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Scandal Beauty: Mark Gatiss on Aubrey Beardsley (2020)
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00:00As a deeply pretentious young man, I was obsessed with late Victoriana, the gas-lit streets of Conan Doyle's London, the decadent world of Oscar Wilde, and the shockingly beautiful and beautifully shocking artworks of Aubrey Beardsley, a young artist who wielded outrage and self-promotion as adroitly as his pen,
00:29and whose uncompromising attitude feels utterly modern.
00:34A 23-year-old boy doing those in the Victorian era is astounding. They're still kind of, whoa!
00:43The critics were complaining about Mr Beardsley's disgusting woman, really plumbed new depths of horror and depravity.
00:53But I was also drawn to his romantically brief life, dead at 25, an artistic career of just six years, cut short by tuberculosis.
01:06He knew he didn't have long. He consciously worked faster. He was aware that if he had his life's work to do, he had to do it quickly.
01:15Who could resist a story like this?
01:20The modern cult of Beardsley began here, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where, in May 1966, the first major retrospective of his work caused a sensation.
01:34But what isn't so well known is that after that landmark exhibition opened here, the Vice Squad raided a nearby bookshop after complaints that it was selling copies of Beardsley's risqué salome drawings for a shilling a pop.
01:50But when quizzed by the coppers, the bookseller replied that he could see nothing wrong with it, as the originals were on display up the road.
01:59The police then came here to the V&A to interview the director, Sir Trenchard Cox, who assured them, over a cup of tea, that Beardsley was art and not pornography.
02:10The police went quietly on their way.
02:13Many of Beardsley's most explicit drawings were indeed on show, but a few were held back.
02:21And now I've come to take a peek at one of them.
02:27This is The Impatient Adulterer, one of a series of drawings made by Beardsley to illustrate the satires of the Roman poet Juvenal.
02:35Beardsley considered it rather a nice picture, but the curator of the 1966 show deemed it too nasty to exhibit.
02:44This was clearly too much for a swinging 60s audience, and perhaps it's still too much for us now.
02:53It's a question that Beardsley's work continues to pose.
02:59From decadent London to the tranquil south of France, I'm going to follow in Beardsley's fevered footsteps to explore the world of an artist every bit as strange, perverse and elusive as his art.
03:13I want to find out how, against such disabling odds, this extraordinary young man achieved so much in so short a time.
03:41Where better to begin?
03:43than with Aubrey Beardsley's first great work, created when he was just 19.
03:53It's a scene from Act II of Siegfried by Richard Wagner, Beardsley's favourite composer.
04:00It's an extraordinary piece of work.
04:03What we start to expect from Beardsley is great passages of negative space, particularly white.
04:09But it's also densely packed with detail.
04:13And although it's a sort of bucolic landscape, it's also completely occupied by sort of monstrous flowers.
04:24There's something, as ever with Beardsley, unhealthy about it, which I find very appealing.
04:31Beardsley.
04:32I find that.
04:32I find that.
04:33I find that.
04:34Beardsley himself must have been hugely proud of this picture, because he presented it as a gift to Edward Byrne Jones, the artist who had perhaps inspired him more than any other as he was growing up.
04:45Young Aubrey's first significant encounter with the work of Byrne Jones was here, at the Church of the Annunciation in Brighton, the town where Beardsley was born in 1872.
05:10Beardsley was very drawn to this stained glass window here above the high altar.
05:31It depicts the Annunciation and attendant angels, and it was designed by Byrne Jones and executed by William Morris, two of the leading English artists of the day.
05:42And I can see how these willowy, androgynous figures influenced Beardsley's own early work.
05:47Gazing up at it in wonder, little could Beardsley have known that within a few years, Byrne Jones would affect the course of his artistic career.
06:06But I think there's a deeper reason for Beardsley's visits here.
06:19Soon after his seventh birthday, he fell ill with a fever and persistent cough.
06:24The doctor, fearing the worst, detected an ominous creaking on the lungs.
06:29It was tuberculosis.
06:31TB, or consumption, was the great killer of late Victorian England.
06:42There was no known cure, but often death came only after many years of severe coughing, weight loss, and hemorrhages.
06:50The young priest in charge of the church, Father Chapman, was also tubercular.
06:55Aubrey became deeply impressed by the zeal with which Chapman pursued his vocation in the face of disease.
07:02The fourth mass has ended.
07:05The great speed of God.
07:07With the knowledge that he was then deemed incurable, Beardsley, I think, decided he would have to live his life with, as a friend put it, the fatal speed of those who are to die young.
07:19At school in Brighton, Aubrey was too frail for sports and games.
07:32But his talent for drawing was soon recognized by his housemaster, who encouraged an interest in French art and literature.
07:39Beardsley would continue to look overseas for inspiration as his artistic skills developed.
07:51But Aubrey had barely left school when his tuberculosis erupted in a sudden attack.
07:57When he was 17 and had his first major hemorrhage, coughing up blood, it would have been clear that he had the adult form of tuberculosis and he could expect to probably die quite young.
08:08Now, if you look at Victorian representations of consumption in particular, they're very focused on the deathbed and the sickbed, as if consumptives are essentially dying people.
08:18But you can imagine how unhelpful that is for someone who is living with this disease.
