Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque
(Oxford University Press, 1995)
Selected by CHOICE as one of the “ outstanding academic books of 1995”
Brief Excerpts from Reviews
“What this perceptive volume attempts primarily is an examination of the details of Beardsley’s works and, within the personal and historical contexts of Beardsley’s life, an extrapolation of the thematic structures that inform those works. Specifically, Snodgrass deals with the larger pattern that underlies the various styles and tropes of Beardsley’s drawings. Six tightly reasoned chapters, well illustrated with reproductions of Beardsley’s works, delve into the “visions” in his oeuvre and then situate their formulations within a spirited framework. In fine, this comprehensive examination resolves many of the questions and paradoxes that surround the “Dandy of the Grotesque” and should become the standard work on Beardsley for years to come. Essential for all academic collections.” —George Cevasco, Choice (December 1995)
“I have no doubt that this book will immediately become a standard text on Beardsley and his art. There is nothing else as comprehensive and searching as this book and it is highly unlikely that anything like it will be needed in the future . . . . Professor Snodgrass does an excellent job of establishing the context in which Beardsley worked, of examining his character (without resorting to arcane psychoanalytic or psychological terminology), and most importantly of explaining the nature of his art. This book offers many exciting and convincing close readings of Beardsley’s drawings and provides as well an intellectually satisfying Beardsley iconography.” —John R. Reed, Wayne State University (1995)
“For Beardsley scholars in particular I believe Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque is the most important book since Stanley Weintraub’s Beardsley biography in 1967.” —Robert Langenfeld, UNC-Greensboro and Editor of ELT (1995)
“Chris Snodgrass’s new book (its subtitle is unfortunately restrictive) seems . . . the most valuable analysis of [Beardsley’s] extravagance and complexity to date. . . . What makes Snodgrass’s study particularly worthwhile is the remarkable precision of his descriptive language, and the placement of his hundred-plus illustrations of Beardsley’s work, most of them sharply reproduced, helpfully close to the words about them. . . . It will be an essential resource for those interested in that remarkable artist who was far more than a ‘dandy of the grotesque.’” —Stanley Weintraub, ELT 39.4 (1996)
“It is one of the merits of Chris Snodgrass’s book that he ignores neither the religious nor the biographical dimension of Beardsley’s art. . . . Through brilliantly sensitive readings of a large number of images of the grotesque and the dandy . . . he argues that Beardsley’s work creates a sense of total indeterminacy, not simply a tension playing back and forth between fixed poles, because it ‘is not a world stable enough to produce fixed poles’” —Gerald N. Izenberg, Victorian Studies (Spring 1997)
“Building upon many other scholars’ ‘readings’ of Beardsley’s illustrations and exhaustive of contemporaneous material, Snodgrass adds to them fascinating detail as he carefully illumines the way Beardsley’s drawings undercut any final, or ‘univocal,’ interpretation. . . . It is the bewildering quality of the drawings, their structure, that Chris Snodgrass has set himself to explore, and he does so carefully and successfully.” —Linda Zatlin, SAR 61.1 (Winter 1996) and Criticism 38.3 (Summer 1996)
“[Snodgrass’s] . . . in-depth analysis is quite fascinating, as [he] covers cultural, sexual, metaphysical, psychological, and artistic facets of Beardsley’s sly and contradictory world. [Beardsley’s] grotesque figures were meant to be disorienting and shocking, corrupt and satiric, and Snodgrass explains why, both in terms of Beardsley himself and in terms of his milieu.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (May 15, 1995)
“I was struck once again by how well Snodgrass writes, and how clearly he thinks. . . . In this book, he brings to the visual images an attention that is a model of critical inquiry, balancing the interpretive and evaluative responsibilities of a critic with a practised and principled hand. . . . It is a fine and formidable book.” —J. Edward Chamberlin, University of Toronto (1995)
“The chapters of the grotesque, perhaps because the grotesque subsumes the very dichotomies it images, I found extraordinarily rich. . . . The concluding chapter, on the rhetoric of parody, is also a delight . . . . Much is asked of scholars these days: awareness of a critical tradition regarding any body of work, an in-depth understanding of the work’s cultural context, and apt appropriation of a wide spectrum of relevant theory—all as background for a focused yet complex and original commentary of ‘texts,’ in the broad sense of that term. Professor Snodgrass, in achieving that synthesis, has created one excellent book and laid the groundwork for a number of others.” —Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Stanford University (1995)
Abstract
Aubrey Beardsley, often cited as the “dominating artistic personality” and “the one ‘genius’” of the 1890s, has long been acknowledged by scholars as “the mentality most representative” of the period known as the Victorian Decadence. Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque analyzes a wide range of Beardsley’s most characteristic works, establishing the assumptions underlying his world view and clarifying why so many observers have considered Beardsley’s art indispensable to understanding fin-de-siècle Victorian culture. The book examines Aubrey Beardsley’s artistic development and his implicit view of the nature of meaning itself in the context of the fin de siècle. His parodic art, characterized by a variety of grotesque figures and revolutionary designs, captured visually the central contradictions and paradoxes of the “yellow nineties”—a period whose “Religion of Art” sought to establish an authenticating “center” for life, only to discover a world that was not logocentric and comforting, but paradoxical and unsettling.
