“The goody-goody taste of the British public is somewhat peculiar. The very work that they expect from a French artist or author will only excite indignation if it emanates from the pencil or pen of an Englishman.” Aubrey Beardsley wrote those words in 1897. A year later he died of tuberculosis, at the age of just twenty-five. His success in transforming “the goody-goody taste” of the nation, in a career compressed to five years of self-consciously innovative brilliance, is one of the principal themes of a new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery: “The Age of Enchantment: Beardsley, Dulac and their contemporaries, 1890-1930”.
Beardsley himself is the undisputed star of the show. His sinuous, ornate designs, mostly in pen and lustrous black Indian ink, epitomised the new, fin-de-siecle style aptly dubbed “Decadent”. The high priest of Decadence in literature was Oscar Wilde, but it was Beardsley’s achievement to devise a language for art as supple, as mischievous and as vividly aphoristic as Wildean prose.
Among the earliest works in the show are a pair of line block illustrations to the Dent edition of the Morte d’Arthur, done in 1893-4: How Four Queens Found Lancelot Sleeping and Sir Lancelot and the Witch. Beardsley chose an appropriate style for his illustrations to the romance, creating such a careful pastiche of the popular neo-medieval productions of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press that Morris threatened to sue Beardsley for plagiarism. Beardsley dismissed the charge as ludicrous, which suggests that he knew how far he was destined to transform the conventions of Kelmscott Press illustration – which amounted, in essence, to little more than a fey, mass-market version of Pre-Raphaelitism, with its swooning maidens enclosed in leafy bowers. Even in these two examples, Beardsley has begun to work his corrupting magic on the moral...