08:23How do you build a life for yourself when your culture doesn't have a sense of what that life would look like?
08:29The shock of his hemorrhage transformed Beardsley into a young man in a hurry.
08:37He now sought out every opportunity to further his artistic development.
08:42By this time, he was living with his mother and sister in London, where he worked as a junior clerk at the Guardian Life Assurance Company.
08:54It was office drudgery by day, incessant drawing by night.
09:01Weekend saw Beardsley and his sister, Mabel, voraciously binging on their favorite paintings by artists like Berne Jones, scouring museums, galleries,
09:11and even collections in private homes.
09:15In July 1891, just before Beardsley turned 19, there was a bit of an artistic epiphany for him.
09:22He visited the house of Frederick Leyland with his sister, Mabel,
09:26and Leyland's house probably had one of the most important collections of contemporary artists.
09:34And here is a copy of a letter that Beardsley wrote to his school friends,
09:39recounting this visit to Leyland's house.
09:42And that shows Beardsley with his sister, Mabel, entering this house.
09:47So it's going through the rooms with Leyland's employees standing there.
09:52Yes, very stiffly. Gorgeous.
09:55It's very invocative drawing there, isn't it?
09:57It is, yes.
09:58It looks a little bit crafty, but already has the cane of the dundies.
10:02He listed all the paintings that he saw and put exclamation marks on what he liked.
10:08And one of the pictures that he liked was Prosopini by Rossetti.
10:13Beardsley's imagination was really fired up, I think, by what he saw.
10:18And he does quite a few drawings with Rossetti femme fatale types,
10:22but always in a more subversive way.
10:28Bernd Jones was probably one of the artists who fascinated Beardsley the most at the time.
10:34I think he was particularly interested in mythology in Bernd Jones's works,
10:39but also in the drapery, the ethereal quality of his paintings,
10:45this sort of idea that you have a world of imagination.
10:48And the compositions as well.
10:50The elongated vertical format is something that is also going to inspire Beardsley.
11:01But Beardsley didn't just seek out paintings.
11:04He shrewdly sought out the painters themselves.
11:07Edward Burne Jones had begun opening his London studio to the public.
11:12And so one Sunday afternoon, the 18-year-old Beardsley went to call on the man he considered
11:18the greatest living artist in Europe.
11:23However, at the door, they were told, the studio was closed,
11:26and no one would be admitted without a special appointment.
11:31They began to walk away when a voice called out after them,
11:35Pray, come back.
11:36I couldn't think of letting you go away without seeing the pictures.
11:42It was Bernd Jones himself who then ushered them in
11:46and proceeded to give Beardsley and his sister a private tour of his studio.
11:52In an incredibly audacious move, and one that must have been premeditated,
11:56Beardsley then mentioned that he just happened, by the merest chance,
11:59to have some of his drawings with him contained in a small leather portfolio.
12:03Bernd Jones began to look through them before delivering a verdict
12:07that was to change Beardsley's life.
12:10Hmm.
12:12All are full of thought and poetry and imagination, he observed.
12:16Nature has given you every gift necessary to become a great artist.
12:20I seldom or never advise anyone to take up art as a profession,
12:26but in your case, I can do nothing else.
12:30And that's how Beardsley presented Bernd Jones with this,
12:39the largest and most intricately worked of his early pen drawings.
12:45He was rightly flattered when Bernd Jones hung it in pride of place in his drawing room.
12:50But as well as being a gift, the picture now strikes me as a declaration of arrival,
12:58which I'm coming to see as characteristic of Beardsley's remarkable sense of confidence.
13:05But we also see the beginning of the Beardsley brand,
13:07because here is one of the first, if not the first,
13:09instances of the famous Beardsley trademark, as he called it,
13:13the three-prong signature.
13:15But Siegfried also marked the end of Beardsley's early period.
13:24He was rapidly moving away from the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites
13:27to head in an even more striking and original direction.
13:31In the weeks following his encounter with Bernd Jones,
13:47Beardsley settled into a very specific creative routine.
13:52After finishing his day's work, he'd returned to the family lodgings here,
13:56at 59 Charlewood Street, Pimlicombe.
14:04At a small plain table, Beardsley would set out two French Ormolu candlesticks,
14:10a sheaf of medium-grade cartridge paper, pen and ink.
14:15And thereafter, often into the small hours, he'd lose himself to a gallery of strange new creations,
14:25which seemed to startle even Beardsley himself.
14:30I struck for myself an entirely new method of drawing and composition.
14:34The subjects were quite mad and a little indecent.
14:37Strange, hermaphroditic creatures wandering about in Piero costumes or modern dress,
14:44quite a new world of my imagination.
14:50These pictures strike me as graphic in both senses of the word.
14:54They're explicit, and they also have a clarity and simplicity of line.
14:59They reflect a dramatic new influence on Beardsley's work.
15:09Japanese art.
15:14On his visit to the Leyland House that summer,
15:18Beardsley had a revelation when he was shown into the Peacock Room,
15:21symbolic of a widespread Japanese craze during the late Victorian period,
15:27following the opening of trade links with the East.
15:33His interest peaked.
15:35Beardsley began to seek out examples of Shunga woodblock prints.
15:41He was beguiled not just by their fine lines and flat tones,
15:45but also by their erotic and nightmarish aura.
