Page 176 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 176/206
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley: Illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome 1894
Caught in the cusp of the Pre-Raphaelite’s mediaevalism and the emerging art-nouveau modernism, Beardsley become notorious overnight for his illustrations for a reprint of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1893), and then these beautiful (and to the Victorian mind-set, salaciously erotic and decadent) line drawings for Oscar Wilde’s Salome. A style connoisseur or aesthete, much after Wilde’s persona, Beardsley, fresh out of the Westminster Art School, dyed his hair green, wore stylishly cut, formal morning suits for visits to his publishers, and went on to art-direct the aesthetic magazine The Yellow Book (1894. The impact of Beardsley’s style of art nouveau, heavily influenced by the Japanese Ukiyo-e (floating world) wood-block prints that appeared in Europe in the later 19th century, and possibly by the posters of Toulouse Lautrec he would have seen on visits to Paris, was immediate and long-lasting. He was rediscovered by my generation in the late 1960s, and influenced psychedelic poster design. The photo-portrait of Beardsley is by his friend Frederick Hollyer...
I think you can detect lots of the influence of the masters of the Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints in Beardsley's Salome - at least in the fine lines and low-key eroticism of the delightful Salome above left, while the title-page still harks back to the medieval tastes of Emery Walker and William Morris. Look at the floating world prints of Utamaro Kitagawa (especially the Laughing Tippler volume - made in 1803). These prints and others by Hokusai, Kuniyoshi Utagawa and lots of less talented artists were infiltrating into Europe (initially as wrapping paper for porcelain), and were avidly collected by leading artists of the fin-de-siecle, including James McNeill Whistler, Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Alphonse Mucha, and Toulouse-Lautrec. But Beardsley is not a painter and doesn't reference Japanese prints directly (as van Gogh does - see his Portrait of Père Tanguy -1887) - instead it is his quality of line and the essential similarity of the results of fine print-making and fine line drawing - and his disposition and use of space, where this influence is most apparent. He is also adept at using the subtle - and often extremely overt - eroticism so well practiced by Utamaro. In the late 1960s, there was a renewed interest in Beardsley (until then largely ignored by the British fine-art establishment), spurred by his association with the aestheticals and art nouveau, his love of the grotesque and erotic, his habit of dyeing his hair green, his impeccable sartorial taste, and his a-genderism - all of which seemed to fit well with the psychedelic flower-power spirit of the time. His influence at this time is reflected in the numerous publications that illustrate his work - cf those by Robert ~Ross, Brian Reade, R.A. Walker, and Bruce Harris (all c1967).