Beardsley’s art presents an ultimately unresolved, interlacing dialogue between two seemingly polar impulses, variations of the same polarity that characterized his personal temperament: on the one hand, an almost compulsive desire to violate, scandalize, and destabilize conventional boundaries of decorum, imposing an iconoclastic personal “signature” on the old order; and on the other hand , an equally strong need to incorporate, inscribe, and affirm the metaphysical certainty of traditional authority, whether it be some implicit moral integrity (in opposition to social hypocrisy) or the absolute hegemony of Art. It is part of the precarious balance in Beardsley’s art that neither iconoclastic disorder nor cultural authority is able to supercede the other entirely, always leaving the viewer with some degree of intractable paradox, stranded in a continuing whirlpool of irony. Signaling a visual-arts equivalent of Einstein’s relativity theory and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” Beardsley’s salacious hidden images and ambiguous designs demand to “be read” narratively and conventionally and yet ultimately resist any harmonizing univocal meaning.
The grotesque becomes for Beardsley an emblem for—the objective correlative of—this potentially “monstrous” metaphysical dislocation. As if concentrating all the fearful contradictions of the Decadence itself, Beardsley’s various grotesque shapes and mutated figures—foetus/old man, dwarf, Clown, Harlequin, Pierrot, among others—function as visual incarnations of metaphysical contortion and suggest the ultimate impossibility of ever resolving the paradoxes such dislocations represent, even as Beardsley’s elegant designs seek to control and implicitly recuperate those dislocations formalistically. Embodying a style that simultaneously “deforms” yet aestheticizes, Beardsley’s grotesque reconfigurations become a rhetoric for radically realigning canonical meaning itself, effecting a kind of “caricature” of traditional signification. And among all of Beardsley’s tropic “mutations,” the one figure which most synthesizes both the disorienting dislocations of the grotesque and the recuperating elegance of art, is the Dandy, that rebellious icon of the Decadent “Religion of Art.” Similarly, Beardsley himself, over the entirety of his short career and in a dazzling array of constantly changing styles, presents us with a world which is inescapably “de-formed” even in its elegance. As an artist and cultural icon, he was himself, in effect, a Dandy of the Grotesque.
Chapter-by-Chapter Synopsis
Chapter 1 Aubrey Beardsley: Emblem of the Victorian Decadence
(introduction; see abstract)
Chapter 2 The Urge to Outrage: The Rhetoric of Scandal
Examines Beardsley’s desire to violate and destabilize conventional boundaries of decorum and how this iconoclastic “urge to outrage” functioned as a rhetorical imperative in his art, imposing a distinctive, personal “signature” on the ruling canonical order.
Chapter 3 The Craving for Authority: Rescue and Redemption
Investigates the “opposite pole” of the Beardsleyan “dialectic,” Beardsley’s equally strong and often simultaneously demonstrated need to affirm and incorporate traditional authority—reflected in his debt to countless cultural father-figures and his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church; his ritualistic work habits and his attempts to impose order artistically through the symmetrical variations and hard, powerful lines of his designs; and his ultimate allegiance to the hegemony of Art itself, a belief in the redemptive power of artistic order. The chapter shows how Beardsley’s ostensibly iconoclastic deviance often proved to be an ironically conservative strategy, oddly fortifying the foundations of the very Victorian mores it critiqued.
Chapter 4 The Rhetoric of the Grotesque: Monsters as Emblems
Analyzes how the grotesque, extending the basic paradox of Beardsley’s art, became for Beardsley an emblem for life’s potentially “monstrous” metaphysical dislocations. It was, in effect, his metaphor or figurative expression for the inexorable and unresolvable personal and metaphysical paradoxes revealed in Chapters 2 and 3, conflating violently, and inevitably throwing into question, a multitude of apparent oppositions—male/female, culture/nature, ethereal/animal, sacred/profane, good/evil, victimizer/victim, freedom/imprisonment, unity/estrangement, et cetera.
Chapter 5 The Beardsleyan Dandy: Icon of Paradox
Demonstrates how the figure of the dandy orchestrated for Beardsley both the scandalizing disorientations of the grotesque and the recuperating elegance and control of art, incarnating Beardsley’s paradoxical iconoclastic authoritarianism.
Chapter 6 The Rhetoric of Parody: Signing and Resigning the Canon
Pulls together the various parallel planes—both personal and figurative—of the previous chapters to show how Beardsley’s “dandiacal” sensibility employed the grotesque not only figuratively but rhetorically. Utilizing the grotesque in the service of parody, Beardsley radically realigned canonical meaning, creating a style of canonical “deformation” and recuperation—in effect, a “caricature of signification.”