15:49This is a book that we know from a school friend of Beardsley's,
15:55that he knew well.
15:58And it's called Tales from Old Japan.
16:01And you can see echoes here, sort of quite clearly,
16:05of these Japanese folktales.
16:08Yes, it's an immediate, obvious influence.
16:11But the use of the negative space, the black and white,
16:13but then the grotesquery, but he's immediately synthesized it into his own Beardsley vision, hasn't he?
16:20And wouldn't have been seen in quite this way, I think,
16:23until the Japanese sort of influence started to come in.
16:27It's something...
16:29This aspect of Beardsley's work has long been a source of inspiration for Chris Riddell,
16:33one of today's most imaginative book illustrators.
16:36I think what's special about Beardsley is his idiosyncrasy.
16:41If you see a Beardsley, you never forget it.
16:44And I think maybe that's because he's so effective in channeling his influences and making them his own.
16:49And I remember being very struck by his characterisation, the simplicity of his line.
16:56Figures sort of bleed off the page and sort of spreads almost like a stain to the edges of the picture plane.
17:04No one can pose his pictures quite like Beardsley.
17:07So this has always been one of my favourites in Sipid Vita Nova.
17:14Here begins the new life.
17:16Where do you think this rather angry fetus motif comes from?
17:20That's fascinating, isn't it?
17:22I think this is his step into a new visual language.
17:26I like to think of this illustration as a farewell to Byrne Jones and the pre-Raphaelite profile.
17:32There's something curdled about...
17:35Five-topped shadows.
17:37Oh, yes.
17:39And the fetus, I mean, it's interesting.
17:41This is a German book of anatomy that Beardsley would have encountered in his grandfather's study.
17:49And you can see here these diagrams of a fetus we recognise.
17:55What he's added, I think, is this sort of notion of absolute sort of implacable fury.
18:02This appears just at the time when Beardsley himself is making a transition into a new style.
18:10He begins a new life, so he's talking about himself.
18:14And then the fetus recurs, so he obviously enjoyed using this as a device.
18:18This amazing picture of a birth from the calf of a leg.
18:24What on earth is going on there?
18:26And we can see here a wonderful sort of Beardsley composition.
18:30This has got a very Japanese quality to it, and yet it is all Beardsley's own.
18:36It's a blood spatter pattern, like a crime scene, that's what he's...
18:41Yes, yes.
18:43And then with sort of areas of rather exquisite beauty in the detail of the flowers.
18:49And then you get this extraordinary detail, which is the sort of scissors,
18:53this sort of almost medical instrument pointing up towards the mother,
19:00which is sort of, again, a little sinister detail.
19:02And Beardsley's very good, I think, at just throwing us off kilter.
19:09By all accounts, he worked very quickly, in some senses,
19:13in terms of laying down the ink, but was very decisive.
19:17And so he must have had great sort of hand-eye coordination,
19:21and a very steady hand, I think, when applying the sort of black ink,
19:25and almost with no correction, which I think is remarkable.
19:32Beardsley's bold new style was matched by an increasing commercial ambition.
19:40Although he was beginning to sell his works privately,
19:43for between five and ten shillings a drawing,
19:46Beardsley decided it was time to besiege the publishers, as he put it,
19:51in order to reach a bigger market.
19:52Once again, Beardsley showed remarkable savvy for someone who was still just 19.
20:00He was, in today's parlance, excellent at networking.
20:05And his big break was just around the corner.
20:08Frederick Evans, the proprietor of Beardsley's favourite bookshop,
20:16had heard that the publisher J. M. Dent was seeking an illustrator
20:21for an edition of Sir Thomas Mallory's chivalric romance, The Morte d'Arthur.
20:26One day, Evans urged Dent to come along to the bookshop to see some examples of Beardsley's work.
20:36And as they looked through them, who should walk in but Beardsley himself, on his lunchtime brows.
20:42Evans pointed him out.
20:45There's your man, he said.
20:48Dent found Beardsley weird and emaciated,
20:52but sensed, as he wrote later, a new breath of life in English black and white drawing.
20:58And he asked Beardsley to provide a specimen illustration for his approval.
21:03Rightly sensing that angry fetuses might not be quite what Dent was looking for,
21:08Beardsley switched back to his earlier style.
21:10Over the next few days, he worked tirelessly on a drawing depicting the climax of the Morte d'Arthur,
21:18the achieving of the Sangreal.
21:21And then, he held his breath.
21:25Any reservations Dent might have had vanished the moment he saw the picture.
21:31He declared it a masterpiece, and commissioned Beardsley at once.
21:35Beardsley immediately handed in his resignation at the Guardian Life Insurance Office.
21:41That was that. He was an artist.
21:44And from now on, he was determined to live by his pen.
21:46The sheer scale of the commission was daunting, but rather than forcing Beardsley to take a stylistic step back,
21:57the Morte d'Arthur would actually capture his continuing artistic evolution.
22:02I've come to look at a rare original copy with one of the world's leading Beardsley scholars.
22:09Hello. Hello.
22:10Come in.
22:11Thank you very much.
22:12What we've got here are the Morte d'Arthur, the two volumes.
22:27He was asked to make over 400 designs for this book, all the way through.
22:33It has an amazing array of full pages, borders, chapter headings.
