| Aubrey Beardsley
1872 - 1898
Diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of 7, the
talk of London before he turned 22, and dead at 25, Beardsley was a textbook example of
the doomed artist. He was in ferocious rivalry between the idealistic Pre-Raphaelites and
the more sardonic English impressionists, who ultimately claimed Beardsley's loyalty.His fame was established for all time when
the first volume 'The Yellow Book' appeared in April 1894. This famous quarterly of art
and literature, for which Beardsley served as art editor and the American expatriate Henry
Harland as literary editor, brought the artist's work to a larger public. It was
Beardsley's starling black-and-white drawings, title-pages, and covers which, combined
with the writings of the so-called "decadents," a unique format, and publisher
John Lane's remarkable marketing strategies, made the journal an overnight sensation.
At the end of the 19th Century ,
confronted with an Industrial Revolution, which had enthroned the power of the
bourgeoisie, Romanticism took on an extreme form: decadence. In the name of decorum,
Victorian society required that the debauchery to which it was secretly addicted be passed
over in silence. A new race of artists focused on the object of repression: sexuality.
Their strategy? Dandyism: making the most scabrous subject as beautiful as possible. The
female body was evoked in terms of the tarantula lurking at the heart of the luxuriant
exotic flower. For woman was now seen as being essentially demonic. It was the devil that
had bestowed on her the gift of temptation.
Lysistrata by Aristophanes (410 b.c.)
Cinesias Entreating Myrrhina to Coition (1)
A wicked thing, as I repeat.
O Zeus, O Zeus,
Canst Thou not suddenly let loose
Some twirling hurricane to tear
Her flapping up along the air
And drop her, when she's whirled around,
Here to the ground
Neatly impaled upon the stake
That's ready upright for her sake
Lysistrata Defending the
Acropolis (2)
LYSISTRATA
By the Goddesses, you'll find that here await you
Four companies of most pugnacious women
Armed cap-a-pie from the topmost louring curl
To the lowest angry dimple
The Lacedaemonian Ambassadors (3)
CHORUS
Here come the Spartan envoys with long, worried beards.
Hail, Spartans how do you fare?
Did anything new arise?
SPARTANS
No Need for a clutter o'words. Do ye see our condition?
CHORUS
The situation swells to greater tension.
Something will explode soon!
The Examination of the Herald (4)
MAGISTRATE
Are you a man or a Priapus?
HERALD
Don't be stupid! I am a herald, of course, I swear I am, and I come from Sparta about
making peace.
MAGISTRATE
But look, you are hiding a lance under your clothes, surely.
HERALD
No, nothing of the sort.
MAGISTRATE
Then why do you turn away like that, and hold your cloak out from your body? Have you got
swellings in the groin from your journey?
HERALD
By the twin brethren! the man's an old maniac.
MAGISTRATE
But you've got an erection! You lewd fellow!
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