The Monstrous Orchid

Flippant Victorians parodied his name as Weirdsley Daubery or Awfly Weirdly. For the art of Aubrey Vincent Beardsley, whose sinuous draftsmanship fluttered through the pages of the 1890s farthest-out books, was the scandalous titillation of his day. He seemed to have dipped his pen in laudanum and night shade; his dark silhouettes fairly rippled with overtressed vixens, leering harle quins and glinting grotesques.

Beardsley was decadent and dainty, the epitome of the late-Victorian dandyism that prized artificiality over nature. It is a pity that he never used mauve ink. Oscar Wilde once paid him the compliment of calling him "a monstrous orchid," and Beardsley, relishing his role, jotted on the back of one sketch proof:

Because one figure was undressed

This little drawing was suppressed,

It was unkind, but never mind,

Perhaps it was all for the best.

Satanism & Embroidery. The largest Beardsley exhibit ever shown opened last week in London's Victoria and Albert Museum. And though the artist's work seemed to critics of his time as saccharinely pornographic as orgies sculpted in marzipan, the exhibition recalls his widespread influence. Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch based some of his violent images directly on Beardsley drawings. The ballet impresario Daighilev had sets designed from Beardsley. Kandinsky and even Picasso were admirers. Beardsley's sense of abstract design even relates to the hard-edge abstraction practiced today.

Save for apprenticing in an architectural office, Beardsley had almost no formal training in art when, in 1893, at the age of 20, he was rocketed to recognition by an article in a popular London art periodical called The Studio. Only five years later, he was dead of tuberculosis. In the interim, he had, as he said, "embellished" or "embroidered" dozens of books, from Malory's Morte a"Arthur to Wilde's Salome, with drawings that earned him Art Critic Roger Fry's epithet, "the Fra Angelico of Satanism."

Weary & Queery. Beardsley was influenced by Japanese prints and linear Greek vase painting, created an amalgam that also included serpentine art nouveau and traditional English silhouette figures. His subject matter was never innocent. Wrote Beardsley of a series of book cuts: "The subjects were quite mad and a little indecent. Strange hermaphroditic creatures wandering about in Pierrot costumes or modern dress; quite a new world of my own creation."

Indeed, Beardsley dwelt in quite a new world, a velvet underground tolerated by Victorians in literature and art as long as it wore the air of fantasy. His frontispiece for John Davidson's The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender of 1895 shows a barely bosomed lady flagellating a middle-sexed supplicant, wielding the most fragile of whips as if it were a fan at high tea.

He had been art director of The Yellow Book, a weary, queery literary quarterly; and when Oscar Wilde made scandalous trial headlines for his homosexual liaison, Beardsley, though not involved, was sacked out of hand. But when James McNeill Whistler at last told Beardsley that he was indeed a great artist, Beardsley cried. Then again, he was only 23 at the time.

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