Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Aubrey and Oscar – BBC

In the Pushkin Museum. Pushkin exhibition “Oscar Wilde. Aubrey Beardsley. View from Russia. ” Curatorial concept here is the frame drawings of Aubrey Beardsley – English esthete graphics, created in the late XIX century, concise visual language, which will still be talking century XX. They are, however, in this frame is not particularly need.

The exhibition “Oscar Wilde. Aubrey Beardsley “comes on the heels already visited the Pushkin Museum William Turner, William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites. Again news occasion – graphics Beardsley finally taken out of the British Museum – overshadowed curatorial idea. It is based on the result was somewhat disturbing hyperbole:

all the modernists came out berdsleevoy “peacock skirt,” which first flashed in the illustrations to “Salome” by Oscar Wilde.

In addition to “Salome” contemporaries Wilde and Beardsley linked fostered the image of London dandy, and the cult of beauty (and passionate love to him the Silver Age of Russian intellectuals, from which grew the terms “berdslianstvo” and “uayldizm”).

The exhibition, however, was dismembered rather conditionally intersecting with each other curatorial concepts. Beardsley drawings and illustrated copies of his “Yellow Book” – aesthetically controversial issue – there are apart from publications and portraits of Oscar Wilde. In a separate room huddles so-called Russian myth (which grew out of statements, such as a theater director Nicholas Evreinov who wrote about Beardsley: “He died at the end of the XIX century, leaving a legacy of art, where everything from the shape and ending with content created for the joy of the twentieth century “). This part of the exhibition of the united Russian Beardsley Nicholas Feofilaktova, miriskusnikov Leon Bakst, Konstantin Somov, as well as pictures of the epigones, who did not hesitate to write off berdsleevskie “dotted lines and strokes».

«Times” has chosen the main series of papers by Beardsley, who show at the exhibition.

«Death of Arthur», 1893-1894

kinked and simultaneously graceful lines, thickened floral ornament, scrupulousness with which spelled out every blade of grass – all this still gives a healthy discipleship.

In 1893, 21-year-old Aubrey Beardsley is taken to illustrate the sacred to the older generation of English aesthetes, the Pre-Raphaelites, the text – the code of chivalry “The Death of King Arthur “Sir Thomas Malory.

He writes in psevdosrednevekovom style satyrs, fauns and knights, creates mock edition, illustrations, artwork, fonts and vignettes – about 300 drawings.

It was the work on the design style and image of the “cursed poet».

Beardsley tailors new worlds of very conventional, decorative landscapes and figures, not yet resemble grotesque hermaphrodites that will appear in the illustrations to “Salome” and cartoons. In these flat figures even flash graphic traces of moderation and accuracy, but there are empty black holes and then stay in bed in a hospital bed (Beardsley died at age 25 of tuberculosis) aestheticism that one of his publishers call potential evil. After the appearance of “The Death of Arthur” Beardsley something new styled by Albrecht Durer, the gnashing of teeth through a talented imitator named Edward Burne-Jones. The main thing that is not an insurance clerk from office, he thought.



«Salome”, 1894

Berdsleevskaya “Salome” – is a manifestation of style, engorged Japanese prints and the “Peacock Room” by James Whistler (a modern dining room in the house they shipowners Leyland), which became more bizarre, exotic and contingencies. World Beardsley does not grow in breadth and depth, narrows to a soaring on a white piece of paper vampire Salome, to peacock feather.

The story of the princess who danced naked in front of King Herod and demanded the head John the Baptist, shrinks to a trickle of blood that flows from the severed head in a lily pond.

Beardsley evaporates from their schedules fancy landscapes, interiors, symmetry and encodes drama Wilde in a new way. First book illustrations – a subordinate genre that does not seem to exist without the text, actually replaces it. At the site of the wonderful world of illusions “The Death of Arthur” arises frankness X-ray, “smack of corruption and several vicious sensuality”, wrote about Alexander Benois. However, proponents of morality still trashed Beardsley for belly dance of Salome, peeped somewhere in the Parisian cabaret, and its “wanton lust».



«The Yellow Book ‘, 1894

without Beardsley false modesty called amazing bright yellow cover with a black silhouette of the first “Yellow Book” – aesthetically magazine, flirts with the theme of homoeroticism, art editor of which he became in 1894. Wilde said that “naked slut who smiles through the mask, just awful».

«Yellow Book” was a magazine-a mockery of Victorian prudishness, stressed vulgar and eccentric.

Cover, decorated in the style of Toulouse-lotrekovskih posters and Pulp Fiction, has referred to the novel by Joris Karl Huysmans “On the contrary” – a hymn perverse beauty (it is this “poisoning” in the book “The Picture of Dorian Gray” Lord Henry gives Dorian’s). Under the direction of Beardsley, however, “The Yellow Book” lived only a few months. In 1895, Wilde was accused of sodomy – the judgment of the writer inadvertently picked up a certain edition yellow cover. Some of the journalists took him for a “Yellow Book” and compromised Beardsley lost his job.



«Lysistrata”, 1896

Beardsley was going to print “Lysistrata” pale purple paint.

Over the illustrations for Aristophanes’ comedy, he was known as “the sower public debauchery” and pornography, which multiplies the impotent fantasy on his deathbed.

Their the same is not getting up from the bed and asked to destroy his friend and publisher Leonard Smithers customer (latest figures released in 1896 by the extremely small number of copies, and “not for public distribution”). Neither the “Yellow Book” or “Lysistrata” is not continued to work on refinement and generalization of the image, begun in “Salome.” In the figures for “Lysistrata” ligature and decorative patterns of hypertrophic bodies connected with obscenities written off from the ancient Greek vases and Japanese prints. Beardsley creates in them a sophisticated world with no details, painted a confident line. However, at the “obscenity” reduced to just a few pictures, not too traumatic gentle look.

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