The Tate's new exhibition about Aubrey Beardsley opens at Millbank next week, which allows a new appraisal of his works, and is rather apt to the current fashion for all things queer. Some images are so in the earlier meaning of the term, as odd, freakish, singular, bizarre; others with a distinctly gay, intersexual aspect.
He had a phenomenal graphic talent for alluring grotesqueries, beguiling sinuous lines and sexually ambiguous figures with triffid-like flowers [maybe they inspired the triffids]. Certainly weirdly attractive parabolic curves and dramatic black shapes.
Though he disclaimed personal homosexuality, drawing these images was auto-erotic, and plainly deviant to those in the gay culture of the 1890s, who encouraged and paid for illustrations to Mademoiselle de Maupin and Wilde's Salome.
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One can only post some of the Lysistrata designs, as the outsize phalluses will be deemed offensive today.
which is interesting in relation to the recent BBC programmes on female and male nudes, in which Prof Mary Beard happily dwelt on Courbet's L'Origine du Monde [probably not postable either] but was very coy in respect of male nudes, showing only limp genitals and nothing by Beardsley or Mapplethorpe.
As it happens, I am publishing a small book on Beardsley with the V&A /Thames & Hudson, with 100 images mostly from V&A collections.
I'm looking forward to Tate's monster display of original pieces.
Somewhat oddly, but in keeping with Beardsley's off-centre reputation, Tate's publicity cites his work as key inspiration for today's tattoo artists.
