Реклама. ООО «ЛитРес», ИНН: 7719571260.
The Art of Aubrey Beardsley
Table of Contents
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
AN ESSAY WITH A PREFACE. BY. ARTHUR SYMONS. PREFACE
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
ILLUSTRATIONS BY AUBREY BEARDSLEY
Arthur Symons
e-artnow, 2020
.....
The republication by Mr. Lane, the publisher of the "Yellow Book," of Beardsley's contributions in prose and verse to the "Savoy," its "rival," as Mr. Lane correctly calls it, with the illustrations which there accompanied them, reopens a little, busy chapter in contemporary history. It is the history of yesterday, and it seems already at this distance of half a century. Then, what brave petulant outbursts of poets and artists, what comic rivalries and reluctances of publishers, what droll conflicts of art and morality, what thunders of the trumpets of the press! The press is silent now, or admiring; the publishers have changed places, and all rivalries are handsomely buried, with laudatory inscriptions on their tombstones. The situation has its irony, which would have appealed most to the actor most conspicuously absent from the scene.
Beardsley was very anxious to be a writer, and, though in his verse there was no merit except that of a thing done to order, to one's own order, and done without a flaw in the process, there was, in his prose, a much finer quality, and his fragment of an unachieved and unplanned romance has a savour of its own. It is the work, not of a craftsman, but of an amateur, and in this it may be compared with the prose of Whistler, so great an artist in his own art and so brilliant an amateur in the art of literature. Beardsley too was something of a wit, and in his prose one sees hard intellect, untinged with sentiment, employed on the work of fancy. He wrote and he saw, unimaginatively, and without passion, but with a fierce sensitive precision; and he saw by preference things elaborately perverse, full of fantastic detail, unlikely and possible things, brought together from the four corners of the universe. All those descriptions in "Under the Hill" are the equivalent of his drawings, and they are of especial interest in showing how definitely he saw things, and with what calm minuteness he could translate what seemed a feverish drawing into oddly rational words. Listen, for instance, to this garden-picture: "In the middle was a huge bronze fountain with three basins. From the first rose a many-breasted dragon and four little loves mounted upon swans, and each love was furnished with a bow and arrow. Two of them that faced the monster seemed to recoil in fear, two that were behind made bold enough to aim their shafts at him. From the verge of the second sprang a circle of slim golden columns that supported silver doves with tails and wings spread out. The third, held by a group of grotesquely attenuated satyrs, is centred with a thin pipe hung with masks and roses and capped with children's heads." The picture was never drawn, but does it want more than the drawing?
.....