“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

(Originally posted September 10th, 2008)

The Peacock Skirt, by Aubrey Beardsley.

This remarkable work (originally a pen-and-ink drawing, reproduced as an engraving) dates from 1892. Queen Victoria would still be on the throne for almost ten years.

In important ways, Beardsley's art is the first really startling trumpet-blast of the arrival of art nouveau. Beardsley himself, a friend of Oscar Wilde and others in a gay circle that generated almost daily scandals for Late Victorian England, lived a life that was, to say the least, original and colorful, although he died in 1898.

I was put in mind of his immense influence because among my recent acquisitions from our public library's astonishing "discarded books" shelf is a volume about Erté, himself a great artist closely identified with the advent of art moderne after World War I. What is remarkable is how Beardsley's elegant sense of long, curving lines prefigures Erté's own development of similar techniques, although with a greater commitment to formal symmetry.

In his bold work, remarkable not only for its astounding sense of line but also for its blatantly erotic content, Beardsley drew on a rich tradition of English cartooning that stretches back to the Middle Ages; if one merely looks through Nineteenth-Century English cartoons (such as appeared in Punch), one sees not only delightfully English whimsy but also a spirit of innovation, especially as to line. The example at right is, I think, from 1849; it already shows a ready interest in exaggerated curves to manage the viewer's attention. Throughout its long history, Punch would publish not only truly funny works, but also ones rich in artistic significance. Of course, in the case of this particular cartoon , there is also great social significance - the reference is to one of the first important achievements of modern statistics, the identification of the source of cholera infections in London.

All too often we think of Victorian Britain as a stuffy, extremely conservative place. In fact, in every field of endeavor, it was (in addition to being stuffy and conservative) bold, innovative, and immensely creative. Few nations or eras have known such dramatic advances , such turbulent creativity. In one sense, it is possible to regard the superficial pomp and circumstance as the cover for a gigantic upheaval, unprecedented in history.

Besides that, from Punch to the works of Aubrey Beardsley, the Victorian era gave us a great deal that was both funny and arresting. Of course, today Punch is defunct. Only the New Yorker really makes a serious effort to keep alive the grand tradition of cartooning that dwarfs things like South Park or The Simpsons. To live with those television shows is to live among rats scuttling about in the sewers; to return to the works of the Victorian Era (in both the Americas and Europe) is to return to true creativity, to true radicalism, to boldness and imagination that makes one realize that the Twenty-First Century is a time of bitter decay.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me