Aubrey Beardsley, often cited as the “dominating artistic personality” and “the one ‘genius’” of the 1890s, has long been acknowledged by scholars as “the mentality most representative” of the period known as the Victorian Decadence. Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque analyzes a wide range of Beardsley’s most characteristic works, establishing the assumptions underlying his world view and clarifying why so many observers have considered Beardsley’s art indispensable to understanding fin-de-siècle Victorian culture. The book examines Aubrey Beardsley's artistic development and his implicit view of the nature of meaning itself in the context of the fin de siècle. His parodic art, characterized by a variety of grotesque figures and revolutionary designs, captured visually the central contradictions and paradoxes of the “yellow nineties”—a period whose “Religion of Art” sought to establish an authenticating “center” for life, only to discover a world that was not logocentric and comforting, but paradoxical and unsettling.
Beardsley’s art presents an ultimately unresolved, interlacing dialogue between two seemingly polar impulses, variations of the same polarity that characterized his personal temperament: on the one hand, an almost compulsive desire to violate, scandalize, and destabilize conventional boundaries of decorum, imposing an iconoclastic personal “signature” on the old order; and on the other hand , an equally strong need to incorporate, inscribe, and affirm the metaphysical certainty of traditional authority, whether it be some implicit moral integrity (in opposition to social hypocrisy) or the absolute hegemony of Art. It is part of the precarious balance in Beardsley’s art that neither iconoclastic disorder nor cultural authority is able to supercede the other entirely, always leaving the viewer with some degree of intractable paradox, stranded in a continuing whirlpool of irony. Signaling a visual-arts equivalent of Einstein’s relativity theory and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” Beardsley’s salacious hidden images and ambiguous designs demand to “be read” narratively and conventionally and yet ultimately resist any harmonizing univocal meaning.
The grotesque becomes for Beardsley an emblem for—the
objective correlative of—this potentially “monstrous” metaphysical dislocation.
As if concentrating all the fearful contradictions of the Decadence itself,
Beardsley’s various grotesque shapes and mutated figures—foetus/old man, dwarf,
Clown, Harlequin, Pierrot, among others—function as visual incarnations of
metaphysical contortion and suggest the ultimate impossibility of ever resolving
the paradoxes such dislocations represent, even as Beardsley’s elegant designs
seek to control and implicitly recuperate those dislocations formalistically.
Embodying a style that simultaneously “deforms” yet aestheticizes, Beardsley’s
grotesque reconfigurations become a rhetoric for radically realigning canonical
meaning itself, effecting a kind of “caricature” of traditional signification.
And among all of Beardsley’s tropic “mutations,” the one figure which most
synthesizes both the disorienting dislocations of the grotesque and the recuperating
elegance of art, is the Dandy, that rebellious icon of the Decadent “Religion
of Art.” Similarly, Beardsley himself, over the entirety of his short
career and in a dazzling array of constantly changing styles, presents us
with a world which is inescapably “de-formed” even in its elegance.
As an artist and cultural icon, he was himself,
in effect, a Dandy of the Grotesque.
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