned: enormous fields of white, a single black shape, a decapitated head held up by a woman with no visible remorse. In April 1894 Beardsley co-founded The Yellow Book with Henry Harland, serving as art editor and designing its covers. He was twenty-one and setting the visual policy of the most talked-about magazine in England.
The Fall, and The Savoy
It lasted a year. Wilde was arrested in April 1895 and was reported to have been carrying a yellow book at the time; the association was enough, and Beardsley was dismissed before the fifth volume. He had illustrated Wilde and was destroyed by proximity to him without ever having been especially close.
Leonard Smithers picked him up in 1896, and the last two years were extraordinarily productive. Beardsley co-founded The Savoy, where his prose romance Under the Hill was serialized. He produced the Lysistrata illustrations, explicitly erotic in a way that had no British precedent, and the rococo confections for Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, which show a completely different artist working in a completely different register in the same year. In March 1897 he converted to Roman Catholicism. On 16 March 1898 he died at Menton on the French Riviera, aged twenty-five, and was buried in the Cimetière du Trabuquet after a requiem Mass at Menton Cathedral.
Why Aubrey Is Called a Genius
The faculty here is technical and specific, and it is not intellect — it is a hand. Beardsley worked in pen and black ink for reproduction, a medium with no tonal range at all: a mark is either there or it is not. Within that constraint he achieved effects of texture, volume and erotic suggestion that oil painters struggled to get with a full palette, by controlling the weight and speed of a line and, above all, by deciding what to leave as blank paper. The blankness is the technique, and his contemporaries saw it. The critic Julius Meier-Graefe observed that in one day he could be Baroque, Empire, Pre-Raphaelite or Japanese, and yet he was always Beardsley. Ada Leverson's much-quoted joke captures the double reaction: while every connoisseur declared that line superb, there were others who deplored that he did not know where to draw it. He stated his own programme without modesty: "I have one aim — the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing."
The counter-case is worth stating. He had almost no formal training and a narrow range — a black-and-white illustrator working to commission inside other men's books. Much of his output was calculated shock, and the erotica divides viewers between those who find it liberating and those who find it adolescent; his deathbed letter suggests he had doubts. What is not in dispute is that he invented a graphic language essentially from nothing, at an age when most artists are still copying.
Legacy
Beardsley's black-and-white aesthetic fed directly into Art Nouveau and into modern poster design, and it has kept resurfacing wherever elegance and menace need to be combined — including, memorably, among the figures assembled on a Beatles album cover in the 1960s, when the psychedelic era rediscovered him wholesale. The Tate mounted a major exhibition of his work in 2020, more than a hundred and twenty years after his death, still calling him the wunderkind of decadence. His entire career fits inside the span most artists spend at art school. Almost no one has ever done more with less time, or with less ink.
Achievements
- Movement: Aestheticism and Symbolism