22:39It's a staggering piece of work for basically an untried artist.
22:43It's absolutely stunning, isn't it?
22:44Probably one of the most elaborate illustrations in the whole book was used as the frontispiece,
22:50and it shows King Arthur having encountered the dragon that he's laying rather nonchalantly in front of.
22:57But you can see that in this, Beardsley has crammed as much complicated detail as he possibly can.
23:04It's a statement of intent, isn't it, I think, in a way.
23:08There couldn't be anything more clean-limbed and wholesome than the story of Arthur and the Grail.
23:14All the way through, he starts introducing odd characters that are nothing to do with Mallory and the Knights and Middle Ages.
23:21You know, he starts putting pan and forms in. Quite funny, but deeply subversive.
23:27The pagan in the most Christian of texts.
23:29Exactly, exactly. And I suspect half the time, you know, he's just actually introducing elements almost for the fun of it.
23:37Almost to be confusing.
23:40I think Dent, the publisher, was delighted because people talked about the book.
23:44That's all that matters.
23:45It's what matters.
23:47And you can see in the early stages, you know, they're incredibly elaborate.
23:52You know, he's really throwing his all into it.
23:54By the time he's getting on through the book, he's actually having to do six or ten drawings in a night in order to keep up with the deadline.
24:04And he finds ways, in fact, of actually putting slightly less intricate effort into it.
24:09And he begins to sort of interest in a sort of simplified pen technique even, which obviously allowed him to fulfil the commission.
24:19This is one of my favourites. I remember this very well from my teenage years.
24:22Guinevere becoming a nun.
24:23But what I always loved is just this incredible stark blackness.
24:27Yeah, I mean, this is what he called his black blot. Your eye invents all the detail.
24:33There's a sort of flatness to them, isn't there?
24:35Yes. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Like Japanese prints that have no shadows, no perspective.
24:40And this also coincides with something of a revolution in the printing process.
24:45Ah, absolutely. I can show you.
24:47Here's an old-fashioned wood-engraved block, just a block of boxwood.
24:51An artist will have made a design, and then a different man, a craftsman, will have sat patiently carving away at the block.
25:00So the old way of reproducing is essentially a copy of a copy.
25:04Someone else's hand is interpreting the artist's work.
25:07Absolutely.
25:09Beardsley exploited this extraordinary new technique called zinc line blocks.
25:14So basically the original drawing is photographed and induced onto a zinc plate.
25:18This is the new cutting-edge technology. This could be done quickly and cheaply.
25:24But more importantly for Beardsley, what you see here is Beardsley's exact line.
25:30It's not interpreted by a wood engraver.
25:33And Beardsley's whole career is actually predicated on the fact that this new process allows his drawings to be rapidly reproduced.
25:41At just 20, Beardsley had become a new, very modern kind of artist.
25:47The printing technique created a direct connection between Beardsley and his audience.
25:52The illustrations you held in your hand weren't copies of originals hanging in galleries or private collections,
26:00but the finished artwork itself.
26:01But the Mort d'Arthur hadn't even been published when, with characteristic urgency, Beardsley made his next move.
26:11He was bewitched by London's avant-garde, the circle of decadence and aesthetes of whom Oscar Wilde was the acknowledged king.
26:19With his frail body and fevered imaginings, Beardsley must have thought he would find kindred spirits here.
26:28And in early 1893, he saw a way in to this exclusive group.
26:34A new magazine called The Studio was taking shape.
26:43Its publishers wanted it to reflect the latest artistic trends and were looking for a new face to give them a sensational send-off.
26:51Beardsley was the perfect choice.
26:55One never forgets one's first review.
26:57Success to Scandal, Times Educational Supplement, 1988.
27:02For Beardsley, it was this.
27:04As well as designing this striking cover, the publishers chose no less than seven of Beardsley's drawings to accompany their keynote article.
27:11A new illustrator, Aubrey Beardsley.
27:18The article celebrated the presence among us of an artist whose work is quite as remarkable in its execution as in its invention.
27:25It sealed Beardsley's reputation overnight.
27:29And it provided him with the springboard to seize the commission of a lifetime.
27:38He'd been tipped off that an illustrated version of Oscar Wilde's banned biblical play, Salome, was to be published.
27:45Beardsley knew he had the credentials to make an unsolicited pitch.
27:50With canny acumen, remember, he was still only 20 years old, he made this drawing.
28:00Beardsley employed all his most Japanese conventions in depicting the climax of Wilde's play, where Salome kisses the severed head of John the Baptist.
28:10Would Wilde see it? Would he like it? Would he take the bait?
28:19But of course he did.
28:24Beardsley's drawing had cast its spell. Salome was his.
28:35By August 1893, Aubrey Beardsley had more than just his 21st birthday to celebrate.
28:42Wilde's ringing endorsement proved to be his passport to fame.
28:51The Edsley became a regular sight on the giddy social circuit.
28:55New friends, including the artists Max Beerbohm, William Rothenstein, and Walter Sickert, captured his pale, attenuated figure, immaculately attired, thanks to his £50 fee from Salome's publisher, John Lane.
29:15Throwing himself into the commission with what he called a mystico-oriental style, Beardsley conjured some of the defining images of the decade.
