The Myth of the Fine Artist

Figure 1.

Beardsley, Aubrey (1872-1898)
Magazine cover. The Savoy, Volume 4, August 1896
Location: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Great Britain
Photo credit: Victoria and Albert Museum, London/Art Resource, NY

Figure 2.

Beardsley, Aubrey (1872-1898)
Magazine cover. The Yellow Book, 1894
Location: Tate Gallery, London, Great Britain
Photo credit: Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY

Figure 3.

Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de (1864-1901)
Wraparound cover for the portfolio L'Estampe originale, 1893
Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
Photo credit: The Museum of Modern Art/Art Resource, NY

The fog was soupy and tinged yellow on New Year's Day in 1894, when twenty-one-year old Aubrey Beardsley met his older sister, Mabel, and close friend Henry Harland, an American and expatriate, for an

Figure 4.

Duchamp, Marcel (1887-1968)
The Green Box. 1934. Cardboard, copper, paper, glass.
Location: Musée National d'Art Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY
© 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp

early lunch at his London home in Cromwell Road. Young Beardsley had just finished illustrating Oscar Wilde's Salome. The morbid attractiveness of his satiric pen-and-ink drawings received equal parts praise and disapproval from the critics. While Wilde's popularity brought the young illustrator the public notice he craved, he felt frustrated by the experience. During their discussion at the candlelit table, Beardsley kept coming back to the awkward yoking of pictorial art and literature in books and periodicals. He saw a need for a quarterly that allowed both literature and art to stand on their own. Harland enthusiastically agreed, and The Yellow Book was born. The illustrated quarterly, which lasted from 1894–1897, was named for the dense London fog and the color's association to cheap editions of French novels. Harland would oversee the literary contributions, while Beardsley would solicit art. Their publishing mission was clear: No sentimental stories. No sloppy art. The two men hoped that their start-up would be a haven for literary and visual art that was too risky, too ground breaking, for conventional magazines.

Figure 5.

Gauguin, Paul (1848-1903)
Cover of the album "Ancien Culte Maorie"
Location: Paris, France
Photo credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

Beardsley conceived of The Yellow Book as a book. The content should be so spectacular that the publication's impact would last more than just a few months. He succeeded beyond his expectations. Despite the high price of five shillings and the garish cover, the journal was an overnight sensation, thanks to Beardsley's own provocative artwork and the writings of the so-called "decadents." The roster of contributors, who were then relatively unknown, included W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells and Kenneth Graham.

To Beardsley, book covers and illustrations, posters, theater programs, menus and sheet music covers were all the artist's canvas. Though functional, such productions could also be art. His own illustrations were closely observed, carefully detailed and technically resourceful. They were fine art, he believed, and the English art world agreed. Two of his pictures, one a Salome drawing, were exhibited in the New English Art Club's spring show at the Dudley Gallery, alongside the works of Monet, Degas and Sargent.

Figure 6.

Kandinsky, Wassily (1866-1944)
Cover for "Der Blaue Reiter"
Location: Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France
Photo credit: Snark/Art Resource, NY
© 2005 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—who shared Beardsley's Japanese style of asymmetric composition and unusual perspective—also believed that a distinction between "pure" and "commercial" art was unwarranted. In 1891, after two years of success, the Moulin Rouge found its attendance dwindling and...