The Toilette of Salome - II, Aubrey Vincent Beardsley

Exhibition Label: "Conversation X: “That Invisible Dance": Art and Literature under the British Empire from the 1800s and Beyond," Feb-2011, Sorcha Hyland and Stephen Goddard Process Space In 1894, after considerable controversy and a foiled attempt on the part of French actress Sarah Bernhardt to perform the title role, Oscar Wilde’s one-act tragedy Salomé was published as an illustrated book. Publisher John Lane agreed to offer British illustrator Aubrey Beardsley 50 guineas to produce 10 drawings, a frontispiece, and a cover design for the book. Beardsley, 24 years of age and battling tuberculosis, accepted. The extent of Wilde’s collaboration with Beardsley remains vague. In 1893 Beardsley, independently of Wilde or Lane, published a Salomé drawing in The Studio magazine. Shortly thereafter Wilde presented Beardsley with a signed copy of the play including an inscription that read, “For the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance.” Once hired as illustrator, Beardsley intensified his approach, magnifying the erotic elements and latent sexuality of Salomé. Heavily influenced by Japanese shunga (erotic prints), Beardsley’s drawings resulted in added scandal. Many were vetoed by Lane while Wilde publicly compared them to the naughty scribbles of a precocious schoolboy. Despite all this surrounding commotion, Salomé became one of the resounding artistic events of the period, signaling an anarchic shift in the depiction of desire. This shift was too late to save either Wilde or Beardsley from their tragic and premature ends, however it positioned the author and the artist as driving forces in dragging the veil from all that Victorian England strove to conceal. Exhibition Label: "Inspired by Japan," Mar-2003, Cori Sherman (Copy for #15) Although Aubrey Beardsley worked solely in pen drawing, most of his designs were specifically created to be translated into the multiple print form. His ability to form extremely austere, beautifully organized compositions by minimal means of arabesques and contour outlines found extraordinary expression in the seventeen drawings he executed for Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (performed London and New York, 1894). The stark black-and-white images drew immediate attention to the sexual and social allusions in his work, which often provoked outraged response. Archive Label: The image of the femme fatale was popular among art nouveau artists. She could be found in mythology, such as the serpent haired Medusa, in real life through the actresses and dancers of the period, and in biblical characters such as Delilah, Judith, and Salome. Of these, Salome was the most infamous and popular. According to the biblical account, she requested the head of John the Baptist in return for a dance. The most influential depictions of Salome were Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for the 1894 English edition of Salome, a play written by Oscar Wilde. The illustrations were early manifestations of a quintessentially art nouveau expression, and artists across the globe responded to the revolutionary images that were as decadent as the play itself. Wilde wrote the play with the intention that Sarah Bernhardt, herself a cultivated femme fatale, would fill the title role. The decadence of the entire enterprise proved to be too much for England, and the play was banned from the stage.