29:28It's a powerful image, isn't it? It takes me straight back to my, I don't know, when I was 12 or something and I first saw these images and I would stare at that face and think it's smiling but it's so cruel.
29:43Yes. You know, and that one as well, they're demonic.
29:47It's just amazing, tracery of delicate lines and all these weird, unhealthy blooms.
29:54Yes.
29:56There's so much to look at, even though it's simple and clear and clean, there's actually a lot.
30:01Every, every candle has a little story, there's a little phallic symbol underneath it and a little creature holding up that one.
30:09Well, the fascinating thing is, this is the censored version.
30:12Oh, you're joking.
30:13This is the original.
30:14Oh, you're right.
30:15Ah, here.
30:16Even with pubic hair, which as we know, the Victorians really didn't like at all.
30:22Goodness me.
30:24And our old friend the fetus making a return.
30:26Yes.
30:30Beardsley completely ignoring the diktats of the text.
30:37Within his drawings for Salome, Beardsley introduces the unmistakable figure of Oscar Wilde himself.
30:44And yet, there seems to be a very fine line between homage and ridicule.
30:50So this is The Woman in the Moon, and we have a very clear Oscar here.
30:59Yeah.
31:00John Lane, the publisher, took fright at it being called The Man in the Moon, in case there was a sort of lightidious dimension.
31:06Oh, yeah.
31:07Changed the title to The Woman in the Moon.
31:08But then, I remember thinking when I saw that as a teenager, that as a caricature of Wilde, it's even crueler calling it that, because it appears to be a sort of blousy lady.
31:16Yes.
31:17Very fleshy-faced.
31:18It is a peculiar thing that he would do to someone who's older and greater than he at the time.
31:27Most people would say, this is the great Oscar Wilde, and he thought that himself.
31:31And he would presume to do that.
31:34He sort of has a sort of crush or some kind of hero worship.
31:39Very rapidly, he turns it into a satire or bites the hand.
31:45Bites the hand.
31:46We sometimes forget how young he was.
31:48What he actually has is all the pretentiousness of a man of 21, and all the ingratitude.
31:54Yes.
31:56Whether or not Wilde took offence from Beardsley's parody, he also seems to have taken inspiration from him.
32:04Wilde was influenced by Beardsley to the extent that he saw in Beardsley someone with an absolutely cold eye.
32:11The absolute eye of an artist who was refused to be sentimental.
32:16And if you look at Wilde's work after Salome, he learnt in meeting Beardsley that you could get rid of every element that appears kindly.
32:30So, for example, Lady Windermere's fan has melodrama and sentimentality in it.
32:35But after Beardsley, he writes The Importance of Being Earnest, which is crystalline in its absolute perfection,
32:41and has no hint of melodrama and no hint of sentimentality.
32:46In that sense, it's much closer to Beardsley than what he'd been doing before.
32:51And maybe he saw in this young man, he thought, you know, you can't go that far.
32:55There's a wonderful quote, a friend catches him scurrying through London in the winter without a coat.
33:01He says, I don't need one, I am always burning.
33:05And I think it means both physically and artistically, he's on fire.
33:13Salome calls precisely the sensation Beardsley had anticipated.
33:17His scandalous drawings easily upstaging Wilde's text and forcing a wedge between them.
33:25But Beardsley, never one to play safe, was already plotting his next move.
33:30As 1894 dawned, he hurried round to the offices of the Bodley Head to see his publisher, John Lane.
33:40Beardsley proposed a radical idea.
33:42A bold new quarterly magazine in which all that was daring in art and literature could appear.
33:48And with a clear demarcation between the two, pictures independent of stories and stories independent of pictures.
33:54He even proposed a title, The Yellow Book, knowing it would call to mind the popular and illicit French novels of the day bound in yellow wrappers.
34:03Seeing the potential this illicit glare of yellow might have, Lane agreed to back the venture at once, with Beardsley serving as art editor.
34:14But Beardsley had one stipulation.
34:17Perhaps fearing that Wilde would dominate the new venture, Beardsley insisted that Wilde be kept out of the Yellow Book.
34:24His confidence that he no longer needed Wilde was vindicated by the Yellow Book's instant success, selling out its first run of 5,000 copies in under a week.
34:35The tape holds some of the original designs that Beardsley produced for his new magazine.
34:43This is Beardsley's drawing for the very first number of the Yellow Book.
34:47These masked revellers have more than a hint of Toulouse-Lautrec's Moulin Rouge, but in Beardsley's hands they become by turns erotic and sinister.
34:55This cat-like figure here, with his or her sensual lips and almost drugged expression, seems replete with possibilities.
35:08Not all of them benign.
35:15This picture, known simply as the Fat Woman, was also intended with the first number of the Yellow Book.
35:20I love its bold composition. The hair, the hat, the feather are almost abstract shapes.
35:28And then the stark simplicity of this black wine bottle against the great expanse of white tablecloth.
35:37Looking back through editions of the Yellow Book, I'm surprised by just how many of Beardsley's drawings were of female figures.
35:43Was he, I wonder, identifying with another group of late Victorian troublemakers?
35:55I think what Beardsley was doing with inventing this kind of Beardsley woman was he was taking fears that existed at the time about the, er, what was called the New Woman, which was er, er, a new generation of women who were beginning to demand er, a lot of the freedoms that their brothers had.
