Bons Mots & Grotesques

bons mots & grotesques Aubrey Beardsley

edited by matthew sturgis

athene pallas

Aubrey beardsley during his brief life was recognized not only as an artist but also as a wit. Like his friend Max Beerbohm, and many of the other young men of the 1890s, he modelled his conversational performance, to some extent, on the great example of Oscar Wilde. Beardsley knew Wilde well and owed him much. It was his brilliant illustrations to the English translation of Wilde’s play Salome that confirmed his reputation as an artist of daring originality and Decadent allure.

The actress Elizabeth Robins, on meeting Beardsley at lunch, considered him the ‘uncertain ghost of Oscar, minus the brains, imagination, and craft, and plus a kind of tremulous sweetness.’ Frank Harris, though, who knew both men rather better, reversed the equation. He felt that Beardsley’s wit was touched with a distinctively modern hardness and self-assertion that, in fact, came to influence Oscar.

Beardsley said many arresting things. Friends such as Ada Leverson (Wilde’s adored ‘Sphinx’) noted down some of them. And it seems possible that he himself planned to gather a collection of his own ‘Table Talk’. Certainly his some-time publisher, John Lane, included a dozen of his aperçus, under this title, in a posthumous volume of Beardsley’s literary work.

Beardsley, for his part, was familiar with the idea of putting witticisms into book-form. Almost his first commission as an illustrator was to produce for J. M. Dent a collection of ‘grotesques’ to decorate the pages of a series of pocket-anthologies of ‘bon-mots’ by the celebrated wits of the previous century.

Beardsley adored the work—not least because it provided a relief from his other, concurrent, Dent commission, for a huge number of mock-mediaeval illustrations to Malory’s Morte Darthur. With the ‘grotesques’ he was able to let his imagination run free. Anything was possible: satyrs, femmes fatales, dandies, thugs, Pierrots, ballerinas, spiders, cherubs, cats, caricatures (of Whistler, Molière and others), skeletons, bugs, 6

beauties, imps, pimps, whores. He could experiment with stylistic tropes—from his calligraphic ‘japonesque’ line to massed blocks of solid black and white. He could try out the effects of fantastical invention and suggestive realism. He could indulge his fascination with the decadent and the erotic. It was work that both honed his skill, and initiated lines of artistic enquiry that he would evolve during the coming years.

Over the course of eighteen months he produced some 130 drawings. They were published in 1893-4 across the first three volumes of Dent’s series: Bon-Mots of Sydney Smith & R. B. Sheridan, Bon-Mots of Samuel Foote & Theodore Hook, and Bon-Mots of Charles Lamb & Douglas Jerrold. Some of the pictures were given a full page, others—much reduced in size—dotted the margins, and filled the end-spaces.

The trivial nature of the books meant that review coverage was limited, but the quality and invention of the ‘grotesques’ has won for them the enduring admiration of Beardsley enthusiasts. They are amongst the happiest and

most distinctive of his productions. This volume brings together a selection of them, with the first comprehensive gathering of Beardsley’s own bracing bon-mots (drawn from his conversation, his press-interviews, his letters, and his writings) in a celebration of a unique and brilliant sensibility.

‘Of course, I have one aim – the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.’

‘I am not satirizing life. My pictures are life itself.’

Beardsley considered that the cigarette had had great influence over modern art: ‘Fancy!’ he exclaimed, ‘Fancy a man’s trying to write anything delicate with a pipe in his mouth! Impossible!’

Asked, early in his career, what had inspired him to take up his branch of art, Beardsley replied, ‘Nothing in my surroundings, for they have always been completely inartistic. However I have been fond of drawing all my life; and suddenly, without any effort, fell into this style.’ Indicating a boldly abbreviated black-and-white ‘study of a figure floating in space’, he declared: ‘This is the first drawing of the kind which I ever

attempted. That was about eighteen months ago; so my experiences only extend to twelve months.’

‘I had no idea of going in for black-andwhite work professionally when I began studying the subject. It was on the recommendation of Sir Edward Burne-Jones, whose work has no more ardent admirer than myself, and of M. Puvis de Chavannes, that I did so.’

Beardsley’s first major break was a commission, in 1892, from J. M. Dent to illustrate a deluxe edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur. The task, requiring dozens of chapterheadings, tailpieces, and fullpage drawings, proved stimulating, taxing, and eventually wearisome, prompting Beardsley to pen the following limerick:

There was a young man with a salary, Who had to do drawings for Malory; When they asked him for more, He replied: “Why? Sure You’ve enough as it is for a gallery.

The appearance of the first number of the Studio in April 1893, with its wellillustrated article on him as ‘A New Illustrator’, propelled Beardsley to a sudden eminence. ‘Since it came out,’ he explained, ‘I have had my hands full. Before that I spent my time in the City slaving in an office. Perhaps I had a bad time; but I think those over me had worse. I led them an awful life, not they me.’

When asked about his artistic inspirations, Beardsley claimed, ‘Certainly no Japanese painter, though my work is said to recall the methods of the East, for as a matter of fact I knew nothing of their style of art till

quite lately, beyond, of course, the fans and vases which meet one’s eye everywhere.’

‘I might say generally that I have been more influenced by the eighteenth-century schools of both artists and writers, particularly those which took their origin in France, for it seems to me that the English art of that day was little more than a reflex of what was being done on the other side of the Channel.’

‘French art gives me far more pleasure than what we see in this country.’

Quizzed as to whether he had any theories on the subject of drawing, Beardsley replied: ‘None at all. I represent things as I see them –outlined faintly in thin streaks (just like me).’

‘I take no notice of shadows, they do not interest me; therefore I feel no desire to indicate them.’

To people who found his work bizarre, Beardsley countered, ‘I am afraid people appear differently to me than they do to others; to me they are mostly grotesque, and I represent them as I see them. I can say no more.’

‘Apart from the grotesque I suppose I may say that people like my decorative work, and that I may claim to have some command of line. I try to get as much out of a single curve or straight line.’

Beardsley’s illustrations for the Bodley Head edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, commissioned in 1893, were scattered with lewd details. His drawing entitled ‘Enter Herodias’ was deemed unacceptable because of the nude form of the page-boy. Beardsley

added a fig-leaf to figure, and inscribed the original proof with the lines:

Because one figure was undressed This little drawing was suppressed. It was unkind

But never mind— Perhaps it all was for the best.

Beardsley’s rôle as art-editor of the newly-established Yellow Book gave him an opportunity to express his novel ideas about magazine content. ‘There is to be no connection whatever [between words and pictures],’ he declared; ‘text and illustrations will be quite separate. This has never been done before —never attempted, so far as we know; but the advantages are obvious. Many magazines— perhaps most—would not publish a picture unless it related to some of