Word: beardsley
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During his short career as commercial artist in fin de si*ecle England, Aubrey Beardsley scored an outstanding success. Unlike most illustrators, he attempted more than a mere commercial art, and he had enough technical equipment to become a significant draftsman of the nineteenth century...
Today, along with rising interest in the Art Nouveau movement of the 1890's, Beardsley has been brought once more into the limelight. As the show in Lamont testifies, his gifts were indeed impressive--he was a fine caricaturist (see his amusing sketch of Mendelssohn), his mastery of line at times equals Ingres' and his formal arrangements recall the brilliance of Toulouse-Lautrec. Though he was a clumsy landscapist, incompetent in his handling of perspective and an uninventive colorist, he had the good sense to play down these weaknesses and concentrated instead on the flat black and white sketches...
After duly appreciating all this technical assurance, though, I remain unaffected by most of Beardsley's art. Almost all of his works suggest that he used his craft without conviction or spirit. In his very best work, the Salome set in particular, his skill is matched by a twisted demonic compassion, a wierd love of the grotesque which gives the drawings a forcefulness that commands attention. But the majority of pieces in this exhibition are merely lovely designs which at their best provide stylish colors for The Yellow Book...
...Beardsley's subject matter is original and imaginative enough, with its grotesque women, debauched men, cavorting gnomes and malevolent dwarfs, but his technical approach to these appears off-hand, and insufficiently inventive. Though no design in this show is incompetent, most lack the power they might have had if Beardsley had been a little more adventurous and a little less facile. Even the fine Ali Baba, the epitome of gourmanderie, bulging with corpulence, could have used a more radical treatment. As it is, one finds it a very excellent, but conventional, treatment of an extremely unconventional subject...
Occasionally, Crabbe frequents the literary salon of Sidney Thorah, editor of The Blue Volume, "a lank round-shouldered bony unhealthy personage" (in real life Henry Harland, literary editor of John Lane's Yellow Book, made famous by Beardsley and Beerbohm). In his cast-off dinner jacket, Crabbe does not flourish amid the strangely innocent Ninetyish wickedness of this salon...