36:12took for granted. So they were riding bicycles, er, they were taking jobs, er, they were taking jobs, so they had-
36:18Typewriting.
36:19That sort of thing. They had a little bit of financial independence, they had latch keys, they smoked cigarettes and read racy novels.
36:26And of course all this provoked a moral panic at the time with people who really thought, my goodness, where will this end? Of course they were sort of proto-feminists.
36:37So Beardsley took what was actually a type at the time and he realised what anxiety it was provoking. He gave it a little twist and made her a little bit more sinister.
36:47But I think that his creation of this extraordinary female figure was much more about him finding a way of expressing himself.
37:04For me I think Beardsley is interested in transgression, whether that transgression is a woman out at night by herself choosing her own book or whether it's something much more extreme.
37:16But it all came to a bit of a head with volume three of the Yellow Book, which shows a woman looking at her reflection in a looking glass and she's putting her makeup on.
37:29This provoked a critic from the world to refer to Mr Beardsley's disgusting woman and another critic said that it really plumbed new depths of horror and depravity.
37:45But there is a theory that because her dressing table mirror is lit by these two lamps here, which are little replicas of street lamps.
37:54Street lamps, yes.
37:55So the idea, well, as a girl I was always told to put my makeup on by the light I would appear in.
38:01So if you're going to be appearing during the day, you put it on by daylight.
38:04So the idea that she's putting it on by the light of street lamps can only mean that she was planning to spend her evening walking the streets.
38:13That's quite a subtle code. They got it.
38:17I was taught the same thing.
38:21Beardsley took fiendish delight in the attacks on the Yellow Book.
38:25Have you heard of the storm that raged? He wrote to the novelist Henry James.
38:29Most of the thunderbolts fell on my head.
38:32However, I enjoyed the excitement immensely.
38:35As a mark of celebrity status, you couldn't beat the pages of Punch magazine, which now took delight in lampooning Beardsley's drawings like this one.
38:45With their own spoof versions, signed with names like Danbury Beardless and Dauberway Weardsley.
38:58Ever ready to embrace new trends and reach as wide an audience as possible, Beardsley now fixed his antennae on a rapidly developing new medium that he realized would introduce him to the man in the street.
39:15On his infrequent visits to Paris, Beardsley had noticed how French poster design by the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec and others had transformed the streets into veritable open-air galleries.
39:28And now he hoped to create a similar splash of colour on the streets of London.
39:35Advertisement, pronounced Beardsley, is an absolute necessity of modern life.
39:40Could he be referring to himself?
39:42Beardsley's posters startled pedestrians and, like his illustrations, divided the critics, which I think would have delighted him.
39:51Here I think he continues to suggest the independent, liberated woman of the 1890s.
39:57And yet, no matter what the product, they're still teasingly sensual.
40:01This one, believe it or not, is advertising children's books.
40:04And this one, tempting the pedestrian through a beaded curtain, was said by one reviewer to cause camp horses to shy at the sight of her.
40:17Throughout 1894, Beardsley seemed unstoppable.
40:20Then, in early November, a sudden hemorrhage signalled the grim recurrence of tuberculosis.
40:35It was a severe attack, quite possibly exacerbated by his heavy workload.
40:41Doctors ordered his immediate removal to a clinic in the countryside.
40:44And it wasn't until early in the new year that Beardsley felt well enough to properly pick up his pen again.
40:51Only for a very different crisis to erupt.
40:55The arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel on the 5th of April 1895 for acts of gross indecency burst the decadent bubble forever.
41:07Beardsley was swiftly, and quite unfairly, caught up in the scandal.
41:13Leaving the hotel in the company of two detectives, Wilde was seen to be holding a French novel, bound in yellow wrappers.
41:22Believing it to be THE yellow book, people rapidly took matters into their own hands.
41:27A crowd assembled here on Vigo Street, outside the offices of the Bodley Head, and began to pelt these windows with mud and cobblestones.
41:34It was an attack on decadent art, and all that was deemed immoral.
41:40It was clear from the actions of the angry mob out here, a passable little riot, as one commentator called it,
41:46that Wilde's polluting influence was seen to spread like a disease through the pages of the yellow book, and by association through Beardsley himself.
41:53Almost overnight, he seemed to face an uncertain future.
41:58Wilde's imprisonment in May 1895 sent shock waves through artistic London.
42:04One critic accused Beardsley of being sexless and unclean.
42:09Beardsley had just finished designing this cover for volume five of the yellow book, when he learned that his publisher, John Lane, had fired him.
42:21He'd finally been living the life of his fantasies, only to be brutally woken up.
42:28His career was now quite likely over.
42:32But you don't get to achieve all that Aubrey Beardsley had done by knowing when to give up.
42:37It's said that as the Wilde scandal exploded, 600 gentlemen took the boat train to France.
42:56Many were destined for Dieppe, then something of an artist's colony.
43:00There, Beardsley and his fellow Eastleeds recovered and regrouped.
43:18They responded to their recent tribulations with a fresh wave of creativity.
43:23And before long, Beardsley was invited to set up a new magazine.
43:28Beardsley seized on the plan.
43:45Here was a chance to reverse his fortunes and also perhaps to showcase a new style in his drawing.
