Aubrey Beardsley and H. D.’s “Astrid”: The Ghost and Mrs. Pugh of Decadent Aestheticism and Modernity

Mrs. Pugh, first name unknown, received an unexpected present upon moving into her new home at 114 Cambridge Street, Pimlico, London, in June 1895. The previous owner had left behind a two-sided oil painting.¹ On one side of the canvas is a portrait of a woman from the waist up, what in cinematic terms is called a medium-shot. A masked woman (c. 1894) is painted as if mediated through the soft focus of a camera lens. The blackness of her scoop-necked dress and her frizzy black hair highlight her white face and neck. The woman wears a black mask, which draws attention to her white skin and conceals her face so that the viewer cannot tell if she is beautiful or ugly. In front of the woman, a small dead white mouse lies on a brown table. On the opposite side of the canvas are two figures, each painted softly on an olive-brown background. In the foreground of A Caprice (c. 1894), a white woman in a long black dress stands stiffly, looking posed. Her arms jet from her shoulders at uncomfortable angles. Only her white skin, white muff, and the white and blue feathers of her headdress keep her from melting into the darkness of the canvas. The other smaller, eye-catching figure stands at one half the height of the woman. He wears a bright red costume with a white neck ruffle which, along with his bright red hat, makes his black skin stand out prominently. The artist who left these oil paintings behind in 1895 at 114 Cambridge Street was Aubrey Beardsley, the boy genius illustrator of fin de siècle Decadent Aestheticism. These two creations, the only surviving oil paintings Beardsley produced, would have been lost to art and history had it not been for the fastidious cleaning habits of Mrs. Pugh. The paintings engage issues of gender, sex, and race that vexed not only Beardsley, but also the generation of modernist artists that would follow him. Beardsley’s two forgotten oil paintings, along with his many illustrations, allow us to trace a proto-cinematic moment to one that would be realized later in film.²

In many ways, the male modernist artists of the early-twentieth century performed the same kind of act of forgetfulness as did Beardsley. Clearing a path for their own work by rejecting the romantic Decadent artists of the 1890’s, they left behind, whether consciously or unconsciously, part of the identity that shaped and influenced them as artists. H. D. might be regarded as a modernist version of Mrs. Pugh, at the ready to rescue them from their own forgetfulness. She had, in fact, “found” the modernist artist in Beardsley, quite by accident, through her involvement in the 1930 film Borderline, in which she played the role of “white demented Astrid.”³ Beardsley’s “proto-cinematic” work intersects uncannily and metaphysically with H. D.’s role as actress, muse, promoter and editor for Kenneth Macpherson’s film in relation to gender, sex and race.⁴

Beardsley and H. D. are, admittedly, more concerned with questions of gender and sexuality than race. Nevertheless, that he should position the black male body as sexual plaything in A Caprice suggests his interest in the intersections of race, sexuality and gender. His preoccupation with the notion of the racial Other as plaything is demonstrated further in the illustration Beardsley created from this painting, No. I of “The Comedy of Marionettes” (1894) (fig. 1). Had Beardsley not died at the age of twenty-five, I speculate that he would have produced more texts focused on racial issues. In the case of Borderline, the film is clear in its intention to explore race as it intersects with gender and sexuality. Through her role as the racist Astrid, H. D. gives voice to the problem of racism, which was largely without a voice in the Decadent and Modernist eras.

Questions of gender and sexuality saturated the lives and works of both Beardsley and H. D. Beardsley’s androgynous...