43:51Across the cafe table, he devised the magazine's manifesto, hoping to appeal to the tastes of the intelligent.
43:58Beardsley even came up with a name, the Savoy, like the recently opened hotel.
44:03Something lavish and modern.
44:06All well and good, but Beardsley needed a new publisher.
44:10Enter Leonard Smithers, an enterprising but somewhat disreputable figure,
44:16whose proud boast was that he would publish anything the others were afraid to touch.
44:20A sign in his bookshop window proclaimed,
44:24Smut is cheap today.
44:28Beardsley had lost none of his desire to provoke and burn bridges.
44:32His original cover for the first issue of the Savoy depicted a cherub vengefully urinating on a copy of the Yellow Book.
44:38Even Smithers insisted it was changed.
44:42In September 1895, with his new publication on the way, and the Wild Scandal dying down a little,
44:56Beardsley felt able to return to London from his self-imposed exile.
45:02But his prospects looked altogether more dim.
45:06Undeterred, he started writing and illustrating a novel under the hill.
45:12A fantasy replete with orgies and bestiality.
45:17And he adopted a new, more ornate drawing style, inspired by 18th century French prints.
45:24And I rather think that, at the center of the story, he placed himself.
45:29In Beardsley's original manuscript, the Abbe Fanfreluche was called the Abbe Aubrey.
45:36And it's tempting to imagine this as some sort of extravagant self-portrait.
45:41What it actually resembles most is a kind of 17th century swagger portrait.
45:48This amazing figure almost filling the frame like an effulgent butterfly.
45:54With this sensually-lipped arrogance.
45:58This tiny hand contained in the muffler there.
46:01And this aggressively masculine stance is instead replaced by a completely smooth lower portion.
46:11As is so often the case with Beardsley's pictures.
46:16The central figure is strangely androgynous, rather denatured.
46:19I wonder whether his experience as a man whose prospects for straight life, a straight future in the strictest sense, marriage and children.
46:35It's not something you can really expect, even if he wanted it.
46:39And there's no sign that he did.
46:40There's no sign that he had romantic relationships with anyone of any gender.
46:45But I wonder whether being slightly detached from those expectations or being able to defy a lot of the policing of sexuality and gender and masculinity at that time,
46:57perhaps gave an opportunity to think about, well, who am I? What am I? Who are my friends? Who are the people I care about? Who cares about me?
47:07Do the labels matter to me in the same way that they are a matter of life and death for other people around him?
47:14The Beardsley now cultivated a new friendship that may have been an attempt to address both his personal and financial uncertainties.
47:26He'd become fascinated by a study of homosexuality, or unisexuality, by a wealthy writer called Marc-Andre Rafalevich.
47:34Beardsley decided to pay him a visit. But was he attracted by Rafalevich's ideas or his money?
47:44When they met, Beardsley explained that he was, as he put it, in a fix and appealed to Rafalevich for advice.
47:52As an art patron with a large private income, the incentives for Beardsley were obvious.
47:57Rafalevich began buying his work, showering him with gifts of flowers and books and chocolates.
48:02They even adopted pet names, Beardsley signing himself Telemach and addressing Rafalevich as mentor.
48:10Rafalevich was then attempting to reconcile his homosexuality with a growing Catholic belief.
48:17Religious motifs began to appear more frequently in Beardsley's work.
48:24And he provided this drawing of a hermaphrodite for Rafalevich's latest volume of poems.
48:29It's hard not to read something very calculating in Beardsley's sudden attachment to Rafalevich, both as financial benefactor and spiritual mentor.
48:40Was Beardsley playing him? Embracing Catholicism merely to ingratiate himself?
48:46Perhaps. But I think whether it was tactical or not, this burgeoning friendship reflected a genuine confusion within Beardsley about his sexuality.
48:54And also had the very real effect of reawakening a spiritual need within him.
49:03Beardsley's personal torment seems to have reached a peak just before his 24th birthday.
49:08In July 1896, he spent six weeks here in Epsom at the Spread Eagle Hotel, recovering from yet another severe tuberculosis attack.
49:23Yet this was where he also conjured up his last great work.
49:26A series of graphic images that, once seen, are very hard to forget.
49:31And here are the resulting drawings, eight highly explicit illustrations for a privately printed edition of Aristophanes' bawdy comedy by Sistrata,
49:46in which women refuse their warring husbands' sex until a peace treaty is signed.
50:05With these pictures, Beardsley is exhibiting yet another change of style, this time drawing on Greek vase painting which he'd studied in the British Museum.
50:13Depicting figures with giant stylized phalluses as sported by ancient Greek actors.
50:22These are amongst the very first of Beardsley's drawings that I ever encountered, which drew me to him like a moth to a flame.
50:29I wonder why.
50:31They've lost none of their boldness or impact, the very definition of in-your-face.
50:37But there's an added poignancy from sitting here, and that comes from reading the letters that Beardsley wrote at this period, mostly to Smithers and Rafalevich.
50:49I read them for the first time only recently and was surprised how frank and unabashed they are.
50:53To Smithers, there is licentious banter and smutty asides.
50:58A photograph or a model of my prick, how widely spread is the doubt as to my sex.
51:04The cause of it, by the way, was not venereal.
51:07And here he tries to make light of his illness.
51:11The doctor has given me a wondrous medicine which makes my shit black and headache.
51:16Ammonia, potassium, belladonna and chloroform are among its simplest ingredients.
51:22But to Rafalevich, he talks piously of priests and saints, and confides how really depressed and frightened he is about his condition.
51:30Looking at these pictures again, and reading his letters, I get a very real sense of Beardsley sitting here alone in his hotel room, wrestling with his art and his fame.
51:40Smithers and Rafalevich perched like an angel and a devil on each shoulder, tempting him this way and that, towards the darkness and the light.
51:50Over the coming months, the hemorrhages became more frequent and intense, and Beardsley made plans to leave England.
52:00Oh, how tired I am of hearing my lung creak all day, he wrote to Rafalevich, like a badly made pair of boots.
52:10In April 1897, accompanied by his mother, Beardsley set off for the French Riviera.
52:16He was bound for Montaune, one of its chief health resorts, where he had taken rooms here, at the Hotel Cosmopolitan.
52:26The proximity to the mountains and the sea gave him a brief and misleading sense of restored energy.
52:43Beardsley began a new project, telling Smithers with typical frankness that the coming year would bring either death or masterpieces.
52:53To illustrate Ben Johnson's satirical play Volponi, Beardsley embarked on a series of decorative initials, using pencil and wash.
53:01But this tonal work was far more exacting than his line drawings, and the physical exertion took its toll on his frail body.
53:11He could only manage three to four hours a day.
53:13One day, near the sea front, an acquaintance noted how he saw, for a second, the sea.
53:27A yellow skeleton fighting an umbrella on the steps of a chapel, and suddenly recognized it to be Beardsley himself.
53:48Now a practicing Catholic, seeking out a place of worship, Beardsley had chanced upon this little chapel, which he began to attend regularly.
54:03As death tightened its grip on his lungs, Beardsley clung with ever deeper conviction to his faith and his rosary beads.
54:19As he sat here, I can imagine his mind reaching back to those days in Brighton, when he first sought out the Church of the Annunciation with its altar window.
54:28Seeing through it, all the possibilities of life, a mere twelve years back, and now a lifetime ago.
54:44At the end of January 1898, Beardsley was confined to his bed with persistent bleeding.
54:51Beardsley asked his mother to fetch his drawing materials, but the strain was too much.
54:56Ellen returned to find him with his face turned to the wall, and his gold-nibbed pen embedded in the floorboards, where he'd thrown it in despair.
55:07As the weeks dragged on, Beardsley's sister Mabel came over from England to help keep vigil by his bedside.
55:13Beardsley then seemingly scrawled one last note to Leonard Smithers, and it's a desperate final missive.
55:21Jesus is our Lord and Judge.
55:24Dear friend, I implore you to destroy all copies of Lysistrata and bad drawings.
55:30By all that is holy, all obscene drawings.
55:35Aubrey Beardsley, in my death agony.
55:38Is this, I wonder, a deathbed confession?
55:44A penitent wrestling with their conscience, surrendering their art to embrace their faith?
55:50Is this Beardsley's attempt to reconcile those two great spheres of his life that he always kept separate?
55:55Or was it, in fact, his mother who wrote the note, in an effort to save her son's posthumous reputation?
56:04Believing his publisher had agreed to his last wish, Aubrey Beardsley died on the 16th of March, 1898.
56:23He was 25.
56:28He never tried to hide his illness. He never denied it.
56:31He knew he didn't have long, therefore it must be work, work, work.
56:43He's not like illustrators of his own period.
56:46He has his own personal language that really does stand the test of time.
56:50He was keen to make sure that, you know, people understood what we now call his brand, this idea of what you do and the image you project as being sort of a seamless entity.
57:07You have to recognize his courage and his single-mindedness is of an order that is very rare.
57:17He raised the bar as to what was possible in terms of simplicity and purity of line and composition, but also of impurity of subject matter.
57:25I have a confession to make.
57:39I have been here once before, but back then I was a morbid 21-year-old armed only with an interrail ticket and a centre parting and on something of a pilgrimage.
57:51Standing here more than 30 years later, I'm more than ever in awe of this tragic man's genius.
57:57Aubrey Beardsley seemed to live several lifetimes in his brief span, restlessly innovative, propelled by his own sense of romantic doom, playful, prodigious and perverse, almost to the end.
58:11But Beardsley remains more than the poster boy for bedroom decadence.
58:14He was a very great artist and his mastery of line and extraordinary imagination shines still.
58:20The accompanying Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain is currently closed, but there is a free detailed guide available.
58:34Just follow the links from the BBC website.
58:37And you can take a closer look at Gauguin's vision after the sermon with Valdemar Januszczak.
58:43Find the art mysteries hidden therein tomorrow here at 8.30.
58:50To be stationed with Valdemar Januszczak is a sign,
58:57in味in�� star za colon.
59:00There is a recording of the Danny Harrisnet Siap Кassamp ahà along with Valdemar basteran climbing to OlajÃerku.
59:02This is an amazing reunion to this decade.
59:05It will have been the end through a그램 nanometer.
59:08Inresantal Isaiah 5519.
59:11Given that the image and closest done before the sermon therein drawing at Ragnarxic site today,
59:13it will have been the same nightmare of the time in the Re Triste